Many, including myself, may find it hard to believe that I go to church. Moreover, it may be even more shocking that I gave a service earlier this month. There have been a few people from the society who have asked for the text of the service, so I am putting it up here on the blog.
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The Lost Art of Storytelling
Mike Ma
August 9, 2009
First Unitarian Society of Rockland County
Good morning! Since today’s service is about storytelling, I’d like to tell share with you a story told by my barber. Not sure any of you have caught NYT’s One in 8 Million series, but I was shocked to see that my barber, Joe, was featured a few months ago. Have a listen to his story as he tells it.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html#/joe_manniello
Isn’t that a great story? In about 2 minutes you learn all you need to know about Joe Manniello. For me, his fascinating story transforms the mundane experience of a haircut (in Port Authority of all places!) to the remarkable.
And in a nutshell, that is the power of stories. About 3 years ago I read a book by a guy named Dan Pink called A Whole New Mind. In it, he argues that to be successful today in business or in any other field, you need to be right brain oriented. From there he describes the skills of the right brain – play, empathy, meaning, design, symphony, and my favorite of the lot – story.
Much of what I am going to say is openly plagiarized from his book. I’ve bought his book several times for myself and others. I have hired him in the past as a conference speaker and paid him handsomely, so I will assume that I am welcome to an hour of indulgence to share with you. If you haven’t read it, you should.
So, I’d like to spend the next hour exploring storytelling with you in a few parts. In the first part, I’d like to frame how ubiquitous and universal storytelling is. In the second, I’d like to explore some of the forms of story telling and how they are changing. In the third, if I get there, I’d like to talk about why I think that this is important to us Unitarian Universalists.
I. Story as necessary and universal
As children, and even as parents, we aren’t really taught the value of stories. Rather we are taught to esteem facts as knowledge. That Pi is 3.14592… (whatever). That there are 5280 feet in a yard, that the lake in Walden pond was 100.1 feet deep at its deepest point. I was forced to memorize all these things as they were deemed valuable things for me to know. Stories; however, we view as distraction from this. They daydreamer is considered to lazy, distracted, and unserious about her studies.
However, in the days of Google and the internet, facts are of little use or differentiation. You can be a Nobel laureate or a beggar in an internet café and basically have access to the same bit of information. Stories however, are the map that makes sense of fact – and as we get access to more facts I question if we have really ramped our story telling and listening ability to help make sense of all we can avail ourselves to.
Looking back, true learning was tied to story. I got a philosophy degree, and all the great thinkers used story to make their difficult analytical claims. Know Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and you can probably figure out why he thinks the Philosopher King should rule the Republic. Know Descartes’ schizophrenic talk with his Evil Deceiver, and you can trace how he gets to cogito ergo sum.
The use of story didn’t just stay with me during my academic life. In my business, strategy consulting, “hypothesis-driven analysis” is the most vaunted methodology used by McKinsey and Company. While effective, one can really a euphemism for being able to craft a quantitative story about what we think a client should be doing … and most likely, the consultants have come to that conclusion before we started the project. We are just cavemen with powerpoint and excel crafting a story.
Just turn on the TV, or the interwebs and you will see that Story is important. Two economists., Deirdre McLoseky and Ajo Kramer calculate that persuasion, advertising, consulting, etc, accounts for 25% of the US’ GDP. If story is half of those, then Story is worth about $1T to the US economy.
These are not egghead macroeconomics on a page – these have real, local effects. To illustrate, I buy all my wine from Grape D’Vine in Tappan. I strolled in to here after a library visit next door and struck up a chat with Joe Printz, the owner and now a dear friend of mine. “Why did you get in this business?” I asked him. “Mike, I’ve been searching my whole life for the 100 point, $20 bottle of wine.” That was my Jerry Maguire moment, you had me at hello. I have very rarely bought wine anywhere else since.
And it isn’t just business. As many of you know, my wife, Katherine, is a pediatrician, and so we spend a lot of time talking about healthcare these days. I’d hold that story may hold a key to reducing our healthcare costs overall. Let me ask you all a question. How long do you think a doctor lets you talk before she speaks? Guesses?
20 years ago, researchers videotaped doctor-patient encounters, they found doctors interrupted their patients after an average of 21 seconds. When another group did the same thing more recently, there was some improvement guesses? Anyone?
They now interrupted after 23 seconds. Doctors stunk at listening to people’s stories.
During Katherine’s second year, she was forced to take a class in narrative medicine. She read William Carlos Williams, I think, between her pharmacology lectures. The idea was that doctors needed to develop their right brain as well as their left. That listening would improve the quality of care and connection to the patient. That you through story and empathy, a physician could be a more complete healer.
So now instead of “What’s wrong with your stomach?” You will hear questions like “Tell me about your life.” And Columbia is not alone. Today, 3 out of 4 medical schools offer classes in humanities. Belleuve Hospital, in fact, actually publishes its own literary review.
Does it work? So far, the results look encouraging. Dr. Rita Sharon, has been at the center of this narrative medicine movement. To illustrate its efficacy, they developed “parallel charts” where on one chart, they have your regular medical stuff, and on the second, medical students write narratives about their patients and chronicle their own emotions. According to the study, those who did both charts had better interviewing and technical skills than those who did not.
Moreover, stories may make us safer. I was telling my father-in-law about this service. He is chief of police for Amtrak and he was moved by this idea of story as well. We were discussing the recent 60 Minutes piece on the TSA’s onerous screening processes. He only had one major complaint about the TSA, that they only screen for things, and do not interview travelers. He said, “Look people are always going to find a way to beat the scanner, but it’s harder to pull off a lie.” He believes that a story is probably the most important thing in screening a passenger. And that I think that this is true, if you have ever been to Heathrow airport, their immigration officers are some of the very best at that. “Tell me about your consulting firm,” “What firms will you be seeing today?”
So far, I’ve explained how stories can make us richer, healthier, and safer, and you may ask yourself, “So what?” I think I’d be leaving a lot out if I left it to that. Stories are good for the soul. They reach us in an emotional place where we can really understand what is or should be important to us. As E.M. Forster said, “The queen died and the king died” is a fact. “The queen died and the king died of a broken heart,” well, that’s a story.
I’d like to share with you a particularly poignant story that I got a lot from StoryCorps' web site. We will talk a bit more about StoryCorps later, but right now I’d like to focus on the message and lessons being exchanged from mother to daughter, and daughter back to mother.
http://bit.ly/bnk1v
Pretty powerful stuff. With that, I’d like to open this up to the group to share either how stories impact their lives today or if there have been particular stories that have shaped their life.
II. The Form of Stories
Many of you are familiar with the story of Harry Potter. A young orphan boy senses realizes he has magical abilities. He receives a calling to head to Hogwarts School of Magic to become the wizard he is supposed to be. There, he confronts the specters of his parents past and many more and takes his seat as the most powerful wizard ever known. In short, he leaves London, he answers his calling, and returns a man.
Many of you may be familiar with Joseph Conrad’s work, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” He argues that all myths that have survived the test of time have the same structure of the monomyth:
Departure – the hero answers the call.
Initiation – the hero answers a series of challenges
Return – the hero returns wiser and stronger to
That this is so pervasive and so widely shared across cultures does strongly indicate that there is some form that pulls on our heart strings in synchronized rhythm. This is the form from Jesus to Neo in the Matrix. From Luke Skywalker, to Sonia Sotomayor.
This form is so widespread and universal, there is an argument to be made that the form of the story is as important as the story itself.
Technology is also changing the form of storytelling. The clip I played for you before was from StoryCorps. Some of you may have heard this on NPR, but for others StoryCorps in short enables every day people tell their stories or interview people close to them. Head downtown to SoHo to the StoryCorp trailer with a loved one, and in an hour, you get a professional copy of your interview copy. Another copy of the story is archived in the Library of Congress as part of an oral history of America.
Technology has democratized storytelling, so it saddens me at times that we are blame technology for making us such bad storytellers and listeners. StoryCorps proves that we no longer need to be Tolstoy or Homer to tell stories. Every single person can do it and it every single person can listen and save their stories for posterity’s sake. What a wonderful asset to storytelling.
About two months ago, we were having a discussion about technology and how it has eroded the attention of our young people where they can no longer spend time reading books. Many members of this society were throwing Facebook and twitter under the bus, and I wanted to keep that moment since I knew I would have my day up here.
As I shared that same day, I think we are all better off to embrace technology ourselves in some form. Let’s try to find the space where we can share and connect with our younger generation’s use of technology – and storytelling is no exception. For instance, Hemmingway purportedly said his best story he ever wrote was only six words long: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”
I checked. That was 35 characters long, including punctuation, well within Twitter’s limit of 140 characters. Point is, we need to adapt the way we tell stories to other generations today. If we expect them to read Dickens, don’t we have an obligation to check out Facebook?
I’ve tried my hand at this and on my Facebook page, there is my six-word memoir. “Told you, not all philosophers starve.” This was cheeky retort to my very Asian parents who footed the bill of my expensive liberal arts education.
Luckily, there are much better examples of six-word memoirs and stories out there. Some are compiled in an aptly titled book, “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” Some favorites I had were Steven Colbert’s “Well, I thought it was funny.” Or Amy Sohn’s, “Gave commencement address. Became sex columnist.” An anonymous one made me laugh. “Premenstrual syndrome again. Hide the Nutella.”
While I can’t make everyone twitter, I’d like to see if you would explore a six word memoir or story with us. Let’s try to expand our storytelling muscles a bit here.
III. UU Implications
There’s rarely a service that goes by that we don’t ask the question, “How do you describe Unitarian Universalism?”
I am here because of a successful story. But it isn’t an elegant one. Two good friends of mine said that they started visiting a UU congregation in Boston where they live. I asked what it is like. They told me a story: “It’s a bunch of recovering Catholics and Jews who care about people and drive Subarus. You’d love it.”
With that, I am here with you a full year and a half later.
Other descriptions I’ve enjoyed as well. Rev. Jef who was with us in May shared that he described it to dying cancer patients and their families as “Believing in up to one god, and everyone gets in.” (You could rewrite that to a six word story “Maybe God. But everyone gets in.”).
We have no Bible, no Koran, no Torah, we don’t even have a little red book. We have the Library of Congress-like mishmash of spiritual excerpts, not exactly a rallying body of text. All we have is our stories.
In my very first meeting as a member in June, I was exposed to the idea of trying to grow this society and perhaps leave this building. While this is all fine and good, any idea of expansion without a cohesive story I fear will be quite futile. If we care about growing this society, it will be the work for a while to define what the story is. Not just for UUs, but for this particular society and our mission in context of the community here in Rockland County.
I’d like to open it to the floor to see if anyone has had good experience of telling the UU story.
IV. Closing
I will leave aside our megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur a second. I’ve explained challenges to our growth, but I’d like to share with you why I stay and come as often as I can. Mostly, because I enjoy hearing your stories. They enrich my life, and I believe make me a better person. So thank you for sharing your stories with me – I hope you continue to do so here and with all who touch your life.
Thank you as well for listening to mine.
