The Origin of Story Telling and StorySelling

If you’ve read our Wall Street Journal Best-Selling Book, StorySelling, you’re sure to remember the story of Gronk. For those who don’t here’s the lowdown: Gronk is just your basic, everyday man of 15,324 BC. He love’s his wife, his kids and relaxing after a good long day of hunting. He doesn’t sound all too different from you now does he? However, there is one key difference.

Gronk is about to change the world.

Now, Gronk, unlike you, did not have today’s modern luxuries to help him unwind. So it wasn’t quite as easy to brush off the little kiddos dying to hear the tale of the bison hunt earlier that day. However, Gronk had already had a pretty exhausting day and didn’t really feel like creating the framework for modern language, nor did he know how.

What Gronk did know, was that if he scraped a rock on another rock, sometimes it left a mark. So he gathered all the kiddos and they waited on baited breaths as Gronk drew his best bison possible, of course featuring him right behind it with a spear going in for the kill. Everyone was ecstatic over this story, and why wouldn’t they be? No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

The next day, Gronk woke up knowing his calling. It was to create a step-by-step hunting pictograph so that the entire village would be able to know how to kill a bison in the most efficient way possible.  So Gronk took different colored stones and drew his masterpiece: a series of drawings depicting a clear beginning, middle, and end to hunting and killing a bison.

Shortly afterwards, Gronk met his end after being chased off a cliff by a rhino (who knew Rhinos and Bison lived in the same hemispehere?)

Now as I’m sure some of you know, this is actually loosely based off of the cave drawings actually found all over the world. The earliest of cave drawings date back 40,000 years to an Indonesian island. However, the inspiring story of Gronk does lead us into the importance of story telling.

Because of these crude pictographs we have the origins or story telling through the earliest books The Epic of Gilgamesh,Aesops Fables, and even the Bible. Now we are able to see that the best of these and all stories use some type of StorySelling.

We’re not saying that Aesop was trying to sell you a product, but what he was selling, or StorySelling, was a moral code. Perhaps the best example would be the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise; as I’m sure you all remember, in the end the tortoise ends up beating the hare because the hare became overconfident and with such a large advantage compared to the turtle, decided to take a nap and wouldn’t you know it, he slept through the entire race. Moral of the story? Slow and steady wins the race.

Aesop ultimately used StorySelling to influence behavior. This phenomenon is seen throughout history, whether it be through Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Barak Obama’s Dreams from My Father; these individuals use the strategy of StorySelling to sell you their beliefs or theories as well as themselves.

We don’t like to be sold a product, that’s why we look anywhere other than the sales kiosks when we go to a mall. We know what we want and we don’t want to be pursaded otherwise. The best StorySellers are able to sell their idea, product, whatever, without having the individual on the receiving end ever knowing they’re being sold.

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For more info on becoming the best StorySeller you can possibly be, click here to download a free copy of StorySelling: Hollywood Secrets Revealed, How to Sell Without Selling by Telling Your Brand Story, and start your journey.