The power of storytellers to shape our world

Complete history of sapiens Yuval Noah Harari’s book is one of the most successful nonfiction books of recent years. This book covers his entire history of humanity starting 2.5 million years ago and covers the story of our species over 425 pages.

It’s a fascinating journey, but a long one. Therefore, many people may prefer something shorter and more visual, such as a picture book for younger readers. Harari’s new book set, we can’t stopfill in the gaps.

I recently spoke with Harari about key themes in his book. we can’t stop Be clear and vivid:

Sapiens conquered the world because they were able to tell stories that inspired people to cooperate in enormous amounts.

“Storytelling is our superpower,” Harari told me.

“We are the only species with the ability to use language. We can not only describe what we see, taste, and touch, but also create stories about things that don’t exist.”

In other words, stories are the first and most important step for leaders who want to solve big problems and make the world a better place. After all, you can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t rally others to make that idea a reality, nothing will get done.

Storytelling is an important milestone in the evolution of our species. Two million years ago, several types of humans roamed the earth. According to Harari, with the “emergence of stories” 70,000 years ago, Sapiens emerged, spread throughout the world, and became the most dominant species of Sapiens.

Storytelling is a powerful rhetorical tool, although it is important to keep the audience’s attention, and not because people want to be entertained. The power of storytelling is that it allows people to collaborate.

“All of humanity’s great achievements, such as the flight to the moon, were the result of hundreds of thousands of people working together,” Harari said.

Until 1961, reaching the moon was a figment of people’s imaginations, and few believed it was possible. That’s when dreamer John F. Kennedy harnessed the power of words and stories to galvanize large-scale cooperation.

Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 speech to Congress is a brilliant example of the art of storytelling. Kennedy relied on metaphors to paint pictures in people’s minds. He said space was a “new ocean” to explore and countries would “set sail” into this new ocean to gain knowledge and new hope for peace.

Kennedy’s passion, vision, and storytelling skills – his superpowers – sparked the nation’s collective imagination and inspired 400,000 people to support Kennedy’s “adventure.”

“The human tribes with the best stories were the most powerful in the world,” Harari writes in Volume 2 of Unstoppable Us.

“Dreams and stories are very useful…The people of the ancient kingdoms would not have built levees, reservoirs, and granaries, and today there would be no countries, no schools, no hospitals. No cars, no airplanes, no computers. I guess.”

Dreamers and storytellers play a valuable role in our society, but Harari warns that the rhetorical power of stories can also cause real harm when they cause distress. “Many wars in history were fought over stories,” Harari says.

“Stories are tools. They can be very useful, but if a particular story makes people miserable instead of helping them, why don’t we change it?”

The world needs vast numbers of people working with each other to move forward, and it needs dreamers to weave well-intentioned stories to fuel our collective imagination.

“Stories are humanity’s greatest invention. People need stories to collaborate,” Harari says. “But there’s something else that’s really important: By changing the narrative they believe, we can change the way they collaborate.”