Tell Your Story

Our philosophy at We the Media up until now (possibly into the future) has been ninety-nine parts work to one part telling our story. If we were asked what we’re not good at, we’d probably say talking about ourselves. We just don’t do it.

It’s kind of like the interview question, “What are your weaknesses?”

“Some people say I work too hard.”

Absolutely true.

The mantra, “Tell Your Story,” has been coming up often in both our client work and in my own personal relationships. These are two totally different scenarios, but the effect of keeping quiet about triumphs and failures is the same none-the-less.

Within organizations, an initiative is only as successful as the stories that are told about it. If the initiative is blindly rolled out without any kind of recap of past successes or acknowledgement of failures, someone, probably a hairball, will fill in the blanks.

Think about that. Someone who doesn’t want your initiative to succeed in the first place, filling in the blanks. Not where you want to be at all.

With personal relationships, the longer an amount of time goes by without talking (in real-time), the more awkward it is. This is why status updates and picture sharing on social networks are a good thing, we are each telling our own story one share at a time. Now when we do have those real-time encounters, we have context.

Without the social network we’re back to filling in the blanks about the people in our lives.

The only thing worse than not telling your story, is to stop telling your story once you’ve started. Since most things fail (citation?), most people expect failure. When a story stops, it means the thing must have failed. Which means people are already assuming the worse about you or your initiative. In fact it’s probably better to acknowledge failure, and be open about it, than to act like nothing has happened. At least your story will continue.

This is one of those easy-to-say, hard-to-do, things. At We the Media, it’s definitely not part of our culture to publicly share our story – we’re a bunch of introverted creative types. But in heeding this advice, it’s possible some of the people following us might assume we’re right on the brink of failure.

I’m here to tell you we are not.

We’re just not good at talking about ourselves.

Working on it.

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