I promised myself to write a post about creating marker-ready stories. Instead I am writing an article on storytelling.
Storytelling is a great skill I want to master one day. The skill is important from various perspectives as following:
- All stories teach compassion and self-compassion. Bad things happen all the time. Each of us has weaknesses. Our weaknesses and failures make our stories interesting and worthwhile. Otherwise the stories would become unbearably boring. Once you get the heros of your stories right, you understand that your life is yet another such story and you are a sort of hero. And this is great.
- Good stories with greed and fear, adventure and wonder draw genuine interest. By making a great story you can sell your product to yourself and to others. This will enable generating enough resources to focus on solving a problem and finding a viable solutions.
- When making a story you are forced to consider multiple perspectives: of yourself, your audience, your critics, each of your heros and more. The power of perspective generates more creative solutions.
- A skilled storyteller has technical advantage when creating markers. Detailed exciting markers can be created from many worlds and woven into a composition with breathtaking speed.
Now, I am not a great storyteller. But I am always willing to listen to someone who is. This is a list of simple advises for better storytelling. I will reiterate some aspects in superlearning context:
- Keep it simple. Do not add anything not supported by facts [use analytic thinking], do not dive into unnecessary details [move them into a different hierarchy level].
- Tell one story at a time. Link details in such a way that you can tell several separate stories one at a time. There is beginner’s tendency to add to many or too little links, and then it becomes impossible to trace each story separately.
- Never wait for reaction. One of the things Anna teaches is separation of retention and processing skills. You may also want to reduce amount of your emotional involvement. You simply do not have resources to process everything at the same time.
- Make sure the story has a good beginning and a good ending. Otherwise you will have hard time trying to recollect the story. The first and the last markers of each section serve as anchors that allow us to find each story within the ocean of knowledge we possess. The anchor marker typically require much more attention than other markers, so we need to pause longer when creating them.
- A twist. Each good story add some unexpected understanding. If there is no twist, the story may be redundant.
- A twist. Each good story add some unexpected understanding. If there is no twist, the story may be redundant.
- Maintain rhythm. It is important to follow some rhythm. This way if we miss a link of the story we have a feeling what sort of element the missing link should be, making finding this element easier.
- Do not reuse stories. If you reuse stories, you will mix the details and end up with severe mistakes.
Storytelling is a great skill for superlearner. It offers many unexpected lessons and advantages. You can use storytelling to improve the quality of your markers and their linking, and use the skill to your advantage with peers.
