The third foundation of storytelling is human motivation. It begins with learning to see what people want. Stand in a supermarket queue for two minutes and look at what's going on around you. A little kid wants a packet on the shelf by the till. His mother wants him to stop whining. The cashier wants the woman in front to find her card. In fact she probably wants to go to lunch. The woman wants last month’s special to still work. The man behind her wants the queue to move. Th

The second foundation of storytelling is meaning. It’s where most good observations get ruined. A three-year-old was skipping around the lounge of the shiva house. It was shiva for her grandmother. But she was in a good mood because her aunt had given her a job: packing sweets into packets for the children for Shabbos. Eventually she landed on her father’s lap, her mouth obviously full. He asked her how many sweets she was eating. She opened her mouth wide so that he could lo

On Louis Botha Avenue last week I passed a man pushing his belongings along the pavement. I'd filed him before I finished looking. Then something made me look again. Sunglasses. A woollen balaclava, in the middle of the day. And the thing he was pushing wasn't a trolley or a cart. It was an old baby pram. No baby. Just stuff. The second version of that man is interesting. The first one isn't. The only difference between them is about three seconds of continued attention. Many

Sit across the table from a genuinely good CEO and you notice something quickly. Ask a real question and you get an answer built on years of pattern recognition most of their industry hasn't caught up to yet. Most of it never makes it into what they publish. Many of these same people are already publishing. A regular LinkedIn post, a podcast, the occasional interview or lesson. The volume is there. The thinking that impressed you in the room mostly isn't. This isn't rare. It'

It’s comforting to think a job ends the moment you've said something. Once the words are out, or a text is sent. Whatever happens to them is someone else's problem. But it isn't, and the reason is easy to miss because of how differently the two sides of that exchange feel from the inside. You have complete access to what you meant. You know what you were trying to say, how carefully you built it, and why you made the point you made. You don’t have to check it. You were the on

Some of the most compelling people I work with have a better writer inside them than the one who shows up on the page. I noticed it first in a meeting. A leader I was working with had spent twenty minutes explaining an idea to the room, and it was electric. Specific, funny, completely relatable and everyone leaned in. Afterwards I asked him to write it up so we could connect his influence through his social audience and what came back was three flat paragraphs I could have fo

There is a pattern I keep seeing with experienced leaders, and it almost never gets named directly. The more expertise someone develops, the easier it becomes to forget what used to be confusing. That sounds obvious stated plainly. It rarely feels obvious from the inside. A leader spends years building a point of view. Real experience, real failure, real observation. By the time they sit down to communicate it, they are standing somewhere their audience has not reached yet. T