Storytelling for Efficient Learning & Teaching

We live for stories. We learn thanks to stories.

Before inventing writing and reading, the humankind transmitted knowledge orally, through stories.

During Antiquity, theater was sacred. And it was about stories.

Stories of ancestors, stories that teaches, stories that entertains. To memorize plays, actors had to create their own stories inside their mind and become a part of the story themselves.

Stories are memorable. Technically speaking, they touch on many bases in the brain, creating numerous associations between ideas, concepts, characters, objects, etc.

The more associations, the better you remember. And nothing creates more associations than stories.

This is why normies constantly consume TV series. And why they can recall most of the events after 15 seasons, despite having zero good practices nor interests in memorizing anything.

Storytelling is the most powerful communication tool we have

Storytelling is often named as one of the most effective marketing tool, and it is true.

Where I live currently, there is an ongoing campaign trying to get people back to cinema theaters. Since the pandemic, people shifted to Netflix and other subscription based platforms. Most movies go there as well. Why go to cinema then? We have cinema at home and there aren’t a lot of great movies coming out.

This campaign says “all of us have a good reason to go to cinema”.

The clip shows how it entertains kids, how it keeps you up to date with the current thing (important for normies!), how it’s great for dating, how it makes you live through emotions. The goal is to have you think about your own stories.

What’s your reason to go to cinema?

We all have stories to tell about it: childhood movies, dates, meeting friends, watching a long awaited movie.

From this short sentence, I can recall many personal stories. And you too. Effortlessly.

Powerful ain’t it? That’s why we want to harness this power into our learning (and teaching) processes.

What is a Good Story?

We break down a story in 3 stages:

• initial situation
• something happens
• the situation is resolved

This structure means you need to craft stories.

I’m not a natural storyteller. My stories hit home only if I prepare them. When about to tell a story of any kind to someone, you should mentally rehearse before.

And please don’t overlook setting the initial stage.

You certainly know this feeling: you want to tell something about your life to different friends, not at once.

Problem: they don’t have equivalent information about your initial situation and you forget to tell about where you come from. So you dive into the event and people only get part of what you wanted to convey.

You definitely know what I’m talking about if you already had to sum up 10 years of work experience to someone you just met.

Now let’s dive in with a basic example of a structured story:

• Initial situation

In the final year of his BSc, I was a petty but good spirited boy. Studying in a middle sized city, I was looking for shortcuts to better his grades without working more. « Don’t work harder, work smarter », he thought.

I had quite a lot of friends, but none of them were really interested in the same topics. I thought, probably they would be interested if I can make something useful to them out of it.

• Events

So I began reading every material he found on neurosciences. Not just about learning and memory, but about consciousness, biochemicals of the brain, social sciences, psychology, etc. I learned much more than in classes!

Happy with my findings, I started looking into strategies to apply them. Not a very inventive dude, I simply tried stuff I found in Tony Buzan or Tim Ferriss’ books. And they worked! What a pride to be able to remember a gruesome list of technical terms in the right sequence! Flashcards, mindmaps, spaced repetition, you name it. It works.

I went on to describe my work to my friends and classmates. Somehow, people found it exciting. I mean, who wouldn’t want a pal to come at you and say “hey I found a way to work less and crush the exams”?

One of the hardest exam was coming up and I spotted a chance to experiment a wide experiment. I took the whole day to re-read my notes and the course material. Though I didn’t understand all of it perfectly, I got enough to sum it up in the form of a mindmap.

Once the mindmap ready, I simply shared it with all the class. Explaining how to use it for best results. A few students warmly welcomed the initiative. Using the provided material in different manners, what happened next had to be the biggest victory in my life at that time: every student who made use of the mindmap, anyhow, passed the exam. Some had excellent grades. Even me, who was batshit at this matter, got a high grade.

• Resolution

This is how I, with good will and energy, made a small difference in a few students’ lives.

• New initial situation

Years later, as I recall this story, I think “why can’t I repeat that, somehow?”. Genius idea! We must RETVRN. I had such a sense of purpose doing these experiments. I had to find this feeling again, despite being engaged in a relatively successful career with a high level of autonomy and a decently working WiFi business.

• New events

I looked for the most elite group of people on the internet: the BowTied Jungle, and embodied my favorite creature, the cute and deadly jumping spider. If salticidaes were human-sized, they could instantly jump the length of a football field and stab you with their teeth, injecting organ-melting venom into your body, turning it into a delicious puree for the cute-looking spider to suck from your corpse.

And they chase laser pointers like kitties!

• No resolution yet, that story is being written on this very website

Notice the vivid imagery about jumping spiders. A story per se. Stories are everywhere, my friend.

Spiders bite, they don’t sting. If you didn’t know.

Good practices to make your own stories

You should craft stories whenever you want to remember something, make a point, teach something or convince someone. To convey info, in short. Even to yourself.

Stories are the most powerful vehicle of communication we have, but they aren’t easy to craft correctly. Here are tips to help you design a meaningful story.

a. Know where you’re going

Teenage salticidae had an inner talent: telling things in a way that made him look good and compelled people into telling him what he wanted. That’s how, despite obvious evidence that his first ex-girlfriend didn’t care about him, he made his friends think he was getting her back soon!

You must decide what emotions or thoughts you want to trigger in your target.

b. Make it relatable by triangulating

When I started becoming fluent in a language that nobody spoke around me, I had a lot of jokes about the obstacles in the learning process. And I told a couple of them to my friends!

None of them were even remotely understood. They couldn’t relate. Even if they cared, they couldn’t understand.

First, they played no roles at all in my story about learning this language.

Second, they had never learned a language themselves.

If I wanted my stories to be interesting/funny/relatable, then I would had to TRIANGULATE.

Triangulating means finding a bridge between you and the person. Something common that you can both relate to.

Learning a foreign language was something difficult yet rewarding. What did my friend do that was difficult yet rewarding? Sports competition!

One of my friend was competing on the state level in judo, another friend was part of the local cycling junior team. Both were working hard and getting tremendous feelings of success from it.

Now that I know how to make them relate, I just need to use one single magic word: YOU.

Involve your target into your story so they pay more attention. People love interesting stories, but what they love even more, is hearing about themselves. When your story is also about the other person, it makes it that much more interesting for them.

It doesn’t need to be specifically about one person. But the target needs to identify with you or a character of your story. This is what good movies get right (and why we have so much bland heroes: most people are bland!).

Short digression, but this is IMHO the explanation of the success of Tarantino’s movie. All of his characters are bland, but with a few neurotic traits that makes them cool cold blooded psychos. The average watcher thinks “hah, he’s like me but crazier!”. Tarantino wants you to see a cooler, reckless version of yourself.

c. Use the SUCCES framework to polish your story

You may boo me on this one because what I’m about to tell is just summing up a marvelous book. Made to Stick, by the Heath brothers, is about exploring what makes an idea stick or not. Hint: most of the memorable stuff discussed in the book is some form of a story.

No need to look for my Amazon affiliate link to get the book (I don’t have one anyway), just keep the SUCCES framework in mind:

• Simplicity. It’s been told millions of times to copywriters: you should express yourself in a way that everybody can understand. Short sentences, usual words.
• Unexpected. Breaking patterns make stuff memorable. This is the core mechanism of humor and horror: something unexpected is going on. In the case of humor, it’ is harmless. Add an element of danger and you have horror. Hence the two faces of clowns.
• Concrete. Use comparisons to make people understand advanced concepts. Tap into their existing mental schemas.
• Credible. This part is more about convincing, demonstrating authority, etc. I know a super Twitter account to show you about that: here.
• Emotional. Amusement and fear, discussed above, are emotions. Emotions are drivers of human behaviors and make our life experience more memorable. This is by design: we are wired to avoid negative emotions and seek positive ones (ofc it gets much more complicated real quick, but you get the idea). What scares you will be remembered, as a survival mechanism.
• Story. Yeah, I mean, you know. That’s the last chapter of the book. So if you’re trying to make a point, check out if your speech looks like a story. If not, craft a story around it. Don’t go “stop smoking”, rather say “my grandfather smoked 2 packs a day, got a throat cancer and died before he could meet his grandchildren”. That’s a true story unfortunately.

I still advise the book, it’s one of my favorite non-fiction read and one of the keystone of my early mnemonist journey, along with Brain Rules by John Medina, The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg and most books by Richard Wiseman and Tony Buzan.

Packing it up: using stories to make an impact

Use stories to teach. Showing how trigonometry helps an architect design some fancy castle makes it easier to understand than drawing dumb triangles.

Use stories to sell. Successful ads tell compelling stories.

Use stories to help people. Tell them how a young chubby dude became the world’s greatest health coach on the internet, if you want to inspire self belief.

Use stories to learn & remember. Pack the necessary info, no matter how bland it is, into a story. Yes you can get every single element of an income statement within a carefully crafted story with a bit of creativity.

Use stories on yourself! When I have to face a situation where I’m not confident or motivated about (most leg days tbh), I have my own story crafted into a motto: “Salticidae, he shows up”. I always shop up, I always stand to what I commit to.