Storytelling is what makes us human. When we ask for help in something personal, or when we’re trying to make the sale, what we’re really doing is telling a story. The better we become at telling a story, the easier it becomes to get what we want.
In today’s age, we have what seems like an unlimited amount of mediums to publish on, and many different ways to tell a story, but it really boils down to three main ways: with visual imagery (photo/video), text (blogs/books), or auditory (radio/podcast).
With all of these channels, we’ve become distracted in chasing different metrics that mean very little to how we satisfy our need to tell story. Looking at the number of Instagram likes or followers tell us nothing about how good we are at telling a story, but rather on how well we appeal to the norm and to what is common within that medium.
There is some great undiscovered content on YouTube that might not even be discovered by the right people before the content creator gives up on his or her craft because there are no views or no likes on their videos. We’re looking at the wrong metrics, because a content creator creates because they like to make things, because their message needs to get across to someone else, but we’ve been fooled to think that we’re wasting our time because someone else has more likes than us.
And we fail to see that even in the greatest search engines and algorithms are very desperately trying to find the best content to show their users, yet we’re trying to meet the algorithms in the middle by lowering our standards and making mediocre work in order to be found by the majority. It may not be a race to the bottom, but if you’re on top, this is definitely a race to a lower version of yourself. Do you really want to join that race?
I would rather make something that I want to make, an opinion that I want to share, and do my best to make it accessible to the people who want to hear/watch/read it. Yes, this may involve some technical things like adding tags, proper captions, SEO, and other things, but it gets built around your content and not the other way.
Let’s make stories for the sake of making them and experiment with making visuals, writing, or speaking. It may require practice to get back on track, but at some point it will be natural once again because we are storytellers.