High-Leverage Storytelling

Welcome to the 312 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Friday. Join the 37,845 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Tegus!When I started to dive in on Disney, Tegus was my first destination—a cheat code for my research and learning process. Tegus is the leading platform for primary research—a searchable database of thousands of instantly-available, investor-led interviews with experts on a wide range of industries, companies, and topics. It’s fast and cost-effective, enabling you to do great primary research without breaking the bank.Special Offer: Tegus is offering a free 2-week trial to all Curiosity Chronicle subscribers—sign up below to level up your investment research game today!Today at a Glance:Storytelling is a foundational skill for supercharging all human endeavors.Disney was arguably the first company to prove that storytelling can create a durable competitive advantage that builds pricing power and a legitimate long-term business moat.The key principles of high-leverage storytelling: (1) Suspended Reality, (2) Multisensory Experience, (3) Details Matter, and (4) Make It Shareable.High-Leverage StorytellingStorytelling is a foundational skill.Humans are storytelling animals—our species developed around fires, telling tales of successes, failures, and fantasies, of hopes and dreams. It is woven into our DNA.If we study the lives of the greatest humans, we quickly find that the vast majority were exceptionally strong storytellers. This is no coincidence—effective, high-leverage storytelling is a supercharger for all human endeavors.The problem? We don’t study or teach storytelling in the same way we do other foundational skills.Therein lies an opportunity, however—with few understanding the principles of storytelling, those who do are likely to capture tremendous career and personal upside.In finance terms, it’s (basically) free alpha…So in today’s piece, I’d like to talk about the principles of high-leverage storytelling, brought to life by a real world example of these principles in action…Disney World.Disney WorldThe Walt Disney World Resort—Disney World for short—opened on October 1, 1971. It was the second major theme park under the Disney umbrella, following Disneyland, which was opened in Anaheim, California in 1955.Disney World celebrated its 50th anniversary on October 1, marking a major milestone on a historic run for the company, which now operates theme parks around the world.Importantly, Disney was arguably the first company to prove that storytelling can create a durable competitive advantage that builds pricing power and a legitimate long-term business moat.Storytelling is ingrained into the DNA of the company—its founder, Walt Disney, was history’s most obsessive storyteller.So it is no surprise that storytelling is a superpower that's on full display at Disney World. The park—which covers 43 square miles (or 2x the size of Manhattan!) and has 77,000+ employees—can teach us valuable principles for enhancing our own storytelling. This piece deconstructs the principles of high-leverage storytelling that make Disney World so magical (and that you can start using today):Principle 1: Suspended RealityWalt Disney was famous for his focus on suspending reality for his audiences—allowing them to fully experience a new reality he was creating while still being grounded in the safety of their own reality.It is a balancing act—too cold and you never capture the audience, too hot and people retreat to the safety of their reality and disappear.The Imagineers—a brilliant group of creatives, artists, and engineers in charge of designing the theme parks—have executed against this principle brilliantly.It’s on exhibit in several secrets of the park:The Tunnel NetworkAn intricate web of tunnels lies underneath the park, enabling characters to navigate to their respective “worlds” without ever appearing out of world or duplicative.This is critical, because an out of place character breaks the suspended reality for the guests, so Disney created an (expensive) solution.Further, the entire park is designed to create a separation of worlds and maintain the distinction within each domain. You cannot see into other worlds, which creates a legitimate immersion that reinforces the suspended reality.Forced PerspectiveForced perspective is a visual technique which uses optical illusions to make an object appear farther, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. The technique manipulates our visual perception by using scaled objects and the relationship between them and the viewing point of the customer.Disney uses forced perspective throughout its parks to create optical illusions that make objects appear different than reality.A key example: Cinderella's Castle, which has smaller bricks and windows near the top, making the castle look farther away and taller than it is.Purple Traffic SignsThe ...