Read Always Eat Left Handed: 15 Surprisingly Simple Secrets of Success for Free Online

the cover of Wired .*

Why People Follow Stories
    Can you really tell a million dollar story and expect it to sell?  One of the most interesting truths about leaders is that the higher up you go, the more likely the person sitting across the table from you will trust something other than what you put on paper in order to inform their decision.  Despite our world of virtual connections, your pitch delivered in person for whatever you believe in still matters a lot.
    Of course, you won’t always have a meeting with the CEO of a large global empire.  Maybe you never will.  But to understand the power of storytelling, you don’t need to grace the inside of a boardroom.  Just look at one of the most common behaviours in social media and you’ll see this principle in action every day.
    What is the #1 item shared on Facebook consistently? Stories – from the news media or elsewhere.  It highlights one of the most important things the social psychologists who study the transmission of ideas find over and over again.  People share stories, not facts. 
    Telling better stories changes everything.

How To Tell Better Stories
    When it comes to being a better storyteller, the best thing you can really do is pay closer attention to the great stories all around you.  They may be in the media told through a piece of investigative journalism.  Or a new film that comes out.  Learning from professional storytellers of all types is always a great thing to do.  Aside from that, here are three other suggestions that will help you hone your storytelling skills:
     
Show don’t tell. It really is true that the more you can paint a picture of something, the more powerful the story could be.  When I read about the story of Costco founder James Sinegal – whose warehouse store has one of the lowest employee turnover rates in all retail – you could just say he believes in a flat style of management.  Or you could tell a story about how every day when he goes into stores around the country, he always wears his Costco nametag which say simply “Jim” – and greets employees by first name while asking them about their families.  From that story, you can easily get a sense of his management style – but the story brings it to life.   
Make it personal.   Stories need real characters, and one of the biggest mistakes that people often make is working hard to remove all traces of humanity from what they produce.  Do you describe yourself in the third person in online profiles or  as a real person?  One of the most basic ways to bring more of the human element of storytelling back is to switch back to the first person – and to make sure that the stories you are sharing have actual characters in them.
Offer some context.   The best stories offer a way to connect people to the narrative by giving them a way to participate.  When you can offer context behind a story, you can help someone take that story and apply it to their own situation or their own lives.  What are the emotional qualities that your story helps inspire?  That’s the key question to think about answering, and the one that can help you create more context to help your story influence others more powerfully.
    *Author's Note: The story of Murdoch and Rosenblatt was excerpted from a brilliant book on storytelling called Tell to Win by Hollywood Producer Peter Guber.  

Chapter 9 - Interrupt Often
    Lesson - Be An Active Listener
     
    Several years ago, AOL TV decided to run a poll of users asking them to cast votes for their favorite daytime television host.  Over 1.2 million people cast their votes, and Ellen Degeneres narrowly took the top spot, beating out Oprah Winfrey as the top daytime personality. 
    In a secondary question, the poll also asked who viewers would rate as the best interviewer.  This time, the winner was a blowout.  Oprah was by far rated the best at conducting interviews—but you hardly need a poll result from thousands of daytime