This excerpt records Cameron Herold advising CEOs on three evergreen stories every leader should have: (1) the genesis story explaining how the business started, (2) the hero's-journey story about overcoming major adversity, and (3) a customer-centered story showing tangible customer benefit. Herold emphasizes these stories are inspirational, educational, and timeless (no expiry).
Chapters
Every media outlet likes writing two or three stories that every single one of you has. All of you have what I call the genesis story, right? It's how you started your business, right? It's what you saw, the problem you encountered, Getting fired from your crappy job, splitting up with your spouse and needing to figure it out, hating being an employee, whatever it was, that was the genesis of what you started. And then telling that story, it inspires others, it educates others. And because there's no timeline on it, there's no expiry, they can do the research and they can write the story in a month. The second one that we all have is that hero's journey, right? It's that overcoming adversity. It's. It's the lesson from the edge. It's when you struggled and when you almost went bankrupt, when one of your employees was stealing from you, when you almost lost your marriage because of it, when your kids weren't talking to you because you were working too hard, and you somehow overcame those things to build this brand. Again, it educates and it inspires. And it's not a fluff story. But again, there's no timeline on that story. And then the last one is the story that is about your customer, right? Where it's something that you did that gave your customer their time back or gave your customer their freedom or gave your customer a better home and a cleanliness that allowed them to have that great birthday party for their daughter. The little things that, again, are inspirational and timeless.
