Boy, this back-to-work week has been tough, after a fun break!

I would have loved to be able to make some good progress on the book, but could not because of a critical project which took up more time than expected.

Hopefully next week is better.

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the ninety-eighth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

Not sure of the data source, but fascinating stat. We are more demanding as employees than as consumers or investors.

Provocative prediction. I don't know ya... I am more comfortable either writing on paper or directly typing, instead of speaking...

An older tweet, but another provocative one. This one seems more probable to me. Who wouldn't want a reliable 24x7 house help?

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. '25 Useful Ideas for 2025' by Gurwinder

Writer-philosopher Gurwinder Bhogal has a list of nifty ideas/terms for the new year.

I loved the 'Law of conservation of difficulty'

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty:

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

- Judith Butler, Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time (1997)

Boy, that para would be a tough one as a reading-comprehension passage.

Next up is the Reminiscence bump. I don't know though - I don't particularly yearn for the 1990s:

4. Reminiscence Bump:

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked – morally, politically, economically, artistically – whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

This is so true - less is more when it comes to arguments when building a case:

15. Goal Dilution Effect:

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

b. On Humans fighting against institutions by Shantanu Deshpande

A provocative (though slightly depressing) LinkedIn post by Shantanu (CEO of Bombay Shaving Co.). He connects how most big industries (especially in the US) almost unknowingly seem to be working in cahoots:

Every human is getting increasingly and scarily alone in their fight against institutions.

Big Food stuff their products with palm oil, sugar, sodium, preservatives and addictive substances that make the individual dependent and extremely unhealthy over time

Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco design and distribute their products to create lifetime addiction and health hazard

Both of the above drive the funnel of consumers to Big Pharma - lesser said the better

He goes on to aim our attention at Big Tech, Big Banks, Big Real Estate, Big Influencers, and finally Big Government

Seems like a great premise for a dystopian novel or movie.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'The Power of Family Stories' on the Hidden Brain podcast

This lovely conversation between host Shankar Vedantam and psychologist Robyn Fivush talks about the impact that family stories can have on our lives.

Robyn talks about her husband's big 'storytelling family' and how the stories would keep the family cemented:

Robyn: ...And they had the big iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how one of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager had to get told. And it had to get told the same way, with the same punch lines, every year. And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family

Robyn would visit families and ask mothers to speak to their children about special occurrences from their family's past. She discovered that these stories were an important part of children learning about how to narrate their past. It also had other benefits:

Robyn: So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations, have children who have higher self-esteem even very early in development.

I was struck by one stat - 40% of all conversations are about past events:

Robyn: Families tell stories all the time. Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner. And we know from other research that 40% of all human conversation is referring to past experiences.

And this was the big finding in Robyn's research: families that share more stories have better outcomes:

Robyn: So families that tell more stories show more trust and community within the family. Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories, and particularly tell them in a certain way, and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem, they have higher academic competence, are doing better in school, they have higher social competence, they are more socially skilled. And in later research, because of course we followed up on this first study with lots and lots of research, as they get older and you can start to assess more mature aspects of well-being, like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

How does Robyn find out about how many stories children know? They use a simple 'Do you know' scale:

Robyn: The Do You Know Scale is a 20-item yes-no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed, simply to assess as a very, very rough index the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history. We ask adolescents and young adults, do you know where your parents met? Do you know where your mother went to school? Do you know what sports your father played in high school? Do you know where your grandmother grew up? Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met? So we're not getting stories, we're just getting yes, no. But in order to answer yes to a question like that, we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories.

What an elegant way to measure the likelihood of having heard more family stories!

I loved this lovely description of stories as a vehicle of passing on values and norms:

Stories are not just stories. They are sophisticated tools that humans use to pass on values, norms, and the complex contours of relationships. In family settings, stories can be engines of meaning, identity, and purpose.

The benefits of family stories are innumerable.

The episode renewed my commitment to spend more time at home - at the dinner table and in other spaces - listening to and sharing more family stories.

I hope it encourages you to do so too!

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

The Impact of Family Stories (3-2-1 by Story Rules #98)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Science Storytelling Tips from Mark Rober (3-2-1 by Story Rules #97)

Do Leaders Need to be Feared or Loved? (3-2-1 by Story Rules #96)

Damodaran on the Corporate Life Cycle (3-2-1 by Story Rules #95)