The Right Story: The secret to spreading your ideas

Dyson’s system did away with the need to replace the dust bag that was essential for the conventional vacuum to function. Selling the replaceable dust bags generated considerable revenue for these market leaders. No wonder they were reluctant to change their business model.

you can’t change a mind without winning a heart.

We spoke of targeting prospects and winning the war on attention. Our motivations changed along with our language, and naturally our strategies and tactics changed too. We collected followers. Created clickbait. Counted pageviews. Tracked open rates. The medium not only changed the message, it changed the messenger too. And in the end, the tactics

we know instinctively that our survival depends on more than any one individual’s ability to stay alive. We understand the need to connect and collaborate with each other. We want to bond and belong, so we can work together for the greater good of the tribe.

Effective change engages someone in the act of becoming the kind of person they want to be.

there is no such thing as a bad idea or a good idea. There is only the wrong story or the right story. The right story is one that is trusted. It is believed because it is told by the right person, for the right reasons, in the right way, at the right time, to the right people. The success or failure of our ideas depends on us telling the right sto

Facebook likes had value. Marketing goals changed. Now, instead of investing time to understand customers’ unmet needs and unspoken desires as successful companies had been doing for generations, we began to monitor their online behaviour, looking for patterns and vulnerabilities, gathering data to leverage later—sometimes to serve or oftentimes to

What’s stopping us from telling the right story isn’t the soundness of our argument, the brilliance of our logic or the quality of the thing we’re selling. It’s that we haven’t understood how best to communicate in a way that helps others to imagine a future they can’t yet see.

Now, instead of investing time to understand customers’ unmet needs and unspoken desires as successful companies had been doing for generations, we began to monitor their online behaviour, looking for patterns and vulnerabilities, gathering data to leverage later—sometimes to serve or oftentimes to exploit the user. Virality became top of mind.

to focus on what’s unchanging about people instead.