Stories Keep Us Awake, Lectures Make Us Sleepy
And more: good stories stick and spread like wildfire.
Dune 2 is almost three hours long and I didn’t see it pass.
In the dunes of Arrakis, it’s adapt or die. Goof around and the next minute a giant sandworm is swallowing you alive. Now, try to learn the same message from a textbook on evolutionary psychology. Can you see the difference?
OK, not everything can be turned into a story. To learn the nuts and bolts of evolutionary psychology, you need that textbook. But certain messages, especially moral ones, are better understood and ingrained when delivered as a story.
Take my field — aeronautical engineering — for example. To be able to calculate how much lift a wing will develop at a certain speed, you need to know a great deal of math and physics. There is no escape. It’s textbook after textbook. It’s sleep sleep-inducing lecture after sleep sleep-inducing lecture.
But —
This lift calculation is not just another fancy math problem disconnected from reality. There are lives at stake, and, sadly, people have died flying. People have died because somebody made a mistake and we don’t want this same mistake to ever happen again. Without a strong safety culture, the aviation industry would fall apart, and, to foster such culture, to impart the “do the right thing” message to people, a story is way superior to a lecture.
Take Flight 2574 from Continental Express, which crashed on September 11 (what a day…), 1991. The investigation revealed that a maintenance error was the primary cause of the accident. Old screws had been removed from the horizontal stabilizer the night before the accident and, following a maintenance shift change, new screws were NOT installed. During the flight, the horizontal stabilizer’s leading edge was lost, and the airplane became uncontrollable.
For the benefit of mankind, the Mayday series episode “Breakup Over Texas” tells the dramatic story of this flight. It is impossible to not change after seeing it. All maintenance people should see it. To simply state in a dry manual that you must adhere to procedures is a message that pales in comparison to seeing lives being lost because a fellow human being, like you and me, failed to adhere to such procedures.
Whenever possible, tell a story
We humans are wired to like and share stories. We have been doing this since forever and will continue to do it. We just can’t help but be absorbed by a tale where a hero overcomes his biggest fear and saves the princess.
So, if you’re not using stories to convey a message, you’re missing something — something big.
I’m not kidding. Around 15 years ago, when I still worked at an airplane manufacturer, we had a “career workshop” and guess what: my boss made us watch Kung Fu Panda. Why? Because, jokes apart, this movie is a brilliant story on the importance of following our call. Can you read a non-fiction book on that? Of course. There are millions out there — and one is mine, by the way!
But, again: reading a rational explanation in a non-fiction book on why you should act in a certain way is no match for a story where characters show us by their actions and witty dialogue how we should (or should not) live.
You can read a book on objectivism or enjoy Atlas Shrugged, from Ayn Rand. You can take a class on existentialism or read The Stranger, from Albert Camus. The choice is yours. Just remember that, while we may easily forget a lesson on philosophy, we’ll never forget a good story.
Take advantage of that.
