What is strategy? Strategy is the plan to achieve your goals. The plan is a blueprint. It’s a menu. It’s a map. By extension, the blueprint is not the hammer. The menu is not the cookbook. The map is not the land. Here’s a simple trick to determine if your strategy is coherent. If you…
Over the past week or so, we’ve had a chance to look in depth at each of Christopher Booker’s 7 Basic Plots as they apply to marketing and storytelling: Overcoming the Monster: The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force which threatens the protagonist and the things/people/places the protagonist cares about. Rags to Riches:…
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the last of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: the Rebirth. The Rebirth is one of our favorites stories, as a human race. Rebirth is the story of redemption, of bad made good. Rebirth is especially…
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the sixth of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: the Tragedy. The tragedy is one of the oldest storytelling forms, in which the protagonist is actually a villain whose demise everyone roots for. One of the…
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the fifth of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: the Comedy. Comedy isn’t just funny content. While there are shows on Netflix of stand-up comedians doing their routine for two hours, that’s not comedy in the…
Previously, we looked at Christopher Booker’s 7 basic plots of how stories are told. Today, we’ll look at the fourth of these 7 from a content marketing perspective: Voyage and Return. JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit epitomizes the Voyage and Return, so much so that the subtitle of the book is There and Back Again, a…
It’s now the first day of February, so we’re a month into my three words of story, restoration, and compassion. All three are moving ahead very intensely, and I want to share one of the lessons I’ve learned about story. Early on, I thought stories were just narratives. You tell what happened. This tends to…
In the martial arts, there are series of exercises called kata (in Japanese), or forms. These are single or multi-person exercises that follow a pre-arranged sequence of techniques that are performed almost like a dance. An astonishing number of martial artists no longer see the value in kata. To them, they are outdated, outmoded relics…
The toughest fire I ever remember having to start was when I was on a Boy Scout campout in February. One of the challenges issued to scouts during that campout was the one-match fire: you’re given exactly one match to start a fire, and if it doesn’t work out, you don’t earn whatever merit badge…
