Tell Good Stories.

On the value of storytelling as a medium of communication.

Welcome to Young Money! If you’re new here, you can join the tens of thousands of subscribers receiving my essays each week by adding your email below.

---

695,000 people die from heart disease each year in America. That’s roughly the population of Nashville, Tennessee. Do you know how many passengers died in commercial flight accidents in the US this year? 0. What about in 2023? Also 0. The last flight accident involving a major US airline that resulted in the death of a passenger was Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, in 2018.

In the last six years, the equivalent of the population of Los Angeles has been killed by heart disease, while one passenger died in a US commercial flight. Guess which of these occurrences was covered by every major media company:

Southwest Airlines Flight 1380. Why?

There is a quote, often falsely attributed to Joseph Stalin, that says, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” As we see here, regardless of the quote’s source, its message rings true. The reason that tragedies stick with us is because every tragedy represents a story, and stories resonate with us.

Jennifer Riordan, the passenger who died on the flight, was a 43-year-old banking executive with a husband and two kids at home. She had probably flown hundreds of times in her life, and she probably started this flight like any other: by tossing her bag in the overhead bin, sidestepping into seat 14A, fumbling around for the seatbelt, and scrolling through the limited selection of shows and movies on the screen in front of her.

30 minutes later, debris broke off the left engine and crashed through the window, inches from Riordan. The mother of two was sucked halfway out of the damaged plane before other passengers managed to pull her back in, and she later died in the hospital from her injuries.

Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 captured our hearts and minds because any of us could have been Jennifer Riordan. How many times have you casually slid into the window seat, book in hand, hoping that the flight isn’t too bumpy and your middle seat stays open? 10 times? 20? 100? You probably took the structural integrity of the plane itself for granted, and why wouldn’t you? Statistically speaking, air travel is incredibly safe. So there you are, 45 pages into a new book, when suddenly, you hear a *BANG* from your left, and everything goes dark.

Sure, it was just one death. But we can see ourselves in that one death. The only difference between Jennifer Riordan and any of us is that we weren’t sitting in 14A on that Southwest flight.

Stories are powerful because they’re relatable, and that relatability makes us feel something.

In contrast, when you hear that 695,000 people die from heart disease each year, it’s easy to distance yourself from that stat and go on with your day. 695,000 is too large of a number for us to wrap our minds around. Large numbers and statistics dilute the relatability of individual stories through abstraction, creating a homogenous blob that lacks efficacy.

However, while statistics can weaken stories, statistics and stories aren’t opposites. In fact, under the right circumstances, a powerful story can amplify a statistic. Let’s turn to our history books to show you what I mean.

---

---

History is filled with tragedy after tragedy in which millions of people die, but the plights of those millions are condensed to a few paragraphs in chapters concerning European or Asian history.

1 million Armenians were killed by the Turks in the Armenian Genocide. Beginning with the Rape of Nanjing, the Japanese killed between 6 and 10 million Chinese prisoners of war and civilians. Joseph Stalin killed ~6 million of his own countrymen, and the Nazis killed ~6 million European Jews, or roughly 2/3 of their population at the time. Millions of innocent civilians were killed in the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and the Bangladesh genocide as well.

These tens of millions of deaths, for most of us, were condensed to a few pages in world history books, and unless you have a personal tie to one of these tragedies, you won’t really, truly, get it.

A good story, however, of one person’s account, creates a lens through which we can better understand the full extent of these horrors. I remember, in middle school, learning about the Holocaust. I knew how bad it was: millions of Jews and other folks that the Nazis deemed subhuman were imprisoned, sent to labor camps, and murdered for no reason other than their cultural and religious beliefs. But history books just provide stats and dates and numbers, they don’t do those involved in the events they’re describing justice.

If you grew up in an area without a large Jewish (or Armenian, Chinese, or Russian) population, like I did in South Georgia, the Holocaust (as well as the Armenian, Chinese, and Russian genocides) feels like a distant, far-away incident.

The thing that made me really “get it” was one person’s story: Viktor Frankl. Three years ago, I was on a train from Budapest, Hungary to Krakow, Poland, and I had made plans to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. I wanted to learn more about the hardships of the prisoners before visiting Auschwitz, so I purchased a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl’s account of his time spent in Nazi concentration camps, to read on the train.

Frankl’s story was appalling, inspiring, fear-inducing, infuriating, and disgusting. He captured the struggles of European Jews in a way that no history book could:

He described his heartbreak as his wife (who later died in a concentration camp) was taken from him. He discussed the betrayal he felt as he (an acclaimed Austrian psychologist) was increasingly ostracized from his community. His description of his own body deteriorating, with his hair falling out and his skin decaying due to malnutrition, was horrifying. His eyewitness accounts of his fellow prisoners choosing suicide by electric fence were heartbreaking. And his thoughts on finding the will to live, despite these horrors, were inspiring. By the end of the book, you want to cry as you realize just how evil someone has to be to inflict these atrocities on their fellow man.

Man’s Search for Meaning has sold more than 16 million copies, and it resonates with readers because it transports its audience to Frankl’s world, letting them experience his trials and tribulations. A powerful story like Frankl’s can humanize a statistic, helping its audience understand the gravity of its subject. Stories cause people to stop, think, and take action, because at their core, stories are a medium for helping an audience “get it,” whatever “it” may be.

But stories are undervalued in our world today. As the speed of information continues to accelerate, we rush to “get to the point.” We want to lead with numbers, exchange prose for bulleted lists, and replace nuance with formulas. But people aren’t algorithms. We are irrational, emotional, imperfect creatures, and stories are the best medium we have for communicating ideas across our irrationalities, emotions, and imperfections. This is true across all fields, from history to politics to economics to sports to even finance. On describing the ideal stock pitch, legendary hedge fund manager Bill Miller once said, “The world is made of stories, not of atoms. Most people think of the world as analyzing atoms and its constituent parts, and then I am going to figure out how to value it and then describe it. The alternative way to think about it is to construct a convincing story. Take all your material together and construct a convincing story.”

If you want to explain history, lead with stories, not statistics. If you want to raise funding for a startup, land a new job, secure a second date, rally people to your cause, or just plain make someone care about what you have to say, don’t bombard them with facts. Treat them to a story.

Stories are effective because they are a delight to their audiences. A story should engage its reader’s mind, transporting them to the world that its narrator is describing. If you rely on stats and facts and numbers to prove your point, you are force-feeding your audience a conclusion without first setting the stage and preparing them to accept it. A good story readies its audience for your conclusion, and a great story coaxes its audience to reach the conclusion that you want without you having to explicitly say it.

If you have an idea that you deem important enough to share with others, don’t suffocate your audience in facts and figures. Tell good stories.

- Jack

I appreciate reader feedback, so if you enjoyed today’s piece, let me know with a like or comment at the bottom of this page!

---

Jack's Picks

• For my NFL fans out there, I reviewed how expensive each NFL quarterback is by comparing their contract value to their on-field production. Daniel Jones is (as you could probably guess) a significant outlier here.

• I enjoyed this piece in Scott Galloway’s newsletter on using generative AI as a “thought partner.”