The Right Story: The secret to spreading your ideas

We must choose whether we want to make weak ties by going broad and shallow, or strong ties by going narrow and deep. We need to decide if we want to be the loudest or most resonant, most visible or most memorable. We can’t be both.

If you want to appeal to the right people you have to be willing to repel the wrong people.

When is your audience paying attention in general, not just to your message?

What’s stopping us from telling the right story isn’t the soundness of our argument, the brilliance of our logic or the quality of the thing we’re selling. It’s that we haven’t understood how best to communicate in a way that helps others to imagine a future they can’t yet see.

What we see from these stories is that the brands that succeeded in telling the right story spent the majority of their time understanding the change they wanted to create and the impact they wanted to have. They developed superior products and understood who it was for, before they began to tell the story to those prospective customers.

there is no such thing as a bad idea or a good idea. There is only the wrong story or the right story. The right story is one that is trusted. It is believed because it is told by the right person, for the right reasons, in the right way, at the right time, to the right people. The success or failure of our ideas depends on us telling the right sto

you can’t change a mind without winning a heart.

A desire path is usually the most easily navigated route between two places.

We’ve all done something similar on occasion: chosen the wrong place or time to have a discussion with our partner, became tongue-tied because we didn’t prepare what we wanted to say, failed to get the funding or close the sale we needed because we didn’t win the trust of key stakeholders.