Tag Archive for ‘story’ rss

People Don’t Boo Nobodies

November 15, 2011 1 comment
"Boo"

Photo Credit: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/377186-the-san-francisco-giants-spit-on-tradition

I was listening to a Freakinomics podcast the other day and they were talking about “booing”.  You know, ref makes a bad call and you boo?  Ok that’s not the point.

It was a story about booing that got me.

Johnnie LeMaster played 12 seasons in the majors, mostly with the San Francisco Giants.  He was a shortstop with a career average of around 220.  Nothing special but an all around good player to have on your team.


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Caring is a Strategy

February 27, 2011 0 comments

This is a story I found in the book Practically Radical, another reason you should practically go buy it. Seriously, it’s a game changer.  This story had me tearing up.  Read on, you’ll see why.

At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Chicago kids come to get some of the best treatment for Cancer in the World.  A new building was going up,  the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care and construction workers on the project had to walk past the Dan-Farber Institute every day.

The Boston Globe Reported: “It has become a beloved ritual at Dana-Farber, every day, children who come to the clinic write their names on sheets of paper and tape them to the windows of the walkway for ironworkers to see.  And, every day the ironworkers paint the names onto I-beams and hoist them into place as they add floors to the new 14-story Yawkey Center for Cancer Care.


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How To: Get Me to Hate Your Organization

November 13, 2009 0 comments

Last Saturday morning I was woken at 9:45 by my doorbell.  No one comes to our house that early, it could be an emergency I thought to myself, so I staggered out of my room.  My room mate, in the same state (squinting eyes, wearing the pants from last night) was a step a head of me and opened the door.  To our dismay we found no one, just a little, old man leaving the yard going to the neighbors house.  We thought nothing of it except for how mad we were at this little, old man that got us with the ol’ ring and run trick.  Back to sleep.

Two and a half hours later I finally woke from my sleep and decided to check the temperature before I left the house.  Standing on the front porch something in the mailbox caught my eye, it was a “Heaven, how do I get there?” pamphlet.  The little, old man didn’t ring and run our house for nothing, he woke us up to ensure we got this pamphlet in time.  I think you understand the title for this post now.

Heaven’s a touchy subject, but I think Church is great, I
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Tell Me a Story

October 22, 2009 2 comments

If you want to get your point across tell me a story.  Stories, fable and urban legends have all been around for years for a reason, they are easy to remember.  History’s told in stories; our ancestors told parables to pass on knowledge.  Think about how a chilling urban legend will be remembered for years, how does this happen?  It’s a story.

When we’re told a story we actually go through a metal simulation in our minds, this is why it is much easier to remember than random fact, it’s like we’re actually there.  From Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick it says this; “Why does mental stimulation work?  It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity”.

Our minds have a difficult time piecing random fact together, but put in our minds a vivid picture of the story you are telling and we can recite it almost word for word as if we were there.  So if you are an educator, manager, or anyone that needs to make a point stick in some ones mind (which we all should be striving for)
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