The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

- Steve Jobs

Stories are a vehicle that humans have used for ages to transfer “information” from generation to generation. Our minds have adapted to this powerful formula for understanding and remembering.

I am curious about how it works and how people/businesses can use it to be more effective communicators. I have read some books now related to the subject, which I shall mention at the end of this post, and I just wished to share some of the findings.

Elements that make up a good story

1. The story needs to be identifiable or relatable. Something that the audience can understand or connect with.
2. All great stories tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life. This is also the purpose and pinnacle of the story and therefore the end point.
   • Understand the essence of the message you wish to get across. The opposite is then the beginning.
3. The change from the beginning to the end creates the arc of the story, and the human mind is drawn to such a transformation story.
4. Every moment of the story should be a scene which is placed in a physical location, which is were the action, dialogue and internal monologues take place.
5. A story needs to have stakes, which gives the audience a reason to want to know the next part.
6. Stories need to move dynamically between scenes. Surprise and humour can add dynamism and emotional connection with the story and help keep the audience on the edge of their seat.
7. Lastly, be efficient with language. Anything that does not support or bring clarity to the message, should be left out. Also, use natural, spoken language.

These are the parts of the story - the copy, if you will - but nowadays a story is often accompanied by images (or made up of it completely). Related to this, there is an interesting point that is made in the book Understanding Comics: more abstract images of individuals (as opposed to realistic) can feel more relatable, as it could be anyone (including you) rather than someone specific (not you). Additionally, more abstract imagery can also help place the focus on the message.

Possible implications for brands

• Do not make the mistake of making your brand or company the main character in the story: it should be your customer. Centre your message on how you can help them.
• Identify who the potential customer is and what problem (external and internal) you can help them with. Be sure to focus! Connecting with internal problems results in a greater motivator.
• Your brand is positioned as the “Guide” in the story and it helps the customer achieve their transformation. A brand must communicate Empathy and Authority in order to position itself as a Guide.
• Customers trust a guide who has a plan(s). These plans either clarify how somebody can do business with you, (a process plan), or they remove the sense of risk somebody might have (an agreement plan).
• Your story should “push” your customer to take action otherwise they won’t: direct call-to-action (conversion) or a transitional call-to-action (nurturing).
• Loss aversion is a greater motivator of buying decisions than potential gains. Therefore, make it clear both what life looks like when they buy your product/service as well as what happens if they don’t.

Last, but certainly not least, brands that connect with customers on a deeper level (irresistible brands?), tend to have higher market share, according to Kantar. And what brand doesn’t want that.

This story narrative works for attracting customers, but it can also help transform the company culture by avoiding the Narrative Void (a vacant space that occurs inside the organization when there’s no story to keep everyone aligned).

Wrap up

Without a doubt, these books make a great argument for the power of good story telling and give very concrete suggestions of how to use it. My points above are summarised to the extreme, but I hope you find something useful in it.

And if you want to chat about it, feel free to hit my up on Twitter or Mastodon.

The books are:

• Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling (link to GoodReads) by Matthew Dicks
• Building a Story Brand: Clarify your message so customers will listen (link to GoodReads) by Donald Miller
• Understanding Comics: The invisible art (Link to GoodReads) by Scott McCloud

Never really thought a subject like breathing could be so fascinating. We do it all the time and mostly without thinking, but in reality there is so much to it. Both when we do it correctly as well as when do it incorrectly. If you are remotely interested in the subject, I highly recommend the following book. I for one am intend on applying many of the learnings and have in fact seen a drop in my blood pressure just by focussing on nasal breathing (don’t know whether the drop will last, but I have never seen these levels since I starting measuring it some 6 months ago).

The book I have read is Breath: the new science of a lost art by James Nestor.

And before you decide whether it is worth reading, please find below my 13 main take-aways. Surely some of it is interesting for you.

1. Billions of years ago, the atmosphere on earth was filled with carbon dioxide. Early life forms used carbon dioxide as an energy source and oxygen was the waste product. Little by little the level of oxygen increased.
2. Oxygen produces 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide.
3. Newer life forms used Oxygen as their energy source and could become more complex beings, because of the increased energy obtained from it.
4. Humans also use Oxygen as their main energy source and it is inhaled and then absorbed in the cells of our body through our longs and blood stream.
5. Humans have become worse breathers throughout their history due to the changes in diet “thanks to” the advances in cooking.
   • Cooked food releases more easily energy, which has allowed us to have a larger brains, which left less space for sinuses, mouths and airways
   • And more importantly, cooked food is softer. Less chewing led to changes in our facial structure, which in turn also reduced space for airways.
6. In order to improve our breathing, firstly we need to breath “exclusively” through the nose:
   • It increases nitric oxide sixfold. Nitric oxide plays an essential role in blood circulation and delivering oxygen to the cells.
   • When breathing through the nose, the body can regulate which nostril is used more for breathing, which in turn influences the 2 parts of the autonomous nervous system: right for sympathetic nervous system and left for parasympathetic nervous system.
   • If necessary, apply sleep tape at night.
7. Lung capacity is one of the best indicators of expected life span. A typical adult only engages as little as 10 percent of the range of the diaphragm when breathing. Focus on fully exhaling to extend this range, at least during some time of the day.
8. The best way to prevent many chronic health problems, improve athletic performance, and extend longevity is to focus on how we breathe, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body. To do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly.
9. Cells will absorb oxygen from the blood stream and release carbon dioxide. In fact, the amount of oxygen absorbed by a cell is determined by the amount of carbon dioxide in the cell. As a result, even when breathing more quickly then necessary, we don’t absorb more oxygen. However, the frequency of breathing does influence the level of carbon dioxide in our cells and blood stream (and exhaled breath), which is critical for other aspects such as pH level of the blood, blood vessel dialation.
   • There is a benefit to breathing slower and less and keeping carbon dioxide levels up (in the cells), so that oxygen absorption is optimum. The optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters and the optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute.
10. One of the culprits of our poorer breathing was food and eating, well, the first step to improving airway obstruction isn’t orthodontics but instead involves maintaining correct “oral posture”. It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck.
11. Furthermore, we need to chew more. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe. Tools like the Homeoblock can help with this, if necessary.
12. The author argues that there are illnesses and afflictions that are not easily solved by our current healthcare system: tingling fingers, chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes, autoimune disease, erectile disfunction. He argues that what they often suffer is from communication problems along the vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic stress. Fixing the autonomic nervous system can effectively cure or lessen these symptoms.
13. Breathing allows us to intake oxygen, our source of energy. However, breathing is also a power switch to this autonomic nervous system: Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state. Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into a stressed state.
    • Techniques for getting into both states are useful for this. It is the flip-flopping that is possibly key to obtaining the benefits. One of the techniques mentioned frequently regarding entering the stressed state is Tummo (inner fire medition). Check out Wim Hof on YouTube if interested.

Many books I read are interesting, but not all are “life changing”. This recent book certainly has the potential to fall in the latter category.

Overall, I like books that fall in the “productivity” category, but not all offer a leap forward in my way of working. Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen was a transformative book for me. It had so many good ideas bound together by a common sense process. I don’t apply it all religiously, but have benefited enormously from the book.

This latest book by Sonke Ahrens called How to Take Smart Notes is a book similar to GTD: good ideas bound together by a common sense process. Rather than focusing on personal productivity, this book’s topic is more related to knowledge management. The processes described in the book facilitate processing information and helping to advance your thinking.

The system described in the book is based on the Zettelkasten system developed by a German social scientist called Niklas Luhmann in the 20th century. He systematically processed information and included it in his second brain where he developed his thinking. This second brain was the Zettelkasten, or slip box in English.

Both GTD and Zettelkasten have things in common: the brain is great for having ideas, but very poor at holding them, and they need to be externalised into a system. For any system to work, you need to intuitively trust it. In order to intuitively trust it, it needs to be common sense and easy enough to use.

So what is a Zettelkasten system? It is composed of 3 parts:

1. Ubiquitous capture tool (which GTD also has) for fleeting notes (thoughts that come in your mind throughout the day that are interesting enough to revisit later)
2. A reference system to keep track of what you have read / seen / listened to and their related notes (1 note per source)
3. The slip box system itself for all permanent thoughts and insights, together with its index.

So how do you work with such a system?

1. Make fleeting notes, whenever they come up
2. Make reading / reference notes
3. Make permanent notes based on the fleeting notes and the recent reading/reference notes to advance your thinking and insights ( develop ideas, arguments and discussions). 1 idea per note, written in full sentences, disclosing sources, making the necessary references and being brief/precise.
4. Add permanent notes to slip box. Create an index with entry points to the slip box. For every new note, make sure it can be found by either linking to it from the index or linking to it from another note that is used as an entry point to a discussion or topic itself and is linked to the index.

The eventual objective is to develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the slip box system, following what you already have in it and adding to it.

In my experience, it is trickier to apply than GTD, but also potentially more transformative, I feel. So, I am giving it a shot and will try to revisit the topic based on progress I make.

If you are interested, I am leaving you here the link to the book on GoodReads.

Lately I have read a couple of books about privacy and artificial intelligence. These subjects are quite related, as massive amounts of data are required to make artificial intelligence work and that directly leads to privacy considerations.

We all benefit one way or another in our daily lives from sharing our data, e.g. by accessing free tools (such as Facebook and Google) or by using tools that already start to benefit from AI (such as Google Assistant or Google Maps). However, there are lots of things to be worried about. Both books take a closer look at this and I just thought I’d share them here as I found both of them to a worthy read.

The Age of Surveillance capitalism by [Shoshana Zuboff] (https://twitter.com/shoshanazuboff?s=09)

A lot of the ideas in this [book] (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195941-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism) are quite interesting. Few people will argue that we are losing our privacy to tech companies. However, not everyone is equally worried about the implications of this and how these companies go about gathering the information. The book is a good eye-opener for the latter and gives food-for-thought regarding the former.

Zuboff brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. According to the book, vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight.

Should you be interested in the book - and I do recommend it if you are into this subject matter - then I suggest looking at an abridged version (the author is a bit wordy).

Summary of the book to be found [here] (https://goodbooksummary.com/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-by-shoshana-zuboff-book-summary-review/).

The Big Nine by [Amy Webb] (https://twitter.com/amywebb?s=09)

In this [book] (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41717507-the-big-nine), Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI – the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself – is broken. According to Webb, within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations (6 US companies and 3 Chinese companies) may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don’t share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.

Above all, she argues for us to think very well about what we want and what role we want AI to play, as we can still make decisions to ensure that AI ends up benefiting humanity, but in order to do so the status quo needs to be broken. Specifically, in the latter part of the book she describes the near future for optimistic, realistic and pesimistic scenarios depending on how we deal with AI. They are certainly worth a read.

Summary of the book to be found [here] (https://lifeclub.org/books/the-big-nine-amy-webb-review-summary).

After reading both books, it is difficult not to be “worried” about AI. AI offers clearly many possibilities for humanity, but it is very easy for it to get out of our collective control. Reading these books has made me more aware of the issues, but The Big Nine has also made it clear that we are still in time to manage this “properly” - although that will not be easy. All in all, I think I’d recommend The Big Nine above The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Both have interesting ideas, but The Big Nine feels like a more practical and less theoretical book and comes to the point quicker.