"In the beginning was the Word ...", thus begins the Gospel of John, and from this beginning develops the creation narrative of the Christian faith.
No matter what you believe in or not - the word at the beginning of creation, a formulated thought, an idea, a goal meets us every day and constantly.
Even in our time, when we are so short-tempered, the image is fast and thus so powerful and supposedly only the moving image moves, in this time Visual Storytelling is a hopeful magic word and yet nothing is as powerful as the word.
A picture says more than a thousand words and yet often only comes alive with the right word. Or only made suitable by the unsuitable word. Image-text scissors is another way of putting it. Snip-snip, and a story is created in your head.
One word - a thousand images.
Even in the visually driven social media channels, hardly a picture really gets by without a word or at least has to be interpreted or reinterpreted with an emoji. Emojis, the hieroglyphics on the virtual walls of today. Communication as a pyramid game in which hardly anyone wins in the end, but a lot of time is lost.
The same word paints the most diverse pictures in the mind.
I say, "Forest!" What do you see? - Coniferous forest, deciduous forest, commercial forest, primeval forest ...?
The same word, everyone sees something different. One forest, many trees. A thicket of understanding and misunderstanding.
A few words, chosen correctly, create a complex universe in our imagination with a big bang. Ernest Hemingway needed a whole six words to do it:
For sale:
Baby shoes.
Never worn.
One word says more than a thousand pictures.
Everything begins with you.
The strange Steven Pressfield, whom I have often mentioned and whose books "The War of Art" and its successors cannot be recommended often enough - and read (!) by story insiders - recently wrote a text in his blog, which I quote here in the original:
The actress reads a book or screenplay and says, "I want to do this."
We applaud her vision.
The editor discovers a manuscript and publishes it.
We salute his taste.
The director, the producer, the financier find a hot property and scoop it up.
We give 'em an award.
I'm not saying these artists don't deserve their plaudits.
All I'm saying is: It all begins with the writer.
The fun starts with you and me.
Everybody else waits downstream.
Everyone else comes late to the party.
Others may interpret. They may mount, they may discover, they may finance, underwrite, refine, support, reconfigure. They may "bring to life".
But the material they work with had its genesis with you and me.
At the moment of conception there are only two entities in the room - you and your Muse.
William Goldman* famously said in Adventures in the Screen Trade "Nobody knows anything."
Lemme propose an amendment.
Before the writer, nobody has anything.
I wrote in "The Artist's Journey" that the artist enters the void with nothing and comes back with something.
A machine can't do that.
A supercomputer packed with the most powerful AI can't do that.
In all of creation, only two creatures can do that.
Gods.
And you and I.
Keep this in mind, brothers and sisters, when some agent or manager or producer disrespects writers or the writing process.
Before the writer, nobody's got nothing.
Word!
When Steven Pressfield talks here about Writer, he is also talking about each of us. We are the writers of the future. Not just our own. Who else?
What story are you writing?
When you found a company and have the coolest start-up idea ever: In the beginning is the word, only then the business plan.
Before that, no one has anything, no investor, no manufacturer, no programmer, no user, no customer.
When you apply for a job, are politically active, want to win your team over for something, found a theatre group or set up an animal welfare association or a Christmas bazaar. When you present a content strategy to your clients, a restructuring concept for your carpentry shop to your bank, an innovation and change management programme to your colleagues or the new working time regulations to your employees: long before, at the very beginning, someone somewhere sits in front of a blank sheet of paper or in front of a blinking cursor on a luminous screen and writes something down. The first word. And that someone is you.
Story - mightier than the sword.
Martin Luther King Jr. shouted: "I have a dream ...". A dream - what a great word. Behind it is an even greater value, like MLK's, the free peaceful coexistence of all people without any distinction - free at last.
That is story. It's worth fighting for, because talking alone won't get us anywhere.
A dream without a to-do list remains a dream.
But even the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky knew: "You can't fight if your trousers are fuller than your heart." Because it is not only at the end that the better story wins, but already at the beginning.
The beginning is the word. That's as irrefutably true as Steven Pressfield's phrase: "Nobody wants to read your shit." Except in the best of cases.
In the best case, you will achieve something wonderful - with what you say and how you say it. This is called inspiration. You let the spark fly.
We humans can only do that with stories. We can inspire others with them - inspire them. Breathe spirit into them, wake them up, kiss them awake, move them.
It only works if you don't tell your story, but the story of your audience. Everybody wants to read their shit.
Story - the peilton for the meaning of the thing.
Isn't that somehow what some call divine? As a divine spark?
Leave the incense sticks, stranger. We don't have to sing "Kum ba yah, my Lord", drink vanilla tea and hug each other now.
You don't have to believe in that either.
That's just the way it is. Because that is quite simply what makes us human.
Stories make us human.
In the beginning is the word.
In the beginning is a value.
Amen!
Stories give us orientation. In life anyway, but also in the jungle of companies, brands, products.
Stories are the peilton for meaning. Meaning attracts us humans, we seek meaning.
The meaning of life, the meaning in things, in the small as well as in the big.
We want to be part of something meaningful, something that is bigger than us and thus makes us bigger.
We buy what we want to be.
Purpose: one word, one value - our longing.
Purpose, i.e. the common intention, the meaning behind things, the significance of what is done - this is the success factor for brands, companies and organisations that is decisive for the future, because this is how relevant relationships are created. And for each person personally, right down to bare survival, as Viktor Frankl told us: "He who has a why to live, endures almost any how."
Professor Frankl became world-famous and world-important through his founding of logotherapy. Logos - the ancient Greek expression for word and speech and above all for their content, the meaning.
In the beginning was the word. That's pretty logos, isn't it?
Just in time, here are a few figures from a recent representative international survey**, which probably not only those born in the constellation of the Excel find cool:
66% of respondents vote for, switch to or boycott a brand(s) because of its stance on social issues (up from 51% in 2017).
53% agree that brands can do more to address social ills than governments; almost half say brands also have better ideas to do so.
64% say CEOs should initiate positive change, not wait for governments to mandate it.
54% believe it is easier to get brands rather than governments to tackle social improvements.
56% think brands spend too much time forcing them to pay attention than gaining their attention.
Shared values, shared longings, shared stories.
Storysharing is the new storytelling.
In this way, the echo of the advertising noise and the doubling-up of always the same of the social media streams are transformed into resonance in the best case. That would be exactly the point.
Stories respectfully engage us in conversation with our audience when the story is relevant to both. That's how it's done today, beyond advertising.
Our confusing times need orientation. For this, evolution has given us stories as a powerful tool. The world needs storytellers and even more: story sharers.
This is also why my great-grandmother, the ancient Story Dudette, embroidered Johannes Gutenberg's well-chosen words on his printer's apron: "No Story. No Glory."
* William Goldman, Oscar®-winning screenwriter of such classic films as "All the President's Men", "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "Marathon Man" and "Misery", and author of the book "Adventures in the Screen Trade".
Edelman Earned Brand Study