This picture is better than any story

I haven’t eaten in four days–and it’s all my fault. 

I’m trying “one of my weird food things”, as my supportive wife puts it. 

Trying to keep my mind off eating, I fall into an internet rabbit hole and stumble upon the “Widowmaker Burger Challenge”: eat the whole thing with chips in 30 minutes to earn a place on their Wall of Fame. And the restaurant is not far from my house. 

“I can definitely do that tomorrow to break my fast”, I decide. 

So the next day I’m sitting at the restaurant, waiting, but the burger is taking ages to come out. 

When I get up to check it out, I see two people coming out of kitchen, carrying the largest food anything I’ve ever seen. It’s easily the size of three large burgers on top of each other.

The Widowmaker is a triple burger with 1.2kg of meat (about 2.4 pounds!), which includes beef patties, pulled pork, bacon, and breaded chicken thighs. Tons of cheese. And, as I soon find out, the bastards still put some jalapeños at the bottom, to add insult to injury. A knife the size of a sword stuck through it is the only thing holding this monstrosity together. 

It turns out the burger I’d seen online was the Jr version, which was half the size of this…

But I give it a go. I bravely chomp my way through it, and when the 30 minutes are up, I’m only a couple of bites away from finishing. 

Sadly, I don’t win a place on their Wall of Fame. 

What I do win are hours of indigestion, food-induced delirium…

And the amazing picture you see here ;-)

This is how you ruin your stories with pictures

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This one clearly is. There’s just no way I can do that burger justice with just my words. 

But most times, it’s not. Which is why trying to illustrate your stories in a speech or presentation with pictures is a terrible idea. 

When you tell a story, your audience are more engaged than with other forms of communication because their brains are trying to create a movie in their heads. To do that, it pulls from their own life experiences: 

• You say, “I’m in school, and the teacher…” - they imagine what a classroom looks like (to them)

• You say, “I’m 10 years old” - they remember themselves as 10-year olds (or some other kid they knew) 

• You say, “It’s this paradise beach” - they think of a perfect beach they’ve been to, or somewhere they saw on TV

This process is called co-creation, and it’s one of the reasons why we can lose ourselves in a book (our brains are working overtime to picture everything) and often complain the movie version “looked differently” in your head.

Every time you illustrate your story with a picture, you stop the audience co-creating. The classroom becomes your classroom, the 10-year old becomes you, the paradise becomes your paradise, not theirs. 

That makes them less engaged, and makes the story less relatable. Lose-lose. 

If no words can ever match how awesome or weird a picture was, then by all means use it. 

But, in most cases, a story is worth a thousand times more when you ditch the pictures 🤘

-Francisco 

PS. The image for this post is the burger I first saw online, which I definitely would’ve finished in 30 minutes!

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.