Mic Check Volume 24: Family lore

What a weird day to talk about storytelling, huh?

Nov 25, 2022

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One of the weird things about having a Friday newsletter is that at least once per year, your email is going to be woefully irrelevant as most of the country eats leftovers and cruises the web for deals.

Challenge accepted—if for no other reason than to make good on my promise to use every opportunity to become a better storyteller.

Here’s the opportunity I see: I don’t know about you, but I absolutely treasure the bits of family lore that usually bubble up during holiday gatherings. Grandparents’ childhood memories, how people met, hometown histories. It all comes together in an encyclopedia of oral histories that (hopefully) will outlive me.

The fact is, though, that most of these stories have been woven into my consciousness through osmosis. Remembering them (and even hearing them in the first place) has mostly happened by accident. Why not do it on purpose?

Many of us are spending this weekend in close quarters with family and friends who we don’t often see. What an opportunity, then, to practice pulling story out of others—ask questions you’ve never asked before, fill the story in with detail, and commit them to memory.

Hey, at the very least, it’s better than what you’re probably doing right now on your small or medium screen. And if you’re solo today, listening to a StoryCorps episode is a fantastic stand in.

Happy weekend,

Raman at Rhetoric

📚 What’s made me a better storyteller this week

I’m always fascinated when founders decide to step down from leadership (keyword: decide), particularly by the careful line their storytelling must walk so that employees, investors, customers, and potential new CEOs aren’t disillusioned: Pipe’s founding team stepping down as hunt for ‘veteran’ CEO begins.

Extremely cool, has anyone used? “D2 is a domain-specific language (DSL) that stands for Declarative Diagramming. Declarative, as in, you describe what you want diagrammed, it generates the image.” And it’s now open source!

Compiling, analyzing, and sharing learnings from random data sets (like email processing times) is a form of entertainment that this group specifically will probably love. If nothing else, check it out for the final recipe for daily Inbox 0. How I Eventually Tamed My Inbox: Visualized.

✨ What I’m trying next week

One of the concepts I often forget to pull from story into my communication strategy is the idea of choosing one (yes, just one) climax to build the rest of my presentation around. If everything is important, nothing is important.

Next week, before I step into a meeting or presentation, I’m asking myself: if they forget everything else, what is the one thing I need my audience to remember?