Stories Mean Business - Nick Warren

Yesterday, I mentioned the Trigger or Inciting Incident – the thring that throws the hero's life out of balance. In business, our customer is the hero, and we either cause or react to ... that trigger. If you have a 'painkiller' business, you offer a solution to a pain that your prospect already has. To put it another way, if your prospect has a bleeding neck, metaphorically speaking, they'll be v...

Well-told stories start when something happens. That something knocks the hero's life out of balance, and they are forced to take action ... usually something small... to get it back on track. But the small action backfires, triggers a BIGGER REACTION, and things get worse. More tension. LESS BALANCE ... and the need to take an even BIGGER ACTION. So it goes, building and building, until the end....

In the 1990's – like every aspiring entrepreneur – I bought The Art Of War by Sun Tzu . It was book that was more purchased than read and more read than understood. But I did read it, and one of the lessons I remember dealt with power and timing. Tzu used a lovely metaphor of a falcon. Its power comes from it's height, but the ability to break the back of it's prey comes from timing. Back in Podca...

Shakespeare says that there are seasons to life. For me, the longest and most powerful season started 21 years ago today. Our son was born. I joked to my wife that 'kids' were a 20 year project, then we'll do something else. It was a joke, but in truth the ultimate goal of any good parent is to make themselves redundant ... or perhaps it's better to say ... make their child strong and self-suffici...

Psychologists recognise two types of rewards, Extrinsic and Intrinsic . Extrinsic are your basic external status markers – salary, bonuses, promotions etc. Intrinsic rewards are tied into increasing self-efficacy (e.g. getting better at something) and trigger the neural reward system, which in turn reinforces the activity through positive emotions. This podcast touches on how I'm using intrinsic r...

I know you folk can't get enough of this logic stuff ... so here it is ... Inductive and Abductive logic. With some Sherlock and Nassim Nicholas Taleb thrown in! Episode home: https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/725:-Inductive-and-Abductive-Logic

Aristotle's formal logic goes something like this, if you'll forgive the self-promotion. Nick always speaks the truth. These words are spoken by Nick. Therefore, these words must be true. This tortuous construction is called a Syllogism , but the bit in the middle is usually implied/redundant, so smart persuaders skip it bit to create the slightly sexier Enthymemes. Yeah, you're right ... the name...

When we tell a story of standing, substance and authority, we are leveraging the second of Aristotles three forms of rhetoric – Ethos . This is the force I used to build (and sell) my first business, and the force I'm using at this very moment. Ethos can magnify the value of everything you say and do ... or it can tear it down. Episode home: https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/723:-Story-is-Et...

A teacher once described my relationship with English as 'Shakespearean, but not in the good way'. Of course she was talking about my wild and creative use of spelling. When I shared this with a friend yesterday, he responded with this list of fantastic words that Shakespeare created . It's a gold mine. But he also got me thinking about the tribal language that successful leaders build around thei...

I'm talking thinking a lot about testing this week, but I learned awhile ago it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusions. We can see what people do – their behaviour – but it's hard to understand why they do it. There is never enough data. In this podcast, I explain why I'm a behaviourist when it comes to testing. Episode home: https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/721-Behaviourist-Testing

We've been watching Godless , which was written and directed by Scott Frank. If you recognise the name, he's the scriptwriter of Out of Sight (1998) and writer/director of The Queen's Gambit. That's quite a pedigree. One thing Frank does really well is Dramatic Irony, and although I started this episode believing it didn;t have much value in business storytelling, I ended with an insight I'll usin...

Family day. Just us, you and Theodore Roosevelt.

My MinimumViableStory (Beta) starts testing today. Very excited.

We been watching Godless at home, which is the perfect reason to talk about pattern interrupts.

Podcast notes: As I type this, I've just completed the second draft of my Minimum Viable Story course. It's at the stage where I've stopped seeing any wood or any trees – which means it's ready for the Beta Testers. Because I've reached that stage when I can't tell whether it's genius or terrible... Episode home: https://storiesmeanbusiness.com/716: Genius-or-terrible/

Absolutely love this from John Swartzwelder's recent interview with the New Yorker . "But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I...

Show notes: Yesterday, I was a guest on Hannah Power 's podcast. She and I met in 2019, and that meeting was one of my triggers to start creating content (including this podcast). During the interview, she asked me the how it was that I'd kept going when so many people grind to a halt. In some ways its a tough question to answer, but in others it's easy. I think of myself as someone who finishes t...

Side notes for this podcast: In some ways, todays world feels like the world we all experienced as 3 or 4 year-olds, before we understood the people around us were ... shock horror ... people like us. With hopes and dreams and tempers. The world is like that now, with most of the people who come across our path little more than wraiths. A comment. A like. A spam email. There's a real person behind...

Side notes for this podcast: The people you are selling to don't know what you know. They don't know that you are a good person, that you understand what you are talking about, that the testimonials you claim are ... really are true – or that you'll be there for them when things get hard. They also don't know whether the results you promise will be true for them, or what it will mean for their liv...

In 2008, Derren Brown created a thought provoking TV special called The System . In some ways, it changed the way I thought about the path to success. We all crave the shortcut, but there is a longer more certain path. Episode home: https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/711-Leveraging-the-System See also: https://derrenbrown.co.uk/shows/the-system/

Sometimes, it feels like there are two types of activities in the world. I’m 50 now, and I know which ones I prefer.

Super quick podcast because I'm under a heap of deadlines. Big exciting news is that I've booked an awesome guest for the 1,000th podcast – yep, the one that won't come around until early June 2022. (That's forward planning for you.) I'm not saying who it is until the interview is done, but I'm really excited. But most of all I'm excited because this proves that Level 3 works! The best way to tell...

Our Cognitive Unconscious processes around 11 million pieces of information every second, but it's more than just a gatekeeper. There are fascinating experiments that show how even subconscious cues affect our interpretation of events AND decision-making. This is huge, because the stories we tell about ourselves will not only affect the way people perceive us, but the way they perceive what we sub...

Maki Kaji died yesterday. You may not know his name, but he was the man who took a simple game called Number Place ... and renamed it Sudoku! He's the reason that it exploded on to the scene 20 years ago, that and the games beautiful progression of Simplicity > Depth. This is the signature of great writing, great stories and great businesses. From a simple seed grows something amazing. Episode...

I used to think that swearing was just lazy language, but I was wrong. Swear words can improve our tolerance to pain, bind us closer to our friends and co-workers and ... sometimes ... just be exactly the word we need. Episode Homepage at: https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/706-Bad-Fucking-Language See also: https://storiesmeanbusiness.com/bad-language/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie...