A long time ago, I came across an old proverb which has since turned into a sort of personal mantra: Those who tell the stories rule the world. It’s a powerful idea, and a truthful one. Shane Snow did an amazing TEDx talk on this in 2014 where he talks about the reasons why storytelling is so important. We use stories to entertain, of course – books, movies, plays, many video games, and so on are story driven – but we also use them to teach concepts, to sell ideas, and to tap into emotions. Stories help make things memorable.
In his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Jerome Bruner noted that stories are about twenty-two times more memorable than facts alone. But why? Because stories, especially (supposedly) true stories, make us care. They spark emotion. They help us to build connections not just to the people in the stories, but also to each other, which in turn forges relationships that change how we see ourselves and each other and the world around us.
If you enjoyed history, or even if you didn’t, chances are that you remember some events that happened before your time because of their stories. People with religious or spiritual bents learn their philosophies not from a set of cut-and-dried rules, but the stories and parables that teach that particular way of life. “Ah,” you might say, “but what about the Ten Commandments? Those are pretty cut and dry.” Perhaps, but people generally don’t memorize the rules on their own; what gives the Commandments power is the story that goes along with it. Moses hiking up a mountain and coming back down with some rules etched literally in stone doesn’t really provide much encouragement to follow said rules, but Moses coming down with the rules and a story about how God himself personally gave him these rules and told him that the people needed to change their ways OR ELSE certainly packed a bit more of a punch. Toss in a golden cow and you’ve got yourself something that will stick in the minds of your faithful flock.
To give another example, professional sports are augmented by commentators who talk not only player statistics, but share the backstory of how those athletes came to be pros. Overcoming insurmountable odds is a very popular story in sports, giving the fan something more than just on-field plays to invest them into that player. We like stories of people beating the odds and achieving their dreams. We like stories about people who face incredible hardships and overcome them. These stories give us hope. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, these stories stand out and are important to us not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us those dragons can be beaten.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks as it pertains to Rivalcast. As stated previously in this column, the entire point of the Accidental Podcaster blog was to tell stories from my perspective and show how they relate to our evolution from a ragtag group of creators into a cohesive media entity. It’s the reason why Baron consistently asks me to share about my week on each episode of Ghost in the Podcast, even if I don’t really want to answer. Those stories, as (hopefully) entertaining as they are, are meant to illustrate specific lessons learned along the way, cement the ideas and values that provide the framework of our little company, and give our community and guests something memorable about our experience that make them want to invest their time into watching us grow and succeed. They provide a record of where we’ve been and where we intend to go, and hold us accountable not to just the others around us, but also to ourselves.
Killer took this a step farther for his latest video project by asking each of the main RCM staffers for a short video clip reflecting on their favorite moments over the past three years. For a group of introverted nerds, this is an insanely difficult thing to do. These weren’t just gratuitous trips down memory lane; those moments are very personal guide points that remind us of why we do the things that we do here. Vampy’s story of her first moments in our Teamspeak server with Varyar’s greeting of “Who the fuck are you?” makes us laugh, but it also illustrates a number of valuable points: that RCM is tight knit. That some of our people are a little rough around the edges, and we’re going to call things as we see them. That in spite of that beginning welcome, Vampy found something about this group that drew her back, got her involved, and over time eventually led her to take over as our community manager so that no one else will have quite that same welcome moving forward.
There’s a lot about us wrapped up in that tiny anecdote, and it’s not the only one. You see it in tales like how the Rivalcast website was conjured by a fan of some pre-RCM shows who just didn’t want to see the people who entertained him go off the air. You see it in Dee’s stories about the friendships formed in our chat and Teamspeak servers that grew so close, he considers them family. Or how RCM Writing finally launched because I told a friend about what I wanted to do after my current job ends, how I thought I could pull it off, and was informed if I didn’t formally pitch the idea at the following week’s staff meeting he’d do it for me. It comes out in stories about how Killer learned he was shanghaied as a permanent co-host for a new show he hadn’t heard of yet during the pitch to the staff council, or how Bio decided to use an extremist character we’d created as a conduit for humorously approaching a serious topic he’d been struggling with for an article, and how three of us then proceeded to stay up all night (and yes, we all had to work the next morning!) writing a carefully constructed flame war for his comments feed, then rapid-fire posting them before anyone else could jump in, in order to illustrate the point.*
These stories are what make RCM different.
These stories – the triumphs, the failures, the celebrations, the condolences – these are the records of what makes us who we are. They are what connect us to one another and to the greater world around us. They are what inspire us in the bleakest moments and keep us fighting for something bigger. Each story, each memory, is a line in an ever-increasing saga of passion and perseverance, set against a backdrop of seeming impossibilities and starring a cast of diverse and unique characters united by common bonds. None of them are without faults, but it’s what makes the story so interesting: the tale of the underdog who stared in the face of adversity, probably called it some derogatory name, lit himself a cigarette, and laughed into the night sky.
This is our story. And we’re doing our best to make it a damned good one.
So what will your role be?
*****
*Which is, actually, one of my absolute favorite RCM memories ever.
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