Your leadership role doesn’t end when you leave the office. Your kids are looking up to you, too. And how do great leaders inspire the best in others? They spark our imagination with epic stories of heroes and adventure.
“Before I was born, when I was in the tummy of my mother, my father would always say a Pashtun story,” Malala Yousafzai recalls in the documentary He Named Me Malala. Yousafzai, the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate, has inspired a generation of women to stand up against oppression. Malala was named after the Afghani folk hero Malalai of Maiwand. As the legend goes, Malalai was a teenage warrior who saw men retreating in battle. “She rose up to the mountain. She raised her voice…it is better to live like a lion for a one day than to live like a slave for a hundred years.” Malalai led the army to victory before dying on the battlefield.
Yousafzai publicly acknowledges that listening to Malalai’s story over and over as a child gave her the courage to stand up against the Taliban. When Yousafzai was being targeted for speaking out about a girls’ right to attend school, she recalled the story of Malalai in a BBC interview: “When every man was losing courage on the battlefield a woman raised her voice.” Stories of heroes gave Malala the courage to speak up for the voiceless.
In two years of research for my new book The Storyteller’s Secret, I learned that nearly every great leader of our time was inspired by the storytellers who came before them. In most cases stories influenced their world view when they were quite young.
John F. Kennedy, who inspired a generation to shoot for the stars, was a very sick child and bedridden for much of his youth. He spent that time reading voraciously. He devoured the stories of heroes in the pages of books by Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. He read, and dreamed of playing the hero in the story of his life. When the time came to play the hero in his own adventure, ‘Jack’ was ready. On August 2, 1943, an enemy destroyer rammed Kennedy’s PT boat and split it in half. Two members of the 13-man crew were killed. One man was terribly injured and would certainly die if left on his own to swim to safety. Kennedy took a strap of the man’s life jacket, put it between his teeth, and swam four hours to a tiny uninhabited island that was only 70 yards wide. “With the physical courage of which he’d shown himself to be capable, Jack Kennedy had turned his years of frailty and private suffering into a personal and public confidence that would take him forward,” writes Chris Matthews in Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.
The visionary technologist Elon Musk 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,” Musk recalls. Today the Tesla and SpaceX CEO believes those stories of his grandfather’s exploits help to explain his insatiable desire for excitement, adventure, and his “unusual tolerance for risk.” Stories of adventure inspired Musk to dream bigger.
Our brains are hardwired to process the world in story. Storytelling is in our DNA. Stories force us to re-write our internal narrative. When firelight extended the day and humans began sharing stories around a campfire about 400,000 years ago, it marked a major milestone in human development. Stories warned others about potential threats, educated them on new ways to hunt or make tools, and sparked their imagination. Stories do the same today. Richard Branson gathers his team around a campfire at his home on Necker Island to share stories. “Storytelling can be used to drive change,” he says.
Former U.K. Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs once wrote an essay titled A Nation of Storytellers. “Stories give the group a shared identify and sense of purpose,” he said. “It is through narratives that we begin to learn who we are and how we are called on to behave.” In the essay Sachs also quotes Harvard professor Howard Gardner who believes a leader is someone who has “the ability to tell a particular type of story—one that explains ourselves to ourselves and gives power and resonance to a collective vision.”
The next decade holds more promise—and perhaps more peril—than civilization has ever known. We need ordinary kids to became the courageous champions of a bright future. Building the next generation of heroes starts at home.