Kindra Hall

The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story

The goal of a business is to profitably deliver value to people, to get a product or service from point A (the business) to point B (the people who will use it). That’s it. There are an infinite number of ways to achieve these goals, of course, but the overall goal itself is pretty simple

I find it more helpful, however, to think of those obstacles in business not as daunting, immovable blockages but rather as gaps. It is the space between what you want and where you are. The gap

Regardless of the type of gap you face in business, you must master three main elements to have any hope of building a bridge strong enough to get your intended audience—potential customers, key team members, investors, etc.—across the great divide: attention, influence, and transformation

No matter the gap. No matter the product or the audience. The easiest, most effective way to build bridges that capture attention, influence behavior, and transform those who cross them, resulting in gaps that stay closed and bridges that last, is with storytelling

Once you’ve caught people’s attention with a little cortisol and once you have trust, thanks to oxytocin, people become more giving. But you don’t need to drag people into a lab and dose them with neurochemicals to influence their behavior. You just have to tell them stories. And that’s exactly what MHF chose to do

Logic and credibility and rhetoric, I explained, weren’t going to make the cause any more important than they had the year before. By using stories, though, we could hack the very neurology that connects people at a fundamental level and drives trust and generosity

For all the power of story to captivate, influence, and transform the brain, there are two key things we also know from studying the neural impact of story. The first is that there actually has to be a story. If you’ve ever been to a conference, a Monday morning meeting, or anything involving PowerPoint slides and a lot of text, you know that not everything is a story.
Second, not all stories are created equal.
Some stories suck.
Actually, a lot of stories suck.
This is, in essence, the lesson that neurology teaches us about the brain and business: you have to use stories and they have to be good ones

The components we tested were the ones I’d been inserting into wannabe-story messages for decades:
• Identifiable characters

Authentic emotion
• A significant moment
• Specific details