I Ruined My Stories by Telling Them Backward!

I had no idea that the day I switched from the college of fine arts to the college of engineering would set back my storytelling almost four decades. I was too stubborn to listen to the professor who was handing me back my paper, telling me I had the potential to be a good writer. All I could hear was, “be a starving artist.” I remember thinking, “Do you know how much money engineers make?” I put it out of my mind, and then poured myself into getting not one but two engineering degrees, one in computer science, and one in electrical engineering. I could not only build a computer, I could program one as well. The semester before I graduated I took a class in technical writing for engineers. There I learned to write my conclusions clearly and concisely so they could be understood, and sort of like high school, back up my findings with solid argument. They taught me this is the essence of a solid engineering report. They didn’t teach me it is the worst way to tell a story.

I always worked for technical companies, starting out at Motorola, moving to GTX, back to Motorola, then on to THQ, and finally Disney before departing corporate America for good to found GameTruck. And throughout that time, I practiced what I had learned. Tell people what you knew, and provide arguments to back it up. Yet, despite my training, and belief, all that seemed to lead to was more arguing.

I reasoned, perhaps the problem was with my arguments. Maybe I didn’t have enough facts, to back up my conclusions. So I worked on that, devising better, more comprehensive ways to support my conclusions. Mind you, this was not restricted to purely technical things. I did this everywhere. And yet, the harder I tried to push my obviously correct conclusions, the more pushback I got.

Today I cringe at the memory of how I left some people feeling in the wake of my need to “convince” them I was right. How could I not be right? I had proved it! Yet, even if I had clearly handed people the correct answer to a problem, they resisted my assertions, or worse, they walked away. Far from being dazzled by my brilliance, reflecting on it now, I can tell they were bored with my long soliloquies.

What the hell had happened? How had I gone from a storyteller with promise to a bore? What had happened to me? Being an engineer by both training, and disposition, rather than accept this was the case, I wanted to know why it was the case. So I started to study story. I read or listened to a wide variety of texts, from the legendary Story by Robert McKee¹ to reading Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand, to Stephen King’s legendary On Writing, but it was one day when I was driving that I found the answer I was looking for, and it was hiding in plain sight the whole time.

I don’t even remember where I was going, but, as is so often the case, I was zoning out while listening to an audio book. This time it happened to be Matthew Dicks reading his book Storyworthy² on Audible. I had drifted off when suddenly the words, “And that’s how amateurs ruin jokes…”

“Wait what!?” I sat up.

I punched the rewind and listened for the whole section again. I paraphrase, but Dicks³ explained that most amateurs ruin jokes by leading with the punchline. They hear the joke, and when they go tell it to their friends, they start with the punchline, then try to make it funny by telling the facts that lead up to it. In short, amateurs ruin a good story by telling it backward.

I felt a jolt of recognition. This did not only apply to jokes.

I realized, I was ruining my “stories” by telling them backward. I never shared what led up to me arriving at my conclusions, like an amateur ruining a joke, I simply lobbed my finished thought at the other person like a movie spoiler, then I thoroughly ruined it by propping it up with “arguments.” If I wanted to avoid boring people, I needed to share with them how I came to my conclusions, not the conclusions themselves.

It would be easy to blame my technical writing class,⁴ but according to Daniel Kahneman,⁵ we often collapse our lived experience into two points, which he called Peak-End⁶ condition. Essentially, we do not remember experiences the way we experienced them, we collapse experience into two data points. First, how did it end, and second, what was the most intense feelings we experienced during the event. This means we are naturally biased to remember the conclusion before anything else. And the more intense the peak, the more readily available the end. After all, no one gave any of us a class in how to ruin a joke, right? We do it naturally. We are primed to share our end memory.

But that would mean, to tell better stories, I needed to reconstruct how I actually arrived at my conclusions. It wasn’t enough to know what I believed, I needed to recall (or reconstruct), how I came to learn what I now believed to be true. However, it was not as simple as just recalling the order things happened. The brain is not a filing cabinet, and memories are stored associatively, not linearly. My best chance to excavate the pieces I needed for my story, was to play memory detective, which led to this process.

From Statement to Story

This is the five-step process I created to help me move from stating a conclusion to sharing a story.

1. Start with my statement. What do I want the listener to know?
2. Recall when I first learned it. When did this idea become true for me.⁷ This is the story’s end.
3. Next, remember when I did not believe it.⁸ This is the beginning.
4. Next, recall two or three times when my old understanding caused me to stumble.⁹ This is the middle.
5. Finally, sort the pieces in their linear order from: Old belief → struggle → struggle → epiphany → conclusion.

There you are five steps. Human memory is highly associative, so I have never been able to simply recall a learning journey from start to finish in one swoop. But if I take advantage of that associative ability, I can easily reconstruct a story by starting with a firm anchor, what I believe now, then use that to find my moment of maximal contrast, when I did not believe what I know to be true now. Those two points form a kind of net that lets me dig up some examples of what my misbelief cost me.

The Best Part

The best part of this process is that because I lived this, I don’t really need any notes to retell any of these stories. I lived them.¹⁰ Once I have recovered my memories and sorted them in order, it’s surprisingly easy to share them both comfortably and naturally without notes, or at a minimum just a few bullet points.¹¹

But Why Does This Work?

Okay, so here’s the part, I just can’t leave alone… It’s often not enough for me to know that something works, I want to know why it works. I mean in principle, why does it matter what order I present information?

I found the answer in two books, How Minds Change, by David McRaney, and Story Genius by Lisa Cron.

Arguing is a Feature Not a Bug

According to McRaney’s research, when we present people a conclusion with arguments we are naturally skeptical. In fact, in one study they took a bunch of people, asked them to explain their behavior, then later presented those same reasons back to the test subjects but presented them as if they came from someone else. The participants shredded their own reasoning as inadequate and incomplete. It turns out, what we often call reasoning is actually rationalization. Our brain spends just enough energy to justify our actions, to ourselves, and satisfied with its answer moves on. Intuitively, we know this. Consequently, when we are presented with other peoples reasoning, we instinctively start to analyze the thoughts and reasons. A cognitive scientist named Hugo Mercier posits that humanity did not develop reasoning to find truth alone - but rather to reach consensus in groups. Personally, I find this fascinating.

What I think is amazing is not that people argued with my conclusions and arguments, it was that I kept doing it. You would think I would have learned my lesson, much, much earlier, but that’s part of the feature. Once we’ve justified our conclusions, we’re confident enough to share it - effectively outsourcing our best thinking to the tribe. They actually tested this and found that humans reason better in small groups. Using what are called Cognitive Reflection Tests, they found that when people take them alone, they miss between ⅓ and ⅔ of the questions (some miss them all!) But when people take the same tests in groups of 3, they not only take them faster, most get 100% of the questions right.

How is Story Different?

If sharing our conclusions and lazy reasoning causes arguments, how is story different? While conclusions initiate evaluation in the listener, according to Lisa Cron, story activates a whole different process in the mind. Humans are not just social, we are hyper social.¹² We watch each other constantly, being the only mammal with sclera, or whites of the eyes. We not only watch each other, we watch what each other is watching. But there is one place we can’t look: inside someone else’s head. Story is how we see someone else’s thinking. When we start a story, we begin with vulnerability, and that vulnerability activates openness in the listener. A good story begets curiosity.

When you put them side by side, a well-constructed engineering report invites analysis and argument. You present a discovery and defend it. In fact, that’s what they call it in college, defending your thesis.

However, when we tell a story, we are inviting the listener (or reader) to discover something with us. They get to learn vicariously through us, and decide for themselves.

If you want to get right down to it, conclusions challenge agency, story exercises it.

Is Storytelling a Leadership Skill?

One of the surprising things about this process is that I learned telling my team a story had an enormous positive impact on our culture. By framing what I wanted them to know in a way that invited them to learn it with me, led to them having a better understanding of where we were trying to go and what we were trying to achieve. Compliance was replaced with creativity. Collaboration blossomed as people started to internalize the reasoning. They could see more than the answer, they could see how we got to the answer.

And in case you did not notice, I tried to use this exact model myself, throughout this article. If you go back, I bet you can find the pieces. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Try it for yourself. It’s simple. Take something you want someone to know, remember when you learned it, find a time you didn’t believe that, and fill in the middle with the experiences that earned your insight. When I share like this, I avoid boring people.

What do you think? Willing to give it a try? I’d love to hear your story.