The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don't by Carmine Gallo

Author:Carmine Gallo [Gallo, Carmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781466882690
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-02-23T07:00:00+00:00

22

“Dude’s Selling a Battery” and Still Inspires

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

—Steve Jobs

While storytellers like Chris Hadfield dreamed of traveling to space, Elon wanted to build the spaceship to get them there. Story played an important role in Elon’s childhood in South Africa. “He seemed to have a book in his hands at all times,” wrote his biographer. When school let out at 2:00 p.m., he would go to the bookstore and stay until 6:00 p.m. The Lord of the Rings and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were among his favorites.

Young Elon loved reading stories and hearing them. He remembers listening, transfixed, to the stories of his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who had “a lust for adventure.” Haldeman would pack his family into a single-engine airplane and travel from their home in Pretoria, South Africa, on trips that would traverse 22,000 miles across Europe. “My grandmother told these tales of how they almost died several times along their journeys,”1 Elon recalls.

Today Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes those stories of his grandfather’s exploits help to explain his insatiable desire for excitement, adventure, and his “unusual tolerance for risk.” Musk is one the most influential innovators of our time, pioneering advances in electric cars, space travel, and sustainable energy.

On April 30, 2015, Musk introduced the Tesla Powerwall, a home battery that captures and stores sunlight from solar panels and converts it to energy. Although it’s designed for the average consumer, the technology that makes it work is highly complex. According to the website, “The Tesla Powerwall is a wall mounted, rechargeable lithium ion battery with liquid thermal control. It delivers a 5.8 amp nominal current and 8.6 amps at peak output. Powerwall is available in 10kWh, optimized for backup applications or 7kWh optimized for daily use applications.”2 And that’s the easy material. The technical specs are understandable only to the most advanced scientists and physicists.

Elon Musk is one of the smartest inventors on the planet, but when he explains technology to consumers he uses language even a sixth-grader can read.

The Storyteller’s Tools

Peter Kincaid codeveloped the Flesch-Kincaid readability test in 1975 for the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Defense Department began using it to assess the reading difficulty of training manuals. Today educators rely on the score to gauge the appropriate reading level for books used in the classroom. The Flesch-Kincaid grade level test measures word length, sentence length, and other factors to assign a grade level—the number of years of education generally required for a person to understand a specific text. For example, articles in the Harvard Business Review return a grade level of 17 or higher. Articles in the New York Times are written for ninth grade or higher, while, according to the tool, “Text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level of around 8.”

Let’s take a closer look at the key phrases in Elon Musk’s Powerwall presentation. Musk understands story and he knows that all great stories, as we’ve discussed, have a hero and a villain.

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