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Poetry is the story of your life set to verse.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
"I believe that there is only one story in the world...Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil...A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?"
I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.
Over the course of the millennia, all these ancestors in your tree, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time-to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?
No story is devoid of meaning ... If you know how to look for it.
Often one of the stumbling blocks to living a simpler life is our inability or unwillingness to change how we play some of the games that got us into these complicated lives in the first place.
Telling a story without an obstacle for your hero to overcome is like watching paint dry. It's boring.
Your Story = Your Brand!
"In few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story."
Milarepa had searched everywhere for enlightenment, but could find no answer - until one day, he saw an old man walking slowly down a mountain path, carrying a heavy sack. Immediately, Milarepa sensed that this old man knew the secret he had been desperately seeking for many years.
'Old man, please tell me what you know. What is enlightenment?'
The old man smiled at hime for a moment, and swung the heavy burden off his shoulders, and stood straight.
'Yes, I see!' cried Milarepa. 'My everlasting gratitude. But please, one question more. What is after enlightenment?'
Smiling again, the old man picked up the sack once again, lunged it over his shoulders, steadied his burden, and continued on his way.
What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it.
The quick and easy way to stop people from repeating themselves in any situation, especially in the workplace is to simply say You’ve told me that story before, and it’s an excellent story, and repeat the lesson or point you took from that story the first time you heard it.
"Stories are medicine.
They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -
we need only listen"
