Everyone wants to get better at storytelling now. And a story is just how you organize and sequence information. “This is the story of modern farming” or “this is the story of the first thing ever sold on the Internet” or “this is the story of a boy who discovered an alien and how they became best friends” are all just pieces of information sequenced in a particular way. The thing that determines whether a story is good or bad is entirely based on how you end up sequencing that information. What information do you reveal or not reveal? What do you explain or not explain? What do you show without any context? Why? There’s an infinite number of ways you can approach the telling of any story. And how you navigate this space of endless possibilities is the art of storytelling. I don’t know why, but when most companies start telling their own story they put an inherent limitation on how interesting their story can be. It’s like an unspoken limit on the ways they are willing or unwilling to tell their story. These companies, well the founders, end up narrowing their story into only an expression of what they do, not who they are, or what they might become, or even what’s at stake if they fail. I think most of why this happens can be rooted in insecurity, a lack of permission, or an incorrect understanding of what storytelling really is. Telling a story, especially you’re own, can be very scary. It’s one thing to work on a problem that you think needs to be solved, but it’s an entirely different thing to declare to the world that you are working on that problem, and even more different to suggest that there’s some deeper meaning behind it all. What if you are wrong? What if there is no meaning at all and the whole thing is actually pointless? What if you’re just delusional about the whole vision? What if people end up thinking you have a huge ego? What if you tell this big story and then the entire project fails? All of these questions point at the reality of what a founder deals with on a daily basis. As a founder, you could wake up in the morning, riding the highs of new momentum and then by lunch you have your head down on the table in a depressive abyss, and then you’re back on top of the world by the evening. What most founders and companies do not realize is that this chaos, the instability, the ups and downs are what make any story good or even worth telling. So most founders think they they should hide all of this. They believe they should show themselves as being in control. Show themselves doing the “right thing”. Show themselves as always knowing what they are talking about. So instead of leaning into the realities of their own story, they narrow it into something safer, or they start imitating whatever the latest gimmick is. Unfortunately, it will never work. Like always, to stand out, and to stand on your own, you have to lean into all of who you are and tell the story that only you can tell.