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Last week, I had the good fortune of spending four days at the TEDIndia conference in Mysore as a TEDIndia fellow. The talks weren’t consistently inspiring, but the people definitely were, and I especially enjoyed bonding with the 100 other TEDIndia fellows.
TEDIndia reinforced three ideas in my mind: live many parallel lives, tell stories to inspire others, and stay open to inspiration in unlikely places.
In this post, I’ll talk about the importance of storytelling for individuals, organizations and cultures.
Let me start with some of my favorite stories from TEDIndia:
- Hans Rosling kicked off TEDIndia by using his Gapminder graphs to tell the story of the rise and fall of civilizations and predicted that India will catch up with the US in terms of per capita GDP by 2048.
- Devdutt Pattnaik gave a fascinating talk on how a culture’s mythology shapes the beliefs and behaviors of its businesses.
- Tony Hseih told the story of how pursuing happiness, not selling shoes, is the corporate mission for Zappos.
- Pranav Mistry’s demo of his Sixth Sense technology was a fascinating peek into a world where the real and the virtual have merged into each other.
- Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev narrated the idiosyncratic story of his lifelong quest for meaning.
- Anil Gupta from Honeybee Network shared awe-inspiring stories of grassroots innovation in Indian villages.
- Kavita Ramdas explored how women are resolving the tension between tradition and modernity by sharing the stories of inspiring women on three continents.
- Charles Anderson demonstrated the interconnectedness of earth’s systems by telling the story of why dragonflies annually travel 400 miles across the ocean from India to the Maldives.
- Anupam Mishra highlighted the importance of traditional methods of sustainability by telling the stories a well that squeezes out moisture hidden in the sand.
- Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler’s stories were a celebration of the girl within us all.
- Shashi Tharoor said that the country that tells the best stories will be the country that leads the world.
All these stories shared three common characteristics:
- First, they were stories, told as stories. They had a generous dose of drama, a series of ups and downs, and inspiring heroes who fought and won against unlikely odds.
- Second, they went beyond the tedious TEDIndia narrative of “this is the story of how my non-profit saved a hundred children” and talked about ideas that were bigger than the speakers.
- Third, they helped me understand the world in new ways by explaining where we came from, where we are, or where we are heading towards.
These stories reminded me that the most powerful stories we can tell about ourselves are, in fact, stories about other people. These stories reminded me that by telling stories about ideas that are bigger than us, we become bigger than ourselves. These stories reminded me that we are shaped by the stories we tell others, but even more so by the stories we tell ourselves.
So, I am searching now for the storyteller within myself, the storyteller I lost when I started a business, and I am asking myself: what is the story you will tell today?
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