CHAPTER 9

Share Your Story

Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.

—Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

I remember hearing her voice choke up on the phone call.

“Once again, they told me I was overqualified for the job.”

Desiree Adaway, my best friend since college, was at the end of her rope. She was part of a group layoff of consultants at Arthur Andersen, and for the past eight months had been sending her résumé everywhere. But no one was biting.

She had an amazing background and was one of the smartest people I knew. She was an exceptional manager, inspiring and mentoring those who worked for her. When she used to run children’s camps, I would marvel at her ability to build a great relationship with every kind of kid as well as command the respect and trust of the teenage camp counselors.

As a project manager for IBM, she was trusted and respected by her peers and valued by her manager for her ability to get things done efficiently and on time. She would jump into new industries and drink up knowledge, fed by her interest in research and thirst for learning.

But there was something about the way she was presenting her experience that was not connecting with companies that were hiring.

I did a quick search online for resources to help Desiree, and Louise Garver, a career coach and résumé expert in Connecticut, stood out immediately. She offered a job-search package that included drafting a résumé and cover letter as well as doing targeted research to determine the organizations that would be a good fit. Desiree contacted her right away.

“When I first looked at Desiree’s résumé, I didn’t see any focus,” Louise said. “Early in her career, she had experience with nonprofits and then in corporate environments, but I didn’t see the connections between the two. I also didn’t have any idea of her specific skills and strengths and how she had used them to make real and measurable impact in past jobs.”

The first thing Louise did was to clarify Desiree’s career target. What specific position did she want, in which industry? Then they gathered information, sample job postings, and used tools to identify key words and common denominators in the job responsibilities of her desired positions.

Next Desiree pulled out specific examples in her career history where she had addressed significant problems and had quantifiable outcomes. They dug into her natural patterns in any job, regardless of the situation. They found she was an exceptional problem solver and gifted manager. They examined what people always went to her for, if they were in a meeting or a project. Then they built strong stories around those examples.

With a crystal-clear job strategy, brand-new cover letter, and targeted résumé, Desiree hit the job market again.

Within a month, she had three ideal job offers. She took the position of global grants manager for the Rotary Foundation, where she oversaw millions of dollars of humanitarian grants all over the world. After a few years at Rotary, she moved to Habitat for Humanity, where she was senior director of volunteer mobilization.

Was it magic?

It sure felt like it to us.

In retrospect, it was really just a new spin on a truthful, powerful story, told in such a way that it both empowered the storyteller and excited the audience.

Desiree just hadn’t taken the time to really consider the power of her entire body of work.

Now that we’ve done the heavy lifting of digging into your roots, ingredients, and work mode; discussed difficult topics like creativity and fear; and defined how you will measure your success, it’s time to enter the last step: How do you tie it all together to create a compelling story and a marketable package?

No matter how wonderful and fulfilling your body of work is, if you want people to believe in it, act on it, be moved by it, or buy it, you must shape it into a cohesive narrative and tell powerful stories.

EXAMPLE OF A SUCCESS STORY

Just like she did with Desiree, Louise Garver gives an example of how she built a success story with a client with upgrade store management systems experience using these five questions.

1. What was the situation/problem you walked into that needed to be addressed?

The company spent $500 million per year on hourly labor and used a system that was designed to schedule labor for commission sales force. The hourly labor is not “self-funded” like commission, so labor has to be closely matched to customer demand and other work that takes place in the store.

2. What did you do about it (your action steps)?

Installed a new labor-scheduling system—a significant initiative that included the purchase of a new system from Kronos that provided labor scheduling, time and attendance, and daily/weekly/monthly dynamic budgeting.

3. What were the results? (quantify with monetary value, percentage, or numbers)

The labor scheduling initiatives yielded $5 million of annual benefit.

4. What was the strategic impact on the company?

The new labor system allowed the company to be more competitive in the marketplace with a more effective way to manage the cost of its greatest expense (labor) while simultaneously improving the ability to serve customers. The new system also provided growth capabilities:

• Allowing new standard prototype stores to open profitability

• Creating the ability to have a labor model customized for new prototypes

5. What skills and strengths did you identify in your story?

Project and team leadership. Technology know-how. Being a champion for continuous improvement and finding ways to save money for the company. Initiative in identifying and solving problems. Resource and vendor management.

The two critical stories for career success

I spoke with a client who was entering the job market after spending an extended period of time doing a mix of freelance work and raising children.

He was concerned about holes in his experience and the impact they would have on securing a good job.

He felt scared, uncomfortable, and insecure.

Another client had gone through a really tough period in her life, which had caused her to drop some balls at work. Coworkers weren’t happy, and she was concerned about how it would impact her opportunities moving forward.

She felt awkward, ashamed, and stuck.

In both these cases, there are two very important stories to tell.

The story you tell yourself

Going after new goals is challenging. The job market is competitive. It isn’t easy to create art, or to get customers, or to write a book. It is hard to bounce back from failure or adversity. Before you start to worry about what someone else thinks about you, you have to make sure that you are thinking great things about yourself.

Consider the difference between these two stories.

“I have been out of the job market for five years and have not kept up on all the latest trends in technology. I am scared that prospective employers might see me as lacking. I must do whatever it takes to prove that I am worthy. I am desperate for a job. I will take any opportunity that comes my way and heave a sigh of relief, because it will mean that they accept me, despite my flaws.”

How are you feeling after reading something like this? Kind of yucky and in need of a hug, right?

Consider this alternative.

“I am proud of the wide variety of experiences that I have had in my life. I can think of many times when I was put into new and challenging situations and learned quickly. Being out of the job market for a while has given me a new and refreshing perspective that makes me extremely focused and excited for new opportunities. I have enjoyed working for myself, but now I am ready to be back in a team environment where I have support and resources to get my work done. I want to work in a place that appreciates my experience. I will do a great job, and they will be lucky to have me.”

That feels better, doesn’t it? The first story reminds me of Das Boot (a film some find a classic, but what I find a most depressing German film about men stuck in a submarine) and the second story reminds me of Rocky III. (No one brings out “Eye of the Tiger” like Apollo Creed.)

When crafting your personal story, consider:

The story you tell others

Once you get a clear and empowering story to tell yourself, you need to work on the story that will resonate and influence others. In addition to the questions you have answered for your own story, add these:

Every day, I see people with similar backgrounds and equivalent skills accomplish radically different results.

One big reason for this is the story they tell themselves and others on a daily basis.

The quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your stories.

You must craft them well.

The Persuasive Story Pattern

Nancy Duarte has spent her life studying the craft of storytelling.

As the cofounder of the world-renowned Silicon Valley presentation design firm Duarte, she has worked with some of the most influential businesspeople and thinkers in the world.

A few years ago, she was doing research for her book Resonate.

She studied dramatic plot structure in theater from Gustav Freytag and Aristotle’s three-part story structure.

But when she studied Joseph Campbell, she got really excited.

“I got most enraptured by Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. It is such a beautiful pattern for transformation. You can overlay it on life, corporate change initiatives, over so many things. You can look at where you are in your life and actually plot out how your life is going to turn out.”

By analyzing hundreds of the most famous speeches of all time and testing different story structures, she discovered a story pattern that mirrored the greatest speeches in the world. Her breakthrough came one morning when she overlaid both Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Steve Jobs’s 2007 iPhone launch speech, and they both matched her Persuasive Story Pattern.

Nancy describes how to craft your story, using the Persuasive Story Pattern.

Craft the beginning

Start by describing life as the audience knows it. People should be nodding their heads in recognition because you’re articulating what they already understand. This creates a bond between you and them, and opens them up to hear your ideas for change.

After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be. The gap between the two will throw the audience a bit off-balance, and that’s a good thing—it jars them out of complacency. For instance:

What is: We fell short of our Q3 financial goals partly because we’re understaffed and everyone’s spread too thin.

What could be: But what if we could solve the worst of our problems by bringing in a couple of powerhouse clients? Well, we can.

Once you establish that gap, use the rest of the presentation to bridge it.

Develop the middle

Now that people in your audience realize their world is off-kilter, keep playing up the contrast between what is and what could be.

Let’s go back to that Q3 update. Revenues are down, but you want to motivate employees to make up for it. Here’s one way you could structure the middle of your presentation:

What is: We missed our Q3 forecast by 15 percent.

What could be: Q4 numbers must be strong for us to pay out bonuses.

What is: We have six new clients on our roster.

What could be: Two of them have the potential to bring in more revenue than our best clients do now.

What is: The new clients will require extensive retooling in manufacturing.

What could be: We’ll be bringing in experts from Germany to help.

As you move back and forth between what is and what could be, the audience will find the latter more and more alluring.

Make the ending powerful

You don’t want to end with a burdensome list of to-dos. Definitely include a call to action—but make it inspiring so people will want to act. Describe what I call the new bliss: how much better their world will be when they adopt your ideas.

So if you’re wrapping up that Q3 update from above, you might approach it this way:

Call to action: It will take extra work from all departments to make Q4 numbers, but we can deliver products to our important new clients on time and with no errors.

New bliss: I know everyone’s running on fumes—but hang in there. This is our chance to pull together like a championship team, and things will get easier if we make this work. The reward if we meet our Q4 targets? Bonuses, plus days off at the end of the year.

By defining future rewards, you show people that getting on board will be worth their effort. It’ll meet their needs, not just yours.

Nancy believes that understanding story structure will not only make you a much better communicator, it will also allow you to change the world. I believe that by mastering the art of storytelling, you will be able to organize your body of work into a compelling story and present it to the world.

Your life as told by Google

Like it or not, Google is telling a story about you right now.

Go ahead, Google your name.

Hopefully you have narrated part of your story and are happy about what people have written or shared about you. If you aren’t, the good news is that you can change it.

Words, images, and videos make up a multicolored tapestry of your life on the Web.

Jobs are won and business is sold by the strength of the story told by Google when people look you up on the Web. As you create your body of work, you need to package it, to illustrate it, and to tie it together in a cohesive story.

What have you done? What do people say about you? Who are you connected to? Who is connected to you and your message? What do you stand for? How does your work in Sector A tie to the project you are doing in Sector B that you are trying to sell to the Sector C?

Your body of work content map

In order to tell a cohesive story about your body of work, you need to create a content map.

When I was developing my Escape from Cubicle Nation blog and business, I took out a pad of paper and put a big box in the middle labeled “My People.”

Then I asked myself: What do they really need?

For this business, my people were corporate employees who wanted to quit their job and start a business. I brainstormed a bunch of different needs, then grouped them in four major categories:

Once clear on what your audience needs, you can build a product/service map that follows them along a clear and defined path.

In my own coaching work, I know that people generally follow the path outlined in my book:

Develop and share the content they need

Through a period of eight years, I shared hundreds of blog posts, videos, audios, e-books, events, webinars, classes, speeches, workshops, and a book to address the particular needs of my market.

I used social media tools like my blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ to:

By consistently sharing the information that I had gathered by growing my body of work, through being self-employed, blogging, tweeting, planning, and getting through the hard times, I became well-known for this particular aspect of my body of work.

A content map for your career

If you work as an employee in a corporation or a nonprofit, your content map would still be quite similar to the one described above. Remember, organizations can build a body of work too.

Imagine all the information, resources, support, and encouragement your customers, donors, vendors, coworkers and management needs to accomplish their goals.

Share this information in meetings, presentations, e-mails, and where possible, external blogs and presentations. More and more employees of large companies are writing external blogs and building up their reputation and personal brand online.

How to create a personal content map

1. Define the specific needs of people you want to influence with your body of work. Take a piece of paper, put them in the middle, and ask yourself, “What are the major things they need to fully solve their problem?”

Sketch out the steps they need to address their problem. Think of a typical person who comes to you for help. What is the first problem they need help solving? Once that problem is solved, where do they tend to go next? Create a path of steps that ends with them realizing their goals.

2. Create content that helps them solve their problem. You have wonderful tools like blogs, podcasts, tweets, e-books and videos to create useful, valuable content that helps your people solve their problems. Couple this with more intensive support (paid teleclasses, workshops, tutorials, coaching, retreats) and they will have everything they need to solve their problem. Remember that much of your audience will solve their problem using your free material. But there will always be people who are willing to pay for more specific and individual support.

3. Sprinkle the products and services that your people really need. Think of ways to strengthen your paid offerings by adding in the specific things that will help your people succeed. As an example, the way I meet the needs of my people is to offer knowledge with blog posts, programs, workshops, and retreats. I give them inspiration with speeches, interviews with experts and cool people just like them who have made the leap successfully, daily tweets, Facebook updates, e-mails, and free calls. I give them community with live events where they can gather with like-minded people. I give them promotion by tweeting and blogging about their businesses, mentioning them in my press interviews, and making introductions with mentors and customers.

4. Organize your content map in a clear and compelling manner and promote the heck out of it. Depending on the communication style of your market, you can develop a whole range of promotional materials, including a Web-based product map, or a nicely designed set of printed materials. It is wonderful if you can get the domain name for your own name and use yourname.com as a central place to host all of your content.

With a clear content map and plan, you are ready to focus on the quality of your content.

How to communicate clearly

“Let the wild rumpus start.”

The first time I read this passage to my three-year old from the classic Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Things Are, I felt a wave of pleasure and a flashback to my own childhood. I had forgotten how ripe and tantalizing the words were; perfectly chosen, crisp, simple, and powerful.

Why isn’t all writing like that?

As readers, we hunger for clear, useful, insightful, and inspiring words.

As writers, we long to speak the truth and say something relevant and important.

But somehow in our professional lives, we are taught to convolute, complicate, and butcher perfectly good language when communicating with users, clients, customers, employees, and partners.

How can we clean up our stories so that we evoke the spirit of a well-written book? Here are some places to demonstrate clear and effective language.

In presentations: Trust your instincts

In my prior days as a management consultant, I was brought into a project at a large multinational company with short notice and no information. For four hours, I sat in a dark conference room with a bunch of serious-looking executives and listened to an “overview” presentation that was a minimum of three hundred PowerPoint slides, with eye-crossing graphs, charts, and bullets. At the end of the presentation, although I wouldn’t admit it to anyone in public, I still had no idea what the project was about. Seriously. None whatsoever. And I was no green bean; I had participated in large projects in large organizations for many years. Finally, once I was able to corner a smart-looking person, I said, “Can you tell me in ten words or less what this project is about?”

“Sure,” he said. “It is a reorganization.”

They could have saved 299 slides and four hours’ worth of my billable time if they had just said those four words.

There is a conspiracy cooked up by marketing wonks, consultants, and executives to pay for words by the pound, and to question the intelligence of a corporate “professional” who does not create complex and obtuse presentations. They are wrong. Your instinct to keep things clean and simple is right. A few tips:

In blogs: Speak your truth

Blogs are a fantastic vehicle for sharing your story and showcasing your body of work. Blog culture encourages open, personal, and straight communication. But we still fall victim to being either too boring and generic, or too self-indulgent with “Here are twelve more pictures of my cat and kids plus a personal rant” posts. Instead:

Write for your audience

Some bloggers write about whatever strikes their fancy, and it suits them well. I tend to stick close to my readers. Questions that guide my content include:

Use your own voice

Your head can play tricks on you when choosing topics. Mostly, it will play on your fears and insecurities of needing to appear “smart” or “hip.” Dig deeper and write what you feel is the truth. Your truth will be different than anyone else’s, so many are bound to disagree, but that is part of the fun. If you worry about how smart or important you sound, your writing will come out stilted and insincere. A passage from the delightful book If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland sums it up nicely:

[I]nspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a chance to start flowing, and prime it with a little solitude and idleness. I learned that when writing you should feel not like Lord Byron on a mountaintop but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead in front of another.

Use your superpowers for good

This is a favorite saying of my friend Marilyn Scott-Waters, a talented illustrator who has given away more than 3 million lovingly illustrated paper toys on her website thetoymaker .com. Snark and gossip are part of our lives and can be entertaining in a superficial kind of way. But if you are going to spend hours and hours researching and writing and opining, why not do it for the purpose of uplifting and enlightening? There are enough forces in the world right now bent on humiliation, death, and destruction. So voice your honest thoughts, just do so without shaming, scaring, or ridiculing the subjects of your opinions.

In sales copy: Cut the hype

Most of us have to sell our ideas in writing. If you work for yourself and sell a product or service, you may have to create marketing materials or a sales letter. There are well-documented copywriting recipes that specify what color or font size to make your headlines, which “words that sell” to use at which part of the letter, and how to format and use testimonials from satisfied customers. Study these examples, as you are bound to learn something from them, but don’t become a slave to a formula. In addition:

In messages to potential partners, customers, or mentors: Bring back foreplay

E-mail is a great way to begin to build a relationship with someone who interests you. But too often, we forget all rules of human interaction and jump right to a jarring, intimate request, such as:

“I see that your blog reaches a similar target audience as mine. I am sure they would be interested in my product, so could you link to it? I will link to you if you link to me.”

Such crude, direct language turns me off immediately. Instead:

Common sense is rarely common practice. So if some of this advice gets you ostracized, ridiculed, or even fired, all I can say is “Welcome to the other side.” Your audience will thank you for standing up for truth and clarity.

Let the wild rumpus start.

A great story needs great drama

One time when my dad and Diane visited us in Arizona, we all stayed at Saguaro Lake Ranch, a local bed-and-breakfast in the Tonto National Forest in Mesa. While I was inside the lodge writing, my five-year old daughter Angela Rose lost a tooth.

She came to find me, and told me the story of how it fell out.

She then dictated a letter to me for the tooth fairy. Here it is exactly as she told it to me.

Dear Tooth Fairy:

I lost a tooth.

I had bacon.

I feeled my tooth, it was a little bit loose.

I went swimming.

And then I ate a cracker.

And then I thought there was a nut in it.

And then I feeled my tooth and it was out.

And then I went to the hotel.

And then I knocked on the door four times.

And then I showed my Mom.

And then she’s like OH. MY. GOD.

From,

Angela

She retold this story to every person who noticed that her bottom tooth was missing, including my local Starbucks coffee crew, neighbors, her teachers, and the school principal.

Each time, she would end with the dramatic OH. MY. GOD.

Did you really need to know about the bacon and swimming, or how she ate a cracker that ended up containing her tooth? Probably not. But it makes the story much more entertaining.

Another noteworthy story that went viral on the Internet was creative director Ryan Kutscher’s Craigslist ad for his bike, which illustrates how, for Ryan’s ideal customer, colorful language was a key part of adding humor and drama to the story.

Grab a paper bag, breathe into it, and calm your ass down. You’re hyperventilating because you ain’t never seen a deal like this before. Now collect yourself, then keep reading this incredible description that barely serves to do justice to my 2010 Felt Gridlock [sic] 3-speed fixed-gear bike. Yes, 3-SPEED FIXED-GEAR. Also known as the greatest bike the city has ever had the privilege of existing around.

What makes this bike so much better than every other bike that has ever been pedaled? Glad you asked. It starts with the paint scheme. It looks like Iron Man if Iron Man were a bike. That’s bold, son. Curb appeal. It’s probably also why some piece of trash stole the front tire that originally came with this beauty. Why didn’t he steal the whole bike? Because he knew he wasn’t man enough. That’s OK, I replaced it with something that looks even more boss. The next thing is the genuine leather seat. My taint has had a love/hate relationship with this particular bit of the machine. But it’s got those swanky brass rivets, so I can’t stay mad that it smashed my prostate and has likely rendered fatherhood impossible. But let’s face it, I’d rather have had a bike than a kid.

Details, humor, and context can bring your stories to life and connect with the emotions of your audience.

How to establish credibility with your story

We have all squirmed through this scenario:

You sign up for a conference and get really excited about learning critical things to grow your career or business. You invest time, money, and energy to clear your agenda so you can be there.

The lights dim and the first speaker is introduced. They look friendly and pleasant, and start the talk off on a good foot. They mention that they grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and got an academic scholarship to Yale. Then they were president of their fraternity and maintained a 4.0 grade point average while starting a highly successful business in their dorm room.

Five minutes in, you are starting to want to stab yourself in the eye with a pencil if it would mean helping them get to the point of the presentation.

Ten minutes in, they are still sharing the fine points of their illustrious career, awards they have won, and famous people who beg and plead for their advice. “And then the pope said to me, ‘Jim, I am really in a quandary here. . . .’”

Fifteen minutes in, you are wanting to poke their eye out with a pencil, even if it means serving a short jail sentence. Anything to stop their incessant bragging.

“If I were them,” you scream to yourself, “I would stop blowing smoke and get to the point of the presentation, which is about me and my needs.”

Right?

Well, almost right.

There is a fine line between establishing necessary credibility with a new audience and being a complete egomaniac.

What your audience needs to know in order to trust what you say

Never assume that people in a new audience know anything about you. I spoke at a wonderful local event in my hometown of Mesa, Arizona, and besides my friend Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft, and my former client and ace photographer Ivan Martinez, no one knew who I was. I got to know my bright and talented fellow presenter in the session itself, so we didn’t have any context or background about each other to plan the session. So when I did my introduction, even though I was speaking to my own community, I had to establish my background so that they knew enough about me to trust my advice.

A new audience needs to know:

Your formal education or training that prepares you to do your work

If you have a degree from Harvard, or a PhD in engineering from MIT, tell them. Rather than bragging, this puts their mind at ease. If you are talking to a group that values community education, tell them. When Clate did the keynote at Mesa Community College about how he grew his company from a ramen-noodle-eating group of three broke guys with big dreams into a $30 million company with two hundred employees (now approaching seven hundred), what did he mention about his education? That he started it at Mesa Community College. This was extremely meaningful to newer entrepreneurs and students in the audience.

Key parts of your own life story to prove you did what you teach

Are you teaching lawyers how to set up a virtual law practice like my client Rachel Rodgers did? Tell them how you did it yourself and what you learned from the experience. Are you proud of the fact that you grew a great company while raising your kids as a single parent? If that would establish credibility with your audience, tell that part of the story.

Specific examples of how you have helped other people just like them get great results

Street credibility

As much as social media pundits like to exclaim “old media is dead,” there is still huge street credibility in mainstream press mentions. Mention:

Do you need to say all this in your introduction?

Of course not. That would make you a blowhard. But you do need to review all of the concrete things you could share about yourself and choose the specific information that:

“Is she too young to talk about this topic?” “Does this consultant have any real-world experience building a software product?” “Is she one of those people who just teaches others to make money on the Internet so that she can make money off those people on the Internet?” One time, a local friend who I had known for a few years said to me, “You know what my problem is with you? You are like one of those people who create an infomercial to teach people how to create infomercials.” To which I responded, a bit stunned, “Do you have any idea what I do, and have you ever read my book?” It turned out that he didn’t, and he hadn’t. I thanked him immensely for the feedback, because if he was brave enough to say it to my face, it meant that there were a whole bunch more people who thought it and just said it behind my back.

Your audience will think, “OK, phew, she has successfully started a company, raised venture capital, sold the company, and started and sold four others. I can trust what she tells me.”

I was taught by my parents and grandparents to be humble, to be in service of others, and to always put others’ needs above my own. This is a fantastic heritage, and I am so thankful for the teaching, since I think it helps me be a respectful and decent human being.

However, in business situations, sometimes in order to gain the trust of the audience so you can be of service, you must tell a compelling story that establishes credibility and showcases your body of work.

Finding the thread that ties your story together

In this chapter, we have examined:

The final step in creating a clear and compelling story about your body of work is to find a thread of connection with your audience as you craft specific messages for different situations.

1. The high-level story

Your high-level story is the summary of your body of work that you most often find in “Bios” and “About” pages on websites. A story at this level is crafted around:

2. The interview or client story

When you are applying for a job or speaking to a perspective client, you want to craft your story according to specific parameters. For this story, review:

3. The networking story

When you bump into a new person at the gym, or attend a business networking event for the first time, you don’t want to launch into a lengthy list of your ingredients. Choose a short phrase that will help them understand what you do, while helping spark a good discussion:

The most important thing to remember about the skill of storytelling in the new world of work is that you must customize your message to the audience you are speaking to. Because you will have an ever-expanding set of work modes, ingredients, and experiences, you don’t need to overwhelm your audience with a laundry list of everything you have ever done.

Your ability to tell compelling, truthful, engaging stories will decide the lasting impact your body of work has on the world.

Tell them well.