Michael Margolis

Not long ago, thanks to a series of events set in motion by our mutual friend, Michelle James, I had the good fortune to connect with Michael Margolis, the founder of GetStoried.com and the author of Believe Me — “a storytelling manifesto for change-makers and innovators.”

There’s a natural affinity whenever professional storytellers get together.  Everything reminds us of a story, and so the conversation tends to leapfrog from anecdote to observation to insight, and back again.  Michael and I not only leapfrogged.  We hopscotched.  We see-sawed.  We tagged, hide-and-go-seeked and monkey-barred.  We were a couple of kids at recess, playing with our favorite toy.

What I like best about Michael’s approach to storytelling is that it’s active.  Story, seen through his lens, isn’t passive.  It’s not static.  Not fixed in time or immutable.

Story is alive.  It’s dynamic.  In constant motion.  In fact, telling good stories, while it has its place, is not nearly as productive as the living of them.  This is what Michael gets at in Believe Me.  It describes stories as our most powerful way of defining and shaping the world we live in.  Seeing stories in this light gives us the ability to transform them from past-tense or scripted, into a form that is revealed to us in each and every breath, and transmitted to our ‘audience’ in each and every action we take.

This is the learning that emerged for me from Believe Me.  Story is more powerful as a verb than as a noun.

Don’t think of story as a Thing.  Treat it as an Action. The act of Changing.  Innovating.  Revealing.  Inviting.  Reflecting.  Making.  Learning.  Leading.  Contextualizing. Connecting. Understanding.  Liberating. And yes…Playing!

Someday, after the fact, a Story may describe What Happened.  Right now, the only time that matters, Story is What’s Happening.  Knowing this difference will make you more observant and appreciative in the moment, and when it’s time for you to tell your story, it will rock, and your audience will Believe.