Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

Happily Ever After Is Just the Beginning
Great stories happen to those who can tell them.
—IRA GLASS
W
hen my son was about two and a half years old, he didn’t appear to care
much about trucks, but every night before bed he demanded that we read
Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,
a rhyming children’s book that takes
no fewer than thirty minutes to read.
For months, hundreds of nights in a row, my sweet son would sit on my lap
in his little pajamas as I tried to find new ways to abbreviate the story without
his noticing.
But kids always notice.
Finally, one night I simply couldn’t take it anymore. When he crawled into
my lap holding 
Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,
I pleaded with him.
“Please, 
please
can we read a different book?”
“I want 
Construction Site
,” he replied.
Evil little dictator
, I thought. “What about the ducklings book or 
Goodnight
Moon
?”
“
Construction Site
.”
There was clearly no negotiating.
Just before I was about to throw my own version of a two-and-a-half-year-
old tantrum, I had an idea.

---

“What if I told you a story?”
I’d never tried before, but I was a professional, after all.
“
Construction Site
.”
“What if I told you a story about when Mama was a little girl . . .”
The bossy king hesitated. I seized the opportunity.
“Every night when Mama was a little girl and it was the summertime, she
would lay in her bed until the sun went to sleep and the sky was dark. Then she
would sneak out of her bed, tiptoe to the front door, and sneak outside. Mama
lived way out in the country where there were trees everywhere and short grass
and tall grass, and the sky was so big and dark blue. And when she looked at the
sky, she could see millions and billions of tiny twinkling stars. But Mama’s
favorite thing about the summer nights was walking out into the warm, wet air
and onto the cool, wet grass, and all around her, in the darkness, danced
hundreds of tiny blinking green lights . . . Fireflies!”
I told my son how I played with the fireflies. How I caught them and how
they crawled on my hands and climbed through my hair. And then I would tell
the fireflies goodnight and see you tomorrow and tiptoe back to my room and
fall asleep.
The story didn’t have a complicated plot or 
any
plot for that matter. It wasn’t
long, and it didn’t require anything of my imagination. I simply told him one of
my favorite memories of being a child.
The story worked. My son sat still, silently. He barely breathed. Looking
back, he strongly resembled the way his father looked in that Slovenian shop a
few years later. Totally captivated for the first time in his two and a half years.
When the story was done, he asked me to tell it again. And again.
“Tell me about the fireflies, Mama.”
We haven’t talked about construction sites since.
Now the only thing that satisfies this child is a story. My stories. His father’s
stories. His grandparents’ stories. If I didn’t know better, I would blame myself
for a creating a monster—a monster with an insatiable appetite. But go ahead,
try to feed him Goldfish or applesauce. He’d only throw it back at you. He wants
stories.
Of course, I know it’s not my fault, and to be clear, he’s not a monster.
Which, I suppose, is the point. My son wants to hear stories because he’s human.
And though he’s no longer two years old (and likes to frequently point out that
he’s almost taller than me), he still wants stories. He asks for stories about when
my husband got hurt as a kid. He asks for stories about my favorite thing to do

---

while I was growing up.
One time, when he had his first splinter but refused to let me pull it out, he
was desperate to make sense of what was going to happen next. So he asked me
with a shaky voice on our drive to the school drop-off, “Mama, do you have a
story about when you had a splinter?” Unfortunately, I didn’t have a story, or at
least not one I could remember. Disappointed, he walked into the classroom,
splinter still in his hand. I called Michael.
“Our boy asked for a story about a splinter, and I didn’t have one! Ultimate
parenting fail.”
“Oh!” Michael responded, “I have one of those.” Michael grew up sailing. “I
used to always get splinters in my feet when I would run up and down the docks
in bare feet! I’ll tell him that story when I get home.”
Besides the fact that this exchange confirmed that we truly are meant to be
together, even though Michael’s not much of a shopper, it was also an important
reminder that our lives are all story. A real-life narrative that we’re constructing
day by day, piece by piece in an effort to make sense of the world, find our place
in it, and perhaps find a little happiness along the way.
My son asks for stories as a way to make sense of things that have happened
or might happen to him. It isn’t just something we do or need. Stories are what
we are.
Remember that when it comes to storytelling in business, you’re not
reinventing the wheel; you’re dipping into the current of story that runs through
our heads and our lives all the time. And that’s a current worth dipping into—in
business and beyond.
In fact, a 2016 study by some researchers at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill and SUNY Buffalo found that people who are good at storytelling
are also more attractive. Results from this study specifically concluded that
women find men who are good storytellers to be more attractive and better long-
term partners. The researchers surmised this was because “storytelling ability
reflects a man’s ability to gain resources. Good storytellers may be more likely
to influence others or to gain positions of authority in society.”
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Whether at home with your family, trying to find a mate, or getting ahead in
your career, story is the way to do it.
After all, storytellers get hired. They win the contract.
Storytellers make the sale. Get the boy. Get the girl.
Storytellers survive the onslaught. They hold court. Capture attention. Win
accolades. Move to tears.

---

Storytellers close the gap.
Become one and you will close the distance between what you have and
what you want. You shrink the space between where you are and where you
want to be in business and in life.
Once Upon a Time . . .
As our time together comes to a close and you prepare to go off and build your
bridges, allow me to leave you with the one phrase many stories have started
with since the beginning of time. These are some of the best stories, you might
argue. But the stories that begin with “Once upon a time” are often fairy tales.
They aren’t true, and they certainly aren’t business.
But once upon a time, something did happen. It happened to you. Or maybe
your partner. It happened to your employees. Your vendors. And it happened to
your customers.
Once upon a time, a failed marketing effort left you cashless, and then . . .
Once upon a time, you ran completely out of money, and then . . .
Once upon a time, a critical shipment was stuck in customs, and then . . .
Once upon a time, you dreamed a dream about being in business, and
then . . .
“Once upon a time” isn’t just for fairy tales. Because once upon a time really
is a beginning.
That’s the most important thing that all stories share, both the real ones and
the made-up ones. Every story needs to start somewhere. It needs a beginning.
The tricky thing with beginnings though, is they sometimes look like endings.
The thing fails . . . the end. The idea falls flat . . . the end. There is no greater
freedom then recognizing a beginning disguised as an end.
I realize that storytelling can be daunting. Sometimes we don’t have a single
idea. At other times we have so many that the paradox of choice keeps us frozen
in place. It’s easy to be intimidated by the blank page or the full auditorium.
There are days when even the best storytellers freeze. But the way forward is
always the same. The way forward is simply to begin.
“Once upon a time” may seem like an odd place to end our journey. But I
think it’s fitting. After all, the end of this story, this book, is really the beginning
for you.
Once upon a time, I read a book about storytelling in business, and then . . .

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Appendix
The Four-Story Cheat Sheet