📗 Get inspired by stories

To go far you need a large tank of high-octane fuel—or even better, a steady supply of renewable energy.

You need to be able to tap into powerful drivers that actually move people to do things.

And as a leader, you need to start with yourself.

Otherwise, you simply won’t get very far.

For example, I always had money-related goals on my mind. Sadly they never moved me to do much of anything. The things that actually happened, I did for other reasons and money was a side effect. Important, but never the primary thing.

To create a strong, motivating vision we must take into accounts three aspects:

1. what you want,
2. what other people want,
3. what might be possible together.

Each can take many forms, but there is one thing that unifies all three. When you dig deeply into what moves people it’s likely you will find stories.

Get inspired by stories

When you look closely our goals do not typically appear out of the blue. They are often created by comparing our situation to a narrative about other people’s experience. As humans we have a strong tendency to mimic each other. And there is no better vehicle than a story to communicate important challenges and and behaviours of those who stand up to them.

The idea for Grow Together Academy was also inspired by many stories.

That includes stories from our own experience working with many teams and many leaders, stories from the best books we’ve read, stories from the best offline and online courses we’ve attended, and stories from the ones we’ve designed & delivered ourselves.

Stories from great books like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Time to Think, and From Contempt to Curiosity.

Stories from movies and TV shows about how teams and leaders can behave at their best and worst, including: Star Trek, Dune, and Lord of the Rings.

And most relevant for the type of experience we’re creating right now, there are the stories of several excellent online cohort-based courses that I attended, including Seth Godin’s AltMBA (I was part of cohort 33), Building a Second Brain(cohort 11) or a Polish course about building courses.

It’s stories all the way down.

But to make the best use of stories we need one more thing: we need to ground them in our own reality. To relate them to the things we see, hear and do in our immediate environment. But this is a topic for another time (and one which we will definitely dig into during Grow Together Academy).

And what stories inspire YOU when it comes to leadership and collaboration? What epic heroes would you most like to be like? The vibe of which amazing teams would you love to replicate?