It’s a weird phenomenon, really >> this fact that for so many of us, drawing the throughline between our stories and our brands can feel. . . grueling impossible frustrating tiring hopeless pointless [fill in the blank]. I’m sure there’s some super smart psychological explanation for all of this H.A.R.D., too, but brass tacks, real […]
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Imagine with me for a hot second that the moment you took your very first breath and cried your first hello to the world, the doctor looked at your mom and said, “Congratulations! Here’s the minute-by-minute guide on how to raise this child. It’s worked with the last 300 children I’ve delivered, so it’s guaranteed […]
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I don’t know if haunted is the right word, but over the last year or so, I’ve been visited by a memory over and over again, and I can’t seem to let it go. It’s as if it’s showing up, trying to teach me something, but I’m just not connecting the dots. When I was […]
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When I was 11 years old, I moved to a new school in northwest Ohio that was colloquially referred to as The Academy. Their motto was “Excellence is our tradition,” and it wasn’t just a feel good mantra, either. They meant it. For most kids at The Academy, any grade below an A- induced the […]
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A few weeks ago, I permanently closed my business Instagram account. It was a decision I had been mulling over for months, but like a kid who can never escape the social pressures of junior high, I kept tuning in, kept playing the social capital game, kept trying to fit in to the Millennial-powered platform, […]
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In 1910, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov changed the way films would forever be edited. He had a hunch that if you just zeroed in on an actor’s face, a whole range of emotions could be communicated. And his theory blew the lid on the whole bag of audience manipulation tricks. Using the EXACT SAME editing […]
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We are all stepping into story with a very particular paradigm. We each have a worldview that shapes how we see and how we tell stories, and that worldview shapes the TRUTH we emerge with.
And when you don’t know what your paradigm is, when you’ve not done the work of discovering the pieces of your own worldview, then story loses its power – over you + over everyone else in your orbit.
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One of the most powerful aspects of story lies in its ability to turn a ME into a WE. As business owners and brand leaders, this is perhaps one of the greatest powers we seek to wield. We want to tell story in order to convince others to join our side. We want them to […]
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In middle school, I was the kid on the hot, sweaty dance floor who never knew a single lyric to a single song. In the moment, it all felt a little bit devastating, but in retrospect, my ignorance was all by design. Growing up, listening to the radio didn’t quite qualify as “evil,” but my […]
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