Facts Don't Matter, Unless...

I don't know about you, but I’ve never been someone with a great memory for facts and information.

Numbers, dates, dry examples—they just don’t stick. It’s why I always struggled with math equations unless they were in the form of word problems. (Who else remembers finally caring about how fast the train was going if it meant solving the riddle?)

Business books? Same story. Unless there’s a narrative to hold it all together, my brain tunes out. Most business books become reference manuals for me - great to flip through when I need something specific, but not exactly page-turners.

But give me a business book full of stories and suddenly I’m highlighting passages, scribbling in the margins and finding ways to apply what I’m learning in real time. Why? Because stories give facts meaning.

Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner discovered that facts are 22 times more likely to be remembered when wrapped in a story.

TWENTY-TWO times! That’s because stories don’t just speak to our minds—they speak to our emotions.

Think about the last speech or presentation that really stuck with you. Was it the slides full of bullet points? The data? Or was it the story that made you feel something?

The bottom line? Facts don't matter unless people can absorb them and make sense of them.

Don’t just share facts...make them memorable by giving them context and couching them in a story. Your audience will thank you for it, and they’ll actually remember what you said long after the mic drops.