A Final Thought: Change Your Story, Change the World

I’ve written a lot about the importance of storytelling. I don’t believe human beings could have survived without it. Yes, sharing stories around an ancient communal fire passed down essential survival skills to the next generation, but the true power of storytelling runs much deeper. That’s because we don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as our stories allow us to see it.

Stories don’t just entertain; they give structure to everything we experience. They are the framework upon which we apply everything we perceive with our five senses. If there is no story, no narrative to apply to a stimulus, then that stimulus doesn’t register with us. Before we heard “Leaves of three, let it be,” we didn’t really “see” poison ivy. It was invisible.

And we could not truly see the sun, moon and stars until we had stories. The Sun is Helios driving his chariot across the sky, the moon driven by his sister Selene. 

These weren’t “myths” to the ancient Greeks; they were facts. You could be exiled or executed if you didn’t believe them. Remember Socrates? He was put to death for impiety (questioning the existence of sanctioned gods) and corrupting the youth of Athens. The state poured him a nice cup of hemlock tea—then made him drink it.

Before Isaac Newton discovered gravity, the story was that “rising” and “falling” were not caused by an external phenomenon but were inherent properties of the elements themselves—earth, fire, air and water. Rocks and water naturally moved toward the center of the universe (the Earth), while fire and air moved away from it. Gravity became visible—knowable—only with the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head.

This is one reason why understanding quantum physics is so tricky. Nature behaves differently at the quantum level, and we don’t have many stories to help us make sense of all that rule-breaking. One of the few examples is the tale of Schrödinger’s cat, which deals with superposition and “the observer effect.” Until we open the box and look inside, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

I think physics needs more English majors.

We each have our own narrative about the nature of the world, and we use it to comprehend stimuli, which these days—with the 24-hour news cycle and social media—are non-stop. Each time we swipe, we see a stimulus and instantly apply it to our narrative to make sense of it. Whether something is true or false is utterly dependent upon our own story.

In this way, the world is simply what we say it is.

When our narrative never changes, when our stories are “stuck,” we cannot view stimuli in new ways. This is catastrophic for personal growth. Growth is change. And when significant change occurs, what was once “true” can become false, what was false becomes true, what was important becomes irrelevant, what was invisible becomes visible.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

This cannot happen when our inner stories are overly rigid. Instead, to change, we must first be able to explore two narratives simultaneously. This is dangerous if you are a pigeon seeing the fox as both good and bad, but it is highly liberating if you are a human being. Recognizing that the world is just a reflection of our own stories means we can literally change the world by changing our inner narratives.

Every family has a story, too. It may be, “We come from a long line of kind, hard-working people, and we are duty-bound to continue that tradition.” Or “Your father left us when you were young, and that is why our lives are so hard.”

We cannot change our story until we recognize we have one.



I love the way James Burke concluded his 1985 documentary series, “The Day the Universe Changed.” He looked into the camera and said, “If the universe is at any time what you say it is ... then say.”

Mitch@MimiVanderhaven.com