Not sure stories work? This train might change your mind

I’m waiting for the train with my family and some of our friends. 

When one of their kids strays too close to the edge of the platform, my daughter Alice pulls her back and says, 

“You can’t go that far, it’s super dangerous, you can die like my dad’s friend!”

She’s talking about Ben. 

In my early 20s I was working in south London, and the whole office went together to a big horse-racing event. 

I lived far away so I left a little earlier, but when I got to work the next day, something was off. Everyone was quiet, and I could hear some people crying. 

“What’s going on, why is everyone acting so weird?,” I asked. 

“Did you not hear about Ben?”

“No. What happened to him?”

“He died yesterday.”

“What? How??”

“He and some of the other young team leaders were waiting for the train back, messing about on the platform, and he lost his balance and went over. The train… cut him in half.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really know what to say. I still don’t. 

I barely knew Ben. We weren’t on the same team, but I always saw him goofing around the office with a big smile on his face. 

The only real memory I have of him is of when we had lunch at an Irish pub and he taught me how to fry eggs. 

“All you do is get the pan really hot, then when you put the egg on you cover it with a lid, and turn down the heat a bit. That’s it!” 

I think he was only 19. 

And he was right. 

The eggs always come out perfect. When I make them, though, I can’t help but feel a little sad. 

My daughter loves fried eggs, it’s one of her favourite foods. 

Maybe one day, I’ll tell her I learned that from Ben. 

But maybe not. 

Storytelling has worked… for a while

I don’t have a car, so my family uses public transport here in Barcelona all the time. Often that’s the metro or a train. 

I tried many times to convince my kids how dangerous it is to mess around the platform or stray too close to the edge. Nothing worked. 

Until I told them about Ben. 

They never met him, they had never heard me talk about him before, but the story stuck. It changed their behaviour. And now Alice has started telling other kids about him. 

It’s a shocking story for sure. It’s horrible and gruesome and sad. But that’s not why it works. 

It works because that’s how our brains evolved to learn: either through personal experience or through listening to the experiences of people close to us (and back then, those were just about the only people we ever spoke to!). 

The world has come a long way since then–but our brains haven’t. What worked then still works now. If you want to bore people, give them facts and data, try to reason with them. 

But if you want to change their behaviour or move them to action…

Start with the story 🤘

-Francisco 

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