I wanted to screw this newsletter up... and I couldn't

I’m at a restaurant with some friends, and their kid is looking bored. 

While we wait for the food to arrive, their son is playing with the tablet the waiter gave us to make our orders. 

“What’s Digo doing?”, I ask his mom. 

She glances at the tablet. 

“Just checking out what juices they have, I think.”

Food arrives, we eat and the kid is still messing about with the tablet. 

We finish up and start talking about dessert, and he’s still at it. 

I grab the tablet to order coffees, and that’s when I see it: 

He hasn’t been checking out the juice options; he was actually putting in an order for grape juice–but not just one: 

950 bottles of grape juice. For a combined price of $13,000. 

They’re all waiting on the checkout cart, waiting to be sent to the kitchen. 

We all look at each other and start laughing, but before his mom can erase the order, I say, 

“Maybe we should press the button and see what happens.”

There’s a short pause, then they laugh my suggestion away, saying it would be too much trouble, might take a while to fix, and so on. 

So we delete it, and order our coffees. 

I give the kid a sympathetic shrug, and I think he looks a bit disappointed. To be honest, so am I. 

Sometimes, being a responsible adult sucks 😅

I wanted to screw up this newsletter… 

I sat down to write this story, and I fully intended to do something different: I wanted to tell you a fun anecdote with no clear point. I was going to tell you about why you should only do that for fun, with your friends and family, but never in a professional context–but I couldn’t. 

Halfway through writing it down, my thoughts went something like this: 

“The kid is bored… he’s having a tiny bit of fun ordering tons juice on the table… how fun would it be to put in a ridiculous order just to see the trouble it would cause… but that’s irresponsible… grown-ups can’t be irresponsible… and that’s no fun.”

So I had a point after all. Not a terribly strong one, but I could absolutely see myself telling the story on stage, before talking about the things we would like to do because they’re fun, but are more trouble than they’re worth–or maybe why sometimes we should just do the fun thing anyway, and to hell with the consequences. 

…But I couldn't

The reason I failed is because I do this too often. I trained my brain to look for patterns and meaning everywhere, because that’s what it takes to tell as many stories as I do. 

And that’s why you need to do it too: if you never do it, figuring out what a story is about can feel like pulling teeth. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. 

So whenever you write down something that happened (you’re doing that, right??), make sure you spend a minute or so thinking of what it might mean, and write that down too. 

It gets easier, I promise. After a while, you start having fun with it. 

Keep at it and, one day, telling stories will be as much fun as… 

Ordering $13,000 of grape juice 🤘

-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 ;-)

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