A story to calm their fears

Last night was Parents Night in my mom’s second-grade classroom, and as usual, the parents who have never had a second-grader before were nervous about homework.

What if my child doesn’t know how to do it? What if my child won’t do it? How do I deal with this traumatic new development in my child’s life?

You think I’m being sarcastic, particularly with that last question, but based on the fear and angst my mom has described in the faces and voices of these parents around the homework issue, I’m not. In fact, I may be understating the hysteria.

Of course, every child takes to homework differently: some will embrace it and handle it well, while others will hate it, resist it, refuse to do it, and melt down at the mere mention of it. But to patiently explain this is unlikely to calm parental fears.

So instead, my mom does what she does every year: she tells these parents a story. About me.

She tells them that I hated homework. That I would avoid it like I avoided eggplant. That I would fall out of my chair while attempting to do homework. That I would get up half a dozen times to sharpen my pencil. That I would get up another half a dozen times to go to the bathroom. That on top of all of that procrastination, I would pout, and scream, and cry, and insist that homework was dumb, but that eventually, I would give in and do the homework, and it wouldn’t be that bad.

Until the next night, when the masochistic ritual would begin again.

Somehow, this story, along with the assurance that despite its frightening truth I not only graduated from elementary school, but also from high school and college, and am today a productive, contributing member of society, makes the parents feel that they, too, can handle their child’s attempt to handle homework.

They understand that it may not be pretty, and that it many not be fun, but hearing that story lets them know that at least they and their child will survive.

Probably.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Overcoming too big and too vague

A couple recent Seth Godin posts have story implications worth exploring.

In Enormity, Seth writes:

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Every angle tells a piece of its story

Stumbled across this cool quote from Vicki Karp on True/Slant, which is “an original content news network tailored to both the ‘Entrepreneurial Journalist’ and marketers who want a more effective way to engage with digital audiences,” currently in Beta.

Anyway, the quote:

Best thing ever said to me by a sculptor  — walk around it, look up and down and through it; every angle tells a piece of its story.

Vicki’s piece points toward a clip on the Smithsonian Channel website, Walking Among Stars, which is part of The Sculpture Diaries, a series of stories about sculptures.

Oh, and the Smithsonian Channel’s tagline?

Telling America’s Stories

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

A story geek’s dream

I am so geeked.

While doing a bit of procrastinating this morning on ESPN.com, I wandered into the Sports Guy’s World — always a great place to get lost, and a dangerous place to go if you have something you need to get done — and the headline “The Sports Guy on 30 for 30” caught my eye, so I clicked.

What I found was the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, telling the story behind the development of a new series of 30 sports documentaries that will air on ESPN starting October 6th to celebrate the network’s 30 years. It is the story of how an idea that “started out as a one-paragraph email in 2007” evolved into a project that has brought together “the greatest collection of filmmakers ever assembled under the same umbrella.”

In 30 for 30, ESPN picked some of the most interesting stories in sports of the last 30 years — not the biggest stories, not the most obvious stories — and found 30 talented filmmakers to tell them. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. As Simmons explains:

We hoped to land a few respected names early for a “domino effect” of sort and only needed two or three names. Everyone else would get a sniff and want to be involved. That’s what we thought. We all started going out on meet and greets, and that’s when something crazy happened, something we never anticipated: these people had been waiting for us. They had stories to tell. They just never thought they’d have a chance to tell them.

And so, starting next month, ESPN is going to become a conduit for great storytelling. They’re going to let Barry Levinson, director of Diner, Avalon, Good Morning Vietnam, and The Natural, tell the story of the Baltimore Colts Marching Band — which kept marching for 12 years after the Colts left Baltimore.

They’re going to let Albert Maysles, director of Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, tell the story of Larry Holmes’ 1980 defeat of Muhammad Ali, featuring footage that Maysles shot in the weeks leading up to the fight, but that hasn’t been seen for nearly 30 years because people thought the fight was too depressing.

They’re going to let Mike Tollin, director of Varsity Blues and Coach Carter, tell the story about the rise and fall of the USFL. They’re going to let Peter Berg, the director of Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, and Hancock, tell the story of the epic 1988 trade that sent Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles.

And that’s just in the first 4 weeks.

It’s tempting to ghettoize these as sports stories; after all they’re stories about sports. But these aren’t stories about who won or who lost — they’re stories about the people who played the games, about their frailties, tragedies, courage, and pain.

It’s clear from the trailers alone that these are stories that will connect with us on an emotional level, that will make us appreciate what those people did on the field more than any record or scoreboard ever could, and that will give us new lenses with which to think about ourselves and the struggles and opportunities we face.

In short, they will do what all great stories do — they will help us see and understand the world, and ourselves, more clearly, and with more compassion. And they will do it in a way that sticks with us, and that makes us want to pass them on.

I can’t wait for October 6.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Walgreens flips the script on flu shots

I don’t like shots, and I’m generally healthy, so I have never seen a need for a flu shot. I suspect I’m exactly the kind of person Walgreens is targeting with this poster, which I spied in the waiting room of the Walgreens pharmacy:

The poster banks on the understanding that while many people don’t take good care of themselves — and like me, can probably convince themselves pretty easily that they don’t need a flu shot — they do want to take care of the people who are important to them.

And so, the poster changes your association with a flu shot: instead of it being about a needle and 25 bucks, it’s about doing something for others. That’s a pretty nifty flip.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Dude, it matters everywhere

So Ben sends me an email:

Subject: amctv.com

Their new tagline is “Story Matters Here”

I email him back:

Dude, it matters everywhere.

He emails me back:

Sounds like a blog post to me.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

When CITIZEN KANE was simply Citizen Kane

Was Citizen Kane always CITIZEN KANE?

Because we tend to look at the pillars of modern culture — the music, paintings, and films we exhalt as “classics” — through our present-day lens, we often assume the mythology surrounding them was a foregone conclusion, that they were widely acknowledged as classics from the start. But all classics were once notions sketched on napkins, single notes plucked on guitars, or screen tests long buried in a vault somewhere.

Which is to say, there was a time, long ago, when Citizen Kane wasn’t CITIZEN KANE.

That’s not to say it was just another movie — it won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was a critic’s favorite for many of its technical merits. But the mythology we now assign to Citizen Kane (which, as Eric points out, has become something of a burden) didn’t really evolve until years after the film had been released.

When Citizen Kane came out in 1941, it faced two major obstacles to its success: a little conflict we like to call World War II, and William Randolph Hearst and his Hearst media machine. The film actually disappeared quite quickly from theaters after its release. (Hearst, the factual basis for the fictitious Charles Foster Kane, was not exactly pleased with the depiction.)

It wasn’t until a number of French filmmakers and critics, such as Andre Bazin, began discussing the film and elevating its artistry, that post-WWII European audiences began to take notice. The film’s reputation began to snowball, and by the late 1940s and early 1950s it was already being described as the greatest film ever made.

Many of us never knew a time when Citizen Kane wasn’t considered great — and the intimidating benchmark for ambitious, cinematic achievement. But there was a moment in history when it was just a movie, not a film — when it was just Citizen Kane, not CITIZEN KANE.

To me, that seems worth remembering. Mythology, like any part of a story’s DNA, is fluid, always changing and growing to incorporate new experiences and create new associations with an audience that’s ever-evolving. So if you don’t like the mythology your story has today, you aren’t stuck with it. But you do need to figure out how to change it.

:: Posted by Ben Kaplan ::

The downside of mythology: trying to live up to your own hype

Does Citizen Kane suck? That’s the question my old friend Chad Schneider at movingstillpix asked, prompted by friends of his who had been telling him lately that the film classic was boring.

After watching it again for the first time in a decade, Chad concluded it definitely did not suck. In fact, he says …

IT’S TERRIFIC!  It even says so on the movie poster.

So, what’s the deal?  Why do some of my friends who ordinarily can tell good from bad have little love for Kane?  Is it the occasionally over-stylized acting?  Maybe.  Black and White?  No way, they’re better than that. Unattainably high expectations created by lists like the AFI’s 100 Greatest Movies along with an incredible mythology/history rooted in outrageous facts and fictions?  Bingo!

In the case of Citizen Kane, which came out in 1941, the mythology is the reason most people under the age of 50 even know about it at all. But that mythology is almost impossible to live up to, and unless you’re able to block it out, there’s a pretty good chance it will impact your experience of actually watching the movie.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

How to bake the story in from the start

Chris Brogan had an interesting post yesterday in which he outlined a few ideas for what his ideal hotel would be like. He’s not interested in the hotel being fancy as much as he is in having a customized hotel experience — in other words, developing a relationship with a particular hotel so that they know who he is, that he likes thick down pillows and the room set at 70 degrees, and having those things already set up for him when he checks in.

As he says, “This is so easy, and yet, we’re doing hotels as if it’s 100 years ago.” Unless you’re willing to pay Ritz-Carlton prices, in which case you get treated like royalty.

But should you have to pay those kinds of prices to get treated like royalty, when the cost of keeping preference data on guests is now so low?

Imagine a new hotel chain, designed for those of us not on Ritz-Carlton budgets, that did give you the opportunity to personalize your experience like this. The options they give you could be as banal as pillow preference, or as interesting as leaving a selection of books on the nightstand that you’ve expressed an interest in, with the book “billed to your card if not in the room at checkout.”

Though there are undoubtedly costs of building such a system, and putting in that extra effort, they would be investments in developing the story of the hotel chain and cultivating advocates. It’s not hard to imagine satisfied guests sharing stories of their experience with friends and fellow travelers. It’s also not hard to imagine guests willing to commit their loyalty to one hotel chain, rather than making their lodging decisions based on location or the cheapest rate.

And as Brogan suggests, “I would skip Priceline if everywhere I traveled, I was guaranteed a room at a consistent rate range that I agreed upon. This means I’d give the money directly to the hotel.”

Though building this idea into the business plan of a new hotel would bake the story in from the start, any existing hotel chain could adopt the idea now, and begin the process of changing their story.

On the surface, this seems like a conversation about customer service, but at its core it’s a conversation about story: about creating an experience worth talking about, and developing relationships that lead to advocacy.

And it’s not a conversation that’s limited to the hotel industry.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Harley Davidson: Every rider has a story

I’ve never been a fan of motorcycles. This antipathy no doubt traces back to my traumatic first motorcycle experience, in which my parents’ crazy friend Steve (who has since legally changed his name to Stephon — seriously) rode over to our house and parked his motorcycle in our driveway. I was 2 or 3 at the time, so all I knew about motorcycles was that the tailpipe was shiny, and that I liked shiny things. I wanted to touch it. What I didn’t know was that the shiny tailpipe of a motorcycle that has just been riding is hot. Very hot.

I spent the rest of the evening holding ice cubes and crying.

Even now, I’ve got a beef with bikes — specifically those that insist on riding unmuffled. Now that it’s summertime, it seems like you can’t enjoy a nice meal at an outdoor table, or even watch TV with the windows open, without enduring the reverberating belch of somebody’s hog rumbling by.

Nevertheless, I do like what Harley Davidson is up to: they’re encouraging 100,000 women to learn to ride, and they’re encouraging them through storytelling.

A while back I spotted this banner ad:

It led me to Harley’s Women Riders Riding Stories page, where users have submitted “Why I Ride My Harley,” “How I Learned to Ride,” and “Why I Want to Learn” stories.

Several of the rider stories were interesting, but I found this Why I Ride My Harley one especially powerful:

I am an incest and physical abuse suvivor that most people thought would not see the age of 7, yet here I am, 65. My wonderful husband of 46 years has always allowed me to be his rider while encouraging me to ride on my own. I was always too afraid. My background left me with little self esteem or confidence. But with this birthday I decided that now is the time for me to declare myself a winner and taste the freedom that only a Harley Davidson provides. So meet my new Tri Glide. It was so easy to learn to ride I feel silly for being so fearful. I love everything about my life now and my HD is a big part of it. I ride along with my husband and his Ultra Classic wherever the wind blows us. Sisters, nothing can stop you. It is only life if you live it and they only win if you let them. Just believe and climb on that Harley and when you see me on the road wave and look at the big smile on my face. Ride on and live your best life……….

Though all the stories are technically about motorcycles, read through a few of the submissions and you quickly realize that the larger story Harley is telling isn’t about motorcycles at all. It’s a story about freedom, self-esteem, and empowerment.

If you seek those things, and you read enough of these stories, maybe you start wondering about what it would feel like to ride a Harley yourself — and you forget how obnoxiously loud they are.

Or how hot that tailpipe is.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::