Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Slightly elevated. Exactly. I think the third point you make is that it has to be your story. You can't be telling a story on behalf of someone else. Maybe chat about that briefly? So if you're telling a story about someone else, essentially, you might as well be telling fiction. Because that person's not in the room, and to the audience, they don't really exist. If they can't see them, that person is just another human being who supposedly lives somewhere in the world or once lived in the world. And because of that, you are almost unable to express any vulnerability in your story. You can't reveal anything about yourself. And one of the key parts of storytelling is to be vulnerable with your audience. Meaning I'm going to say stuff in a meaningful way. I might say stuff that most people are unwilling to share in a public way, but I'm at least going to offer up a little bit of my heart and mind. If I offer up the heart and mind of someone else that doesn't really require any vulnerability. The only vulnerability is I have to stand in front of people and talk, which I know is challenging for some people, but that doesn't mean anything to the audience. We don't care if you're having a hard time presenting, if it's making you nervous. That doesn't mean much to an audience. What we really want is someone to open up their hearts and minds. So stories have to be about you in some way. There's tricks where you can tell stories about other people by taking that story and centering on yourself. One of the examples, I work with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and in the past, what they would do is they would just tell the story of the Holocaust survivor who has often at this point passed away, and it really does feel like fiction. A long time ago in a place that wasn't this a terrible thing happened. And there's a certain level of empathy and sympathy that you might feel. But what I teach them to do is to tell stories about themselves. And then at some point in the story about themselves, they're going to talk about how the experience of their parent or grandparent during the Holocaust has informed or changed their own life too. So they get to dip into some history, but that history is relevant to the storyteller. So it's no longer history. It's now something changed in me because something terrible happened to my parent or grandparent.…

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