I had an employee once who escaped from communist Czechoslovakia. He was a mathematician and computer programmer and had helped the Soviets create a similar 16-bit computer to the Digital Equipment PDP-11. One day he went home, told his wife to take 30 minutes and pack her things. To avoid the police, they locked their apartment, said goodbye to no one, not even their parents, and left their lives behind. They crossed the border into Austria under the carriage of a railway car. If they’d been found, the penalty would have either been death or years in the gulags. From there they made their way to Italy, then the UK and finally to asylum in the US.
The interesting thing is that he found a job doing image processing for a company that sold this technology to P.O. Box 1, Washington DC where it was used to analyze aerial photography of military installations in the Soviet Union and Eastern block countries. After hiring him, he helped me by being the lead programmer on a project that subsequently sold over $20M in product. I haven’t kept in touch with him, but he had a successful career. And while I moved from California where we originally met, ironically and years later, our children knew each other and were friends in high school.
We are our stories. It is who we are and how we think. Our brains are wired for stories and narratives. We identify with familiar stories. They evoke emotions and expectations and hope. I could have said instead, I once hired a refugee who helped me on a project, but this would not have triggered the same emotions or visions or identification.
You may be, but it’s unlikely that you’re a refugee from an eastern block country. So how is it you identify with my friend? You did… didn’t you?
It’s because the narrative is familiar. There are characters in a narrative and they play roles. In this narrative the roles are hero, victim, villain, and helper. The hero (my friend) is inherently good, while the villains (the soviets, the police) are inherently bad. In this case the hero is the victim and he rescues himself with helpers along the way (me for one, though I had very little to do with his success). This narrative could be called either the “Self Rescue” narrative or perhaps the “Rags to Riches or Success” narrative. In either case you are already familiar with these particular narratives. You would know the characters and the outcomes even to the extent that they are independent of country or culture. They are ancient and in our DNA.
So tell more stories. If you want to sell something, convince someone of your position, or market your products or services, you first need to tell a story. Perhaps a rescue or a hero triumphs story.
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Driving Sales Through Customer Focused Marketing
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110