Are you old enough to believe in dragons?

“Dad, did dragons exist?”

I’m walking Alice to her circus class, and her little sister is tagging along. 

I’m tempted to just tell her dragons never existed, but she’s 9, I think she’s old enough to think this through. 

“That’s a difficult question to answer. What do you think?”

“I think they existed. Maybe.”

“Well, here’s the thing, baby: they might have existed. We just never found any proof they did. No bones or anything like that.”

“Ok, but we also didn’t find proof they didn’t exist, right?” 

I didn't see that coming.

“How could we prove that they didn’t exist, baby?”

She frowns, starts to say something, then changes her mind.

“You can’t prove a negative,” I say. “What I mean is you can prove something happened, but you can’t really prove it didn’t. For example, let’s say we wanted to prove vampires didn’t exist. How would we do that?”

“Ahm… maybe… we can look for them?”

“Sure. But we’d have to look at every single place in the world to make sure they’re not hiding somewhere.”

“We could go into all the caves and castles and look for them!”

“We could, but how many people we’d need to do that? And what if they keep moving from one place to another, then what?”

“Yeah, that would be too hard to do… But dragons maybe lived somewhere no one ever went. That would work, right?”

“It would, but there’s no place no one ever went, really.”

“How about the bottom of the ocean, way way deep?”

“Good point. Maybe they lived there. Maybe they are still there, sleeping. No way to know, really.”

“Ok. Yeah. That makes sense.”

She looks happy when she walks into her class, and so am I: it's great that I can talk to my daughter like this. 

I turn to Olivia, busy making her way through some Rice Krispies. She hasn’t said a word since we left home. 

“How about you, monster, what do you think? Did dragons exist or not?”

“Yeah. They existed. Unicorns too.” 

She starts eating again and doesn’t back up her claims. I’m about to push back, but then I remember: 

Olivia’s only 5. 

She has plenty of time to learn critical thinking.

It doesn’t have to be today. 

I already broke the rules, so… 

Since this newsletter came out, I’ve been sending it every Thursday morning without fail—until this week. Life got on the way and that’s why you’re getting this one late. 

What I’ve also been doing every week is to pair a story with a lesson, either some storytelling technique I’ve used, or something inspired by the story. But this week, not only I’m late, but also… I can’t be bothered 🫣

I’d feel too guilty not giving you anything at all, so here’s my suggestion: 

Listen to the latest episode of The SpeakerPath: it’s only 27 mins long, and my co-host Jo and I go over a crash course on how to find and tell stories. If you learn that, you’re miles ahead of the competition. 

If you do give it a listen, I’d love to know what you think! 

🤘

-Francisco 

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Getting clarity through your story to stand out from all the other coaches, speakers and entrepreneurs out there 

2. If you dream of speaking on the Red Dot, take this Scorecard and instantly discover how likely your idea is to be accepted by a TED-style organizing committee

3. If you (or your team) got any storytelling challenges, I’m sure there’s something we can do together ;-)

Thanks for reading! Reply any time.