Apart from the dictionary definitions of these words, it’s easy to miss “author” in them and how it might help us understand something fundamental about what we do every day, how we do it, and why we do it.

Because I write fiction, to me an author is a novelist dressed up for a night at the opera, ideally in a black-and-white photograph with a cigarette. But how did the novelist afford the tickets? And the cigarette?

(William Burroughs didn’t need a job because his grandpappy invented an adding machine and he lived off a stipend)

Some novelists are so successful that they have one job: writing novels. I have only met one or two of these rare creatures.

Most of us, with a novel-writing habit, also have a career. A generation ago, novelists tended to be literature and writing teachers. We don’t see as much of that anymore, especially as university humanities departments shrink and shrivel.

When I was younger, novelists with a mentoring streak advised me to seek out important yet physical jobs that are not intellectually demanding. This way, we can dream ourselves into our stories while at work. Novelists tend to be obsessive, and our focus wavers. I will confess it is early in the morning and I have just spent a terrible night of sleep thinking about a problem at work. Those mentors, I suppose, were on to something.

I’ve met drivers, a few security guards, a janitor, a mail deliverer, a sous-chef, and a roofer who went home, at the end of the day, to slash away at their books.

This was not for me. The way my brain operates, if I did not obsess about work I would discover problems in the neighbourhood, or with the confusing subtropical trees planted around my house, or my dog’s behaviour. I’m glad I have been able to build an interplay between two careers with a core of storytelling, and I’ve learned so much by observing human behaviour in high-pressure jobs.

In another post, I suggested that corporate boards ought to invite a novelist into the room. I meant it, despite its self-serving flair, though my little essay did not make a dent in board recruitment postings on LinkedIn, where experience as an accountant or a lawyer is what the manufacturing concerns and energy companies really want.

Maybe author is a better word. I have had a few conversations, in recent weeks, that remind me of how strange and valuable it is to think like an author.

(some leaders, like Martha Stewart and Elon Musk, are both authors and allegedly authoritarian)

Enduring leadership is about authority, but not in the usual way we define that word. The top-down power to govern and control is important, especially in hierarchical organizations where nuance can be dangerous.

However, if we are not in the military or paramilitary, we need something else from our teams. We need them to feel a sense of co-ownership so they can improvise, try-and-fail, improve products and services, to create value no single authoritarian leader could imagine alone.

Leadership, in this sense, is inspiring others to act. Bottom-up. But it isn’t chaos. We still need the coherence of an author, someone who can articulate a complex mission in a simple and powerful way so everything meets in the glorious and productive middle.

Authors must remember why they are doing what they are doing, and who they are doing it for. It’s fun to consider the example of Franz Kafka, who asked his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but most of us who write do it for readers. Whenever an author tells me, “I do it for myself,” I think, “Bullshit you do.”

(Franz Kafka actually meant it)

Novelists and screenwriters are here to entertain people, to remind each other of our humanity, our shared pain and joy and ridiculousness. But in our careers, we often find leaders who do everything for themselves. Why do they do what they do every day? Who do they do it for? The next job, obviously, and more money, power, control. Customers and clients, those people out there, are data points to manipulate.

Business strategy needs a point of view. It needs clarity, because vanishingly few people are going to read your plan. It runs on empathy: an understanding of what it feels like to be a human being with a problem. The shared jargon words of our corporate moment will only lose and confuse your audience. Mastery, in communicating your story, and telling your customers’ story, is knowing what to leave out.

Nearly every rule, from novel-writing, applies to genuine authority. It is spectacularly difficult to take a whole world and squeeze it into something any reader can enter. A first draft is never good enough. You will need an agent, an editor, a designer, and people who can tell you when you have made a big mistake.

If you can’t describe it compellingly in a few sentences, with simple and human language, it’s too complicated. Even though you put your whole heart into it, some people will see themselves in what you have created and some won’t. The same goes for your team, and it can make the difference between a job and a daily mission. Many of them will experience and interpret the story differently, and we should see this as a gift rather than friction.

Most importantly: being an author is not for everyone.

“I’ve been worried about my son and this helped. It got us talking.”

Novels aren’t self-help programs but this is what writers most want, when we work on these things for years and years. Her note made me dizzy with joy and pride. Also I have chronic vertigo but the joy was in there, for sure.

When I was in my early 20s, I would have been an absolutely stellar candidate for the worst kinds of social and political grievance. Happily, there was no algorithmic social media back then.

I finished graduate school into a sad economy. In Montreal, where I was living, it was even sadder than in other cities because of a recent referendum on separation and threats that it could happen again. No one was hiring so I moved back to Edmonton where… no one was hiring.

(a fuzzy photo of myself in my early 20s with just a hint of the sideburns I could not grow)

My parents weren’t the types of people to know captains of industry and I hadn’t been living in Alberta. I sent out résumés daily and heard nothing, daily. I did odd manual labour jobs when I could find them, like taking old computer monitors to the dump. In the evenings, I watched old James Bond movies and felt sorry for myself.

My friends tended to grow up in different circumstances, with parents who did not smoke cigarettes. They were lawyers and airline pilots and veterinarians and bureaucrats and business owners. They went on holidays to Europe and Latin American countries and had graduated without student loans.

Self-pity and blaming others for my lack of success would have been an easy pattern to follow.

My dad, who had lost his arm at nineteen, lacked confidence. When he did not advance, at work, he presented the news to us with a smile that confused my brother and me until we learned the family ways of irony and sarcasm. If he lost his parking spot to an ambitious younger person, my dad would talk about it as confirmation. It transcended irony: there was a strange pleasure in recounting to his sons the story of his failure. The universe was organized this way, against him, and when it revealed its mysteries with a new humiliation it seemed like divine order, grim beauty.

Back then, there was no obvious portal into a global community of young men like me. No podcasts, no YouTube, no X, no chans. The only conspiracy theory I knew about was the one in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and it was too complicated to plug into my own woes. My ethnic heritage was messy enough that I could not claim there was a war against WASPs; the only place it felt weird to be white, back then, was in critical theory workshops.

(this is what my copy looked like)

While I bathed in grievance, no one encouraged me to remain in it. James Bond didn’t mope around in his parents’ basement or give up when one of his damsels was captured. While my dad pitied himself, he only ever tried to uplift his sons. More importantly, my friends coaxed me out of my isolation and depression. They forced me go out for pints and made fun of me when I recounted tales of personal failure in the family way.

I was not looking for a community of like-minded, put-upon white men from lower middle-class families who were keen to explore, for several hours a day, how global elites or woke gatekeepers or the mainstream media were aligned against us. But today, grifters and con men are happy to create those communities and to profit from them along with the owners of the media. The consequences can be devastating.

“You are not alone” is a powerful phrase and storytelling platform. It is inherently emotional and positive, even when the motives behind it are grotesque. If you blame immigrants or feminists or CEOs or journalists or politicians for your lack of success, you are not alone. For only $49.99 per month, you can be part of a community of men who feel just like you. These days, with inflation caused by that politician you don’t like, fifty bucks isn’t even half a tank of gas.

I remember feeling the way I felt when I was young and underemployed so acutely it was easy to enter the heart and mind of Waylon Gans, writing What Gentlemen Do. I spent time inside the worst of YouTube, Twitter, and uglier places, absolutely ruining my own algorithms, to understand how hard it would be to escape.

My friends saved me with pressure and mockery, by sometimes just showing up at my parents’ house and joining me in the basement. They dragged me out to bars and nightclubs. They inspired me to think about business ideas. If no one wants to hire you, just start your own thing. Go volunteer. Take up ultimate frisbee.

I dare you, you big baby.

There have been plenty of books, podcasts, academic articles, and Atlantic essays on the plight of young men. The last thing readers needed was another 336 pages of doom. So, I wanted things to work out for Waylon Gans, a big baby like me, because he decides — with a bit of help — to escape the worst of himself. I wanted to tap into a contemporary version of what my friends had done for me.

Only the argument seems to be about itself, in a loop of hopelessness. The academics, the podcasters, and the magazine writers explore it with quantitative data, with anecdotes, and with historical context from Gender Studies 101, and they have some big ideas.

But the solution might be a lot of small ideas, in our cities.

For What Gentlemen Do, my new novel, I dove into the algorithms for a few years. While the names you may have heard of, in the manosphere, say all the extreme nonsense to hoover up the money and attention, when you read the comments and hear the audience questions, there is something far more innocent, even encouraging, happening underneath it all.

Men pay monthly subscription fees to be part of online communities that become affiliate marketing enterprises. At the top of each one, there is a wealthy podcaster promising to transform us schlubs into wealthy and attractive Casanovas. In the novel, I call this club The Gentlemen.

But when you read them on Reddit, even on the chans, the young men paying $49.99 per month understand what they are paying for. They know they will never be smoking cigars at the tip of the pyramid, surrounded by Onlyfans stars. They are paying to be connected to each other, cracking a mixture of cruel and self-deprecating jokes, at the bottom.

It’s a cynical enterprise, to sell belonging, but belonging is the product. It isn’t the grievance philosophy, the get-rich-quick schemes, the dating advice, or the conspiracies. It’s meaning and togetherness.

Those of us who care about young men can’t help ourselves. We come up with colossal top-down policies and projects: boys starting school a year later than girls, national service, slashed regulatory barriers to building new houses and apartments, incentives and campaigns to encourage marriage and fatherhood.

What makes it more complex, and harder to fix, is that underperforming men experience this big problem in millions of unique and intimate ways. It’s the subtext in every line of clever banter online: young men are alone with their devices at 1am. We can engineer a construction boom, a revival of marriage and three kids per family, an improvement of the education system, even a transfer of wealth, but we can’t force anyone to join the Elks Club.

(this might be a hard sell for Gen-Z)

In The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett point out that older generations created the conditions for what Americans now call the Progressive Era but it was young people who seized it with ideas, projects, and movements.

No one in the post Gilded Age White House ordered that cities and towns create chambers of commerce, professional associations, artist collectives, the PTA, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the NAACP, 4H, Rotary, and women’s clubs around the turn of the last century. The laboratories were often in cities like Madison and Cleveland, rather than New York and Washington.

Rather than five big ideas to improve the plight of young men and women in the United States, Canada, and Australia, where the wealth and opportunity gap is widening, what about five hundred, one thousand, or one hundred thousand small ideas, projects, and policies?

This decentralized model, and call to action, is something we build together rather than something that is done to us. It happens in towns and cities around the world, even neighborhoods, rather than in the boardrooms of capitals and legislatures. It isn’t a spoiler, but this is what Waylon Gans, the protagonist of What Gentlemen Do, tries. He looks outside and tries to fix his city, so his friends will stop leaving.

(cities are the ultimate laboratories… if we treat them that way)

I work for cities, to help them unearth and create bottom-up, unified economic development strategies. I currently work for the Gold Coast, a magnificent city full of young people who haven’t yet been asked to contribute.

It’s harder, and it takes more time, but it reminds people why they live where they live, what makes it special, and what they can do about it. This is, essentially, their product.

While most ambitious cities in the world think they can do it with expensive, symbolic infrastructure, their version of the Statue of Liberty, we see and feel the story of New York City far more movingly on the High Line.

(while we often want a fast-track to “iconic” it’s the strange, loveable, and relatively cheap spaces built by community obsession that last)

Young people can find meaning and togetherness on the streets when the local team wins a game, but they need something more enduring: an invitation to get out there and improve something, save something, create something with friends and like-minded strangers that can only happen in their communities.

The macro solutions, the abundance agendas, the new new new deals, can happen at the same time. A Gold Coast version of the High Line won’t help anyone get a cheaper house but one thousand small things, in cities all over the world, can coax us off social media, bring us together with a common purpose, build skills and confidence, and remind us that all of this is ours to build.

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women.” - Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

When I was fifteen, I drank alcohol for the first time and a boy beat me up in front of a huge crowd at a bush party. Lots of punches, and then kicks as I crawled around. When the boy was finished, he poured a beer on my head. I think it was beer.

High school being high school, even the kids who weren’t there knew about it by Monday morning.

While I didn’t remember much of the beating, as I was apparently slurring and stumbling before it happened, the ordeal stayed with me because of how I looked in the mirror. I had to go to the hospital. My mom cried when she saw me.

Mostly it was humiliating, in a way I remember vividly. People whispered about me, pitied me, treated me as a victim. Of course, I was a victim. I just hated to feel that way.

This was a before-and-after event, and while I wish it did not happen, it inspired some worthwhile things. I ended up in mixed martial arts for years, which was fun and enduring, though I remained hopelessly indefensible after a drink or two.

That night became central to the way I grew into adulthood: careful, cautious, untrusting of other men. And it gave me a theme to explore, as a novelist. It is not terribly special to be pummelled, especially when you grow up in an oil and hockey town. What stayed with me was the humiliation.

Of the thousands of wonderful and funny and scary things that happened as a teenager, why did that night stay with me? As the core memory of my youth? Why had I felt so humiliated, so weak, so out of control? Why that memory instead of lovely moments from football and theatre and lifelong friends and my first girlfriend?

I have never spoken to a psychiatrist about this, but I am more or less certain that I get up at five a.m. and give the first efforts of my day to this money-losing and heartbreaking endeavour because that guy beat me up when I was fifteen. I am a writer because I was profoundly humiliated, in front of all the kids, and because I have never quite figured out what it means.

My new novel, What Gentlemen Do, is about a young man named Waylon Gans who falls deep into grievance and bad podcasts, the ugliest parts of the Internet, after being humiliated. No one beats him up, though that happened in a different novel. Waylon is forced to take a class in Stoicism, which is a lovely antidote for humiliation, if you have the temperament for it. We try, we try. Largely through his relationships with women, Waylon gets a chance to explore what it means to be a man in this weird time. Not a dumb podcast stereotype of a man but something else, someone with a purpose larger than himself.

This week, McClelland & Stewart is also republishing Monument, originally The Empress of Idaho, another book about the fraught relationships between women and men. Then there is Toby: A Man, also about humiliation and non-traditional views of masculinity, and two crime novels that explore the same themes.

None of these novels are for men, which is lucky because, statistically, we are not superb book buyers. If anything, each of these novels is an outsider’s exploration of traditional masculinity by someone who is resolutely bad at it. Ask my daughters, who treat me like one of the girls. It’s not a new thing. My response to teenage humiliation was not to become macho. On one of my first dates with my now-wife, one of my best friends took her aside and warned her that I am “a daisy.” I don’t know the names of cars, and I am afraid of motorcycles and farm animals.

Was I bad at masculinity, was I a daisy, before lying in bed for years, actual years, thinking about the night that boy punched me and kicked me and poured beer on my head because I had spoken to his girlfriend? Maybe. Was I a writer? I’m not sure.

Writers are obsessives. We overthink and analyze and fuss and wonder, but not about everything. Perhaps I would have been far more successful, as a writer, if my early obsession was magic or the immigrant story or wellness fads. It’s more likely I would have become obsessed, like everyone else, with money.

I did not choose to be humiliated that night when I was fifteen. And I am not noble. Like all losers, I fantasized about being sober and in loose-fitting clothes when that boy who beat me up, who became a puffy-faced and slow-moving man in cowboy boots, turned up in a public place in my hometown.

Thanks to him, maybe, maybe, I have never suffered from writer’s block.

Language evolves, she would argue. The markers and cues and fillers and clichés were anthropologically fascinating to her. For me, and the undiagnosed disorder in my heart, these words were psychological sandpaper.

When my daughters were young, I banned the use of the word “like” superfluously in our house. There were awkward moments during sleepovers, when they would assure their friends: “It’s okay. He is joking.”

He wasn’t.

I taught my daughters to avoid “um” and to steer away from starting sentences with “so” and to never, ever use jargony phrases like “from a ____ perspective” in their speeches and school writing. By their mid-teens, they were finished with my nonsense.

Though it remains my nonsense.

At work, I do not have the power to ban words. Leadership is about inspiring action in others, not forcing them to do what you say. Of course, all it takes is a ten second scan of American political news to see that last sentence is entirely wrong in practice, but I am an optimist.

I know banning words sounds terrible. Words are not knives, or even sandpaper. We should be free to express ourselves, apart from inciting violence and hate. Lies? They are hard to endure, but a dose of stoicism helps with that because the local tabloid and that sociopath on Facebook is going to lie for clicks no matter how poorly you feel about it.

I mostly ban words and phrases for myself, when they stop meaning anything. If the language we use is meaningless, George Orwell warned, we will be meaningless. Innovation is long gone for me, along with world-class, resilient, and disruptive. We are currently running workshops for brand partners, on the Gold Coast, and I share a slide with a few suggestions and words and phrases to avoid, just for fun.

None of them are harmful, in themselves. They are all corporate synonyms of “Super awesome!” in some way. Just for fun, we encourage partners to describe, as precisely as they can, with examples, what they mean by an innovative company or a resilient city. World-class enterprises don’t call themselves world-class. They just are who they are and tell their story powerfully.

Banning words tips us closer to telling our story. We think before we say the first cliché that naturally pops in our heads. We ease down the funnel of cultural specificity.

It works for our organizations and for our careers. If we describe ourselves in our LinkedIn bios as innovative and dynamic leaders does it say anything, in a crowded marketplace of talent, about what makes us special? How do we respond if someone asks, “What is one truly innovative thing you did this week?”

Like my linguist friend on Twitter, I am sure a LinkedIn recruiter would call me a fussy weirdo for giving this advice. I have written before about how my “story-first” advice has hurt my children, whose professors are sometimes looking for a robotic approach to learning. Sorry, kids. Again.

Perhaps it is the same for exhausted readers of cover letters and LinkedIn bios, who may be resorting to artificial intelligence. If the algorithm is looking for innovative, and you talk about your unique approach to solving problems with others, using examples, maybe you will be overlooked.

You might also be happier, saying innovative all the time. It is permanently painful when words are sandpaper, or knives. But I promise there are benefits in being a fussy weirdo about language, in forcing yourself to find a fresh way to say leverage. There are other fussy weirdos, and you will recognize them in their books and presentations, in the dialogue they write for actors.

This is your invitation to be a passive-aggressive (just for fun!) or aggressive-aggressive (get out of my house!) word-banner, a fussy weirdo. Join us! Ban ten words for a week and let me know how it feels. Please include the humiliating bits.

I was enormously proud and excited about the book. Others were too. I would hear from people who worked at Penguin Random House, not my editor or publisher, just early readers who wanted me to know they loved it. There was a hard, confusing, semi-autobiographical quality to the novel, about a teenager named Adam and his relationship with an older woman, a newcomer to the town named Beatrice.

(the original title and cover)

Cathal Kelly, a writer I admire, read it and said, “If Gillian Flynn, Richard Ford, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Irving got together to write a novel, they would come up with The Empress of Idaho. Todd Babiak has gotten very close to perfection here. Plan ahead before you start—once you do, you will not be able to stop.”

These quotations on the backs of books, called blurbs, only show up if the person who reads the book likes it. This quotation and another one by Claudia Dey, another writer I admire, who called it “a 1980s Lolita turned into a darkly compulsive miniseries by Jean-Marc Vallée” made me sweaty and wild with optimism.

Cathal and Claudia absolutely understood the novel, what I was trying to do. Everyone would think similarly. Soon I would be dining with Zadie Smith.

Some early online conversations about the novel focused on the sexy bits, so much that my future boss wanted to know if all this could embarrass the Australian state of Tasmania, where I was about to start a new job.

My boss need not have worried.

Nothing really happened with the novel. No one invited me to their literary festivals that autumn.

I could feel it coming in media interviews, as journalists nearly always placed the novel in the context of the Me Too movement. Was this not the wrong time to talk about a story like this? Even to promote it? I felt like I had done something wrong. The whole enterprise was off-topic, like shouting about the origins of communism while people are kicking their way through the Berlin Wall.

What could I say? They were right.

There is, of course, a good chance Cathal and Claudia and the others were just wrong, that it was a boring and pointless novel. The 1980s? Some football kid and his mom and some lusty dingbat? Who cares!

But instead of sleeping, I rolled around in bed thinking about good luck and bad luck in endeavours like novel writing and filmmaking. This takes a long time. The publisher or studio picks a date in the future to release the thing, without a psychic on staff to divine a perfect moment.

Two of my favourite classic American things, The Great Gatsby and It’s a Wonderful Life, were entirely out of sync with the culture at the time of their release.

(Alert, alert: I am speaking of these works as cultural artifacts, not comparing myself to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Frank Capra.)

Books about longing and moral emptiness and movies about sacrifice and desperation don’t sell well in eras of optimism and prosperity.

All we can do, as creative people, is write the book humming and shaking inside of us. Chasing trends, trying to align with the zeitgeist, might work for TikToks and Instagram Reels, but everyone’s favourite poet and lunatic fascist asshole Ezra Pound was right about the never-ending cycle of Make it New.

On June 23, McClelland & Stewart will release my new novel, What Gentlemen Do. I have been working on it for years, so I can’t claim to be hitting any cultural targets, but it does concern a young, aggrieved, white man, living in a sad and forgotten city, who feels the world and its economy are against him.

We have those!

On the same day, my wonderful publisher is also re-releasing The Empress of Idaho, with a new title: Monument. That is the name of the town where Adam and his mom and Beatrice live, and of course there are secondary meanings. It’s literature, mes amis.

(I am colourblind so I don’t really see what you see on the new cover)

Is this a better time for Monument? Who knows. A peek at today’s news suggests men aren’t behaving any better than in 2019. But as soon as you start thinking about it that way, about how a novel might fit into a cultural moment, you sound like a tarot card reader or a lunatic. I adore the leaders at McClelland & Stewart for trying a new, untested, bold thing.

How about the timing of What Gentlemen Do? Will people give it a try, tell their friends about it, read it over the summer, buy it for Christmas? Will it add to conversations about aggrieved young men? So far, my marketing plan is unanswered emails to podcasters and awkward TikToks and Reels about stoicism, a major part of the new novel.

We put so much of ourselves into these things, hoping for a meaningful connection with a reader. But the stoics would remind us 99% of this is outside our control. Try, try, try, risk, risk, risk, fix, fix, fix, push, push, push. But find a way to sleep at night.

The phrase “toxic empathy” tries to push it further so Elon Musk and his pals can get even more stuff.

For them, empathy itself is toxic.

In English 101, we read Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. If you have not read it, or seen it performed, the play concerns two minor characters in Hamlet. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, puts these two doomed idiots at the centre of his story, with Hamlet the overthinking prince off-stage.

(Joshua McGuire and Daniel Radcliffe as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)

This was before Marvel, Star Wars, and Disney movies became franchises, with the possibility for Iron Man’s foot fungus to get its own movie, limited series, touring ice dance show, and line of popsicles and Halloween costumes.

But back in the 1990s the play shocked and delighted me, gave me a new route into reading and writing. More importantly, it taught me something about how we can build value and meaning into our work.

The Stoppard play is delightful as a thing-in-itself, but it would not have been possible without Shakespeare. Not only because he created Hamlet and the Hamlet universe but because all his characters, in all his plays, are so human. We don’t know much about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from Hamlet, as they exist largely as plot devices. This is unusual. Shakespeare is great because of what he did to every other character of consequence in Hamlet: he entered their hearts deeply and remained there, used all their passions and contradictions, their weaknesses, to bring them to life.

Shakespeare was an empathy machine: curious, strategic, and obsessively hard working.

Like any writer, I have tried to learn from him. Even characters who don’t do much of anything in my novels are human beings. I give them backstories. I haunt them. I try.

In What Gentlemen Do, Waylon Gans and his parents Tracy and Stan Gans live next door to a man named Mr. Kang. There is an important scene, near the beginning of the novel, when Tracy discovers her husband has drained their home equity line of credit to bet on a crypto coin. The coin fails. Waylon and his mom are sitting together on the front porch, in the terrible echo of this news, and Mr. Kang is listening to Shaboozey and tending to his yard.

For the next while, Mom tried to explain a Ponzi scheme to me. Then she realized she did not know what it was either so we just sat in silence. Mr. Kang fired up his weed whacker and went after the dandelions that grew between his peonies and the concrete slab of his house. His wife, Helga, had fallen in love with another man and moved to Greece. Mr. Kang wore dress pants and a shirt with a collar for gardening, like he had mixed it up with a job interview. The weed detritus had a sweet wet green smell, even from our front porch.

Waylon does not interact with Mr. Kang in What Gentlemen Do but I have a short story in my head about the childless Mr. Kang, born in 1977, how he lives, the quality of his summer evenings, why Helga lit out for Greece and what he plans to do next. Maybe there is an awkward woman with unfashionable spectacles on Laredo Street who notices Mr. Kang out there weed whacking in wool pants and a button-up dress shirt, finds it odd but irresistibly so.

This is what writing fiction teaches you, when you do it every morning. It makes everything better, more alive, when even the Rosencrantzes, Guildensterns, and Mr. Kangs have an inner life. And it leaks into your life…

I have had the good fortune to apply this thinking, and feeling, to my job. Understanding people as people, their desires and motivations, what they aim to achieve together, and helping them articulate it emotionally, without bullshit or jargon, uses the same skills as trying to figure out Waylon — a lost and aggrieved twenty-one year-old who has been seduced into nasty politics.

When someone in the work world is so obsessed with power and advancement they lie and undermine you, you learn to see it from their point of view. They struggle when they are alone with themselves. They lack confidence, despite projecting it. Were they born like this or did something happen to them, when they were kids?

Every time he tries to hurt you, you think: oh that sad, miserable, awful man.

Though it is relative, we are all in pain. We worry and fret, we deal with illness and age and people. For some of us there are whole movements of history and communities of people who derive pleasure from diminishing our humanity.

It enriches our lives to listen quietly, without judgment. There is nothing toxic about trying to understand other human beings, if we accept we cannot change them. It’s a gift to them and to us. Unless they are characters in our books or, in the case of Elon and his pals, we own the algorithms.

What an asshole, we think. Then, slowly, we understand.

Neither daughter nor son wants to live the life their parents lived. They’re urban people now, with their own unique desires. Succession, a generational or multi-generational dream, becomes impossible. All they can hope, in the end, is that there aren’t too many taxes owing and that their daughter, son, spouses, and children don’t tear each other apart in court over the money.

At Story Engine, we worked with family-owned companies wrestling with this. I was younger then, and so haunted by my own post-graduation struggles in a recessionary job market, that I wondered why these lucky people could not see themselves as owners and managers of a perfectly good light-manufacturing concern.

At a conference where I was asked to speak about using narrative in business strategy, there was a break-out on succession. One of the planned panellists fell ill and the organizer offered to pay me more if I could take his place and “wing it.”

Story Engine’s ownership was spread across two families, and my children were in their “pretty good at colouring” phase at the time, but I’m terrible at saying no to money. I went up on stage to talk about our clients’ experiences without naming names. The woman on the panel with me cried mid-way through her opening remarks.

I found myself in tears listening to her worries, both for the business she inherited from her father and for her children. Neither of her kids was remotely interested in taking over, and she was struggling with the decision to either hire a CEO outside the family or sell.

We invest so much into our businesses and careers, and we sometimes fail to acknowledge the emotional aspect. Finance can be thrilling and devastating, but we tend to forget its consequences on people. Business language is so polluted with jargon and fads that we push feelings away, replacing human fragility with a PESTLE Analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, or just some abstract boasts about resilience.

In family businesses, it’s harder to put emotion in the closet.

My daughters could not help listening to me talk about storytelling in business. They taught me a lot, as tough audiences. Neither of them had any patience for the boring bits, and even when they were pretty good at colouring they could sniff out an inauthentic moment.

Both of them are now studying a fusion of law and liberal arts, still teaching me things. My daughter Avia is a student at the University of Sydney. Though Sydney’s population is approaching six million, it remains a tightly-connected city and as immigrants we have few connections. No one gets a legal clerkship, it turns out, because of a sparkling cover letter.

In Sydney, you have to know someone.

Before she found her current part-time job, in a barristers’ chambers, Avia was desperate. So she created one for herself, based on what she watched me do for most of her childhood. To add a bit of legal flare, she called her business Atticus Consulting (both of us refuse to read To Kill a Mockingbird, the sequel).

(the Atticus Consulting logo)

Atticus Consulting found a client. Avia did story interviews, as she had heard me do them, piled into other research, spent time with the organisation, and distilled it all into a one-page story and an implementation strategy. I helped, but she was the boss of the enterprise.

She asked me to join her, when she presented it. She was amazing, far more confident than I was at twenty. When we walked away from the conference room, afterward, she was upset. Even though she had heard thirty positive things about the work she had done, Avia was — as I once was — focused on the two or three things that did not go as well.

This is true succession.

It was a window into what I had to learn through tense and sweaty sessions with clients, over many years. Stay calm, breathe. People will surprise you. Some of them need to go to the bathroom a lot, they just do, and they don’t mean any disrespect. Others are addicted to their phones. They can’t go two hours without looking. Despite it all being clear in your head, your clients are hearing this the first time and they will want you to do it for them, if you can. This is why there have always been advisors, even in the most ancient texts.

(the CEO of Atticus Consulting on the Busselton Jetty)

Yes, AI is coming for us all. But humans still need humans, to help us and entertain us and keep us out of court, or jail, to build something we cannot build ourselves because our brains do not work that way.

Will Avia fold storytelling into her career as a lawyer? Assuredly. Will she continue in the family business, in some way? I don’t have to be the angry patriarch at the dinner table and I don’t have to swig corn liquor tearfully in the barn because no matter what they do, both my daughters have been infected by the narrative virus. I hope it helps, as I hope it helps you.

When she wanted to annoy me, Esmé, my other daughter, used to say, “Um, like, from a ‘so’ perspective,” folding all of my least favourite business phrases into one phrase.

Infected.

Amoeba-level creativity.

We are who we say we are, the poets and philosophers remind us. I like to ask Mom why she thinks the way she does about herself. She now speculates she grew up without confidence, dismissed and belittled by her own mother, and graduated straight from high school into marriage. She funnelled her creativity into motherhood. But it went deeper.

Someone or many people told her she wasn’t creative or productive. They encouraged her to think ideas and risks were for other people, and Mom believed it.

Since I like to go through the horror of moving a lot, I get a chance to look at things that are designed to sit unmolested in boxes for thirty years. One of these things is a folder Mom made of my writing, from grade six tales of ice hockey and sex and cannibalism to goofy nonsense in the university newspaper and my first published piece of fiction, an embarrassingly autobiographical story in a journal called Blood & Aphorisms that was, to me, the literary version of Sub Pop Records.

She wasn’t against creativity. Mom read crime and horror novels with a fiendish enthusiasm and could have completed a PhD on the relationship between Matlock and Murder, She Wrote.

(Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a deeply important person in our house)

Creativity was for other people.

When it turned out I was nerdy in school and might have become a doctor or a lawyer, yet decided instead to follow a more meandering path, Mom quietly asked Dad not to worry. It didn’t work. He associated creativity with the arts, which had only produced heartbreak in his ancestors. They were violinmakers and musicians who gave it all up to pursue farming when they moved to Canada.

Of course, Dad had it backwards. If his people had focused on violinmaking instead of the safer option, an agricultural endeavour they knew nothing about and probably despised, Dad would have been born into a happy but struggling family of craftspeople. Instead, he tried to be a farmer, lost his arm in a tractor accident, made no money anyway, never had a parking spot at work, and watched his sisters fall into crazy politics.

They could have been violinmakers.

(even the Amati family gave up on violins)

Dad died far too young for me to tell him creativity is not just the domain of the arts. It’s an essential part of being human. It’s why we have flushing toilets and antibiotics and canned sardines, his favourite food. It’s also why drones carry explosives and why what remains of my father’s family believes birds aren’t real and that immigrants are desperate to stab them at Costco and rip off Medicare. But let’s focus on the good stuff.

Story Engine clients would often whisper, after hiring us, that they weren’t creative. They couldn’t help us unearth the story of their bank or their start-up, their city or their multinational baking concern because they were accountants or coders, CEOs or senior vice-presidents of operations.

There was something mysterious, even scary, about Story Engine. Advertising agencies just did creativity at clients. The bank got a new website, a rhyming phrase they could put on stuff, a TV commercial, and merch. The big consultancies gave them boring reports that felt like a warm MBA bath of innovation and sustainably resilient verticals on a go-forward basis.

The idea that we were going to help them think differently sounded good, in the proposal, but once they said yes and the doors were closed and the small-talk was finished, they suspected we were going to ask them to strip to their underthings and slap snakeskin drums.

Maybe it’s a flaw in the English language, that we don’t have a good way to bridge the artistic instinct, entrepreneurial ambition, and our deep love of understanding and solving problems, of helping each other, of finding new ways to be our best selves while doing it. There is nothing wrong with growing wheat and canola, obviously, but violinmakers are important too, and learning how to make and play violins can help you make and do other things that humans need today and will need tomorrow.

I remember what it felt like, when Mom put all my money-losing writing endeavours into a folder and presented it to me on my birthday. She had been watching and reading all along, caring. There was value in what I had been learning to do, and she wanted me to know I would figure out how to make a market for it in some way.

Mom is creative. We’re all creative, and I wish there were some way to wipe away the confusing shame that comes with the word for some people, as though it were the antithesis of GOOD BUSINESS THINKING™.

What did she make in that ceramics class? An absolutely kickass R2D2 lamp that I desperately wish I still had.

My new novel, What Gentlemen Do (Canada, USA) will be published by the beautiful people at McClelland & Stewart in June.

(The cover will be ready in a day or two)

Twenty years ago, book publishing relied on publicity. Someone at the publishing house would send copies of the book to people at newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television studios desperately hoping that one of these people, drowning in boxes and shipping bags, would give it to the right reviewer or producer.

I am so dumb that when my last book, a Halloween-Christmas themed novel called The Spirits Up came out, I thought it would still work that way.

It didn’t. It doesn’t. It’s over, and it has been over for a long time.

I spoke to a senior American publishing executive a few years ago, and he was gloomy about all of this. “If you aren’t famous, or famous on TikTok, I’m not sure there’s a way anymore. No one will find your book. We can’t even sell your book if you’re TikTok famous. It’s all just luck.”

In the first half of What Gentlemen Do, Waylon Gans, our protagonist, would let this sort of thing get him down. At least in the first half of the novel. He is not special. The system and its actors are in a conspiracy against people like him. He derives pleasure from feeling sorry for himself, and sees every setback as delicious confirmation. The podcasters reinforce it all.

Come on, Waylon.

People are still reading novels. Americans, the most literary people in the world, read seventeen books a year, on average, followed by India, the UK, France, Italy, and Canada. This is an unscientific hunch, but I suspect in each of these countries the numbers are juiced by students and super-readers like us.

My part-time job, somehow, between now and the 23^rd of June, is to move a sufficient number of these super-readers in North America to pre-order What Gentlemen Do. And then, once they order and read it, to tell their friends and to put it on their book club calendar. Someone will have to slip it to Oprah and Reese Witherspoon.

I can’t do any of this with reviews and breezy radio conversations anymore, largely because in the diminishing traditional media “middle aged white man writes novel” can’t compete with daily updates to “elderly white man devours world.”

So what can I do?

I will soon be paired with a publicist at Penguin Random House, and I am thrilled to speak to her. I assume she is amazingly talented, but I will not be her only author. Unless she has magical powers, I fear for our prospects.

The best novel in the history of literature, seized and forged in intellectual and emotional genius, will struggle to compete with the FIFA World Cup, also in mid-late June, with the inevitable geopolitical crises, with the other novels coming out in the northern hemisphere summer, written by people more famous than me, and with… the non-book stuff over at TikTok.

Here on Story Engine, I write about how we can storytelling as the core of our strategies. So what’s the story? How can I use narrative to sell an old fashioned artefact in an old fashioned medium, somehow reaching yet not annoying the smartest and most discerning consumers in the world — buyers of books?

That is, you.

What Gentlemen Do is a good and entertaining novel, with contemporary themes. I believe this to be objectively true, despite what my sworn enemies and the people on Goodreads who hate The Great Gatsby will say. The amazingly talented publicist knows what to do with this marketing funnel and I am here to help in any way I can. We shall leave that aside.

Is there another way?

This is a novel, not a work on non-fiction. But What Gentlemen Do tussles with today’s problems. Could I try to sell the novel the way we sell non-fiction, by delving into the subject matter and the book’s point of view?

There are two broad but related themes in What Gentlemen Do.

1. Young, poor men are not doing well. I grew up poor, so what? The difference today is grifters and attention-seeking liars encourage young, poor men to blame others for their plight and to be furious about it. They prey upon the Waylons for economic and political gain. Our twenty-year-old protagonist is caught up in this. It has ruined his life. When Waylon is enrolled, against his will, in a stoicism class at the University of Walleye, he is inspired to change.

2. We can transform our towns and cities. Waylon does not want his stoicism professor, Dr. Lincoln, or his childhood best friends, Derby — his love interest — and Solomon, to leave their sad, overlooked, misunderstood hometown, Walleye, so he decides to do something about it. He vows to make Walleye better than New York City.

Not to psychoanalyze myself, but along with storytelling in general these are my intellectual and professional obsessions. I have written about them in my previous novels, in various ways, but never this pointedly.

On aggrieved young men and stoicism, it would be foolish for me to speak from on high, as though I were an academic authority on these matters. So what is my way in? I can talk about Waylon with those authorities, those who have podcasts.

There is something else. My daughter, Esmé, often says I have “no chill.” She is right. I sweat the small stuff à la George Costanza.

Yet like Waylon Gans I try to be a stoic, to focus only on what I can control and to leave everything else alone. The word here is try. Multiple times a day I am infuriated by things I can’t control like loud exhaust systems, leaf blowers, litterers, misused apostrophes in commercial settings, and people who smoke cigarettes right in front of no smoking signs.

How can we use the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus to calm our furious hearts? Stoicism, according to Dr. Lincoln, in What Gentlemen Do, is like golf. Easy game to understand but unmasterable.

STORYTELLING THEME ONE: no chill stoicism.

Here I would explore my own flaws, and Waylon’s flaws, readerly flaws, through the lens of stoicism. I guess this means I have to figure out TikTok.

On theme number two, I have worked for misunderstood and underappreciated places since 2011. This has led me all over the world, and I am currently working for a beautiful city of positive change and unpretentious ambition called the Gold Coast (see, I am lucky). In What Gentlemen Do, I share my career obsessions with Waylon Gans. Serving his city is ultimately where he finds what has been missing in his life: meaning.

(The Gold Coast, everybody)

Richard Florida, one of my heroes and probably the most influential and successful urbanist of this century, was the first stranger to read What Gentlemen Do. This is what he said:

“Funny, furious, and quietly devastating. What Gentlemen Do gets at something most people miss about struggling cities — that they come back to life not from top-down policies but from the ground up, from a kid in a used bookstore, a song played in an empty downtown, a philosophy class that won’t let you quit. A novel about placemaking that never once uses the word. Against the most depressing backdrop, Todd Babiak has written one of the most hopeful things I’ve read about our relationship to cities and place in years.” —Richard Florida, author of The New Urban Crisis

You haven’t read What Gentlemen Do, but this could not be a more perfect reading. I teared up when I saw it.

STORYTELLING THEME TWO: we can find meaning through action in underappreciated and misunderstood towns and cities.

While I am not an academic authority on stoicism or masculinity, I have made enough mistakes and done enough correctly that I can write and speak animatedly about cities, and how we can improve them. The Gold Coast, my current city, is real. Walleye is pretend.

I will try to use social media, podcasts, and op-eds to hit these two themes. Honestly, I have been losing sleep for the past year thinking about this.

Will any of this work? Have I missed something?

Of course, it worries me, the nakedness of it, the old sock smell of self-promotion, the possibility of annoying you on Instagram or LinkedIn.

See? Absolutely no chill.

· A dense strategy report from one of the big four consulting firms that looked a lot like the dense strategy reports their competitors received.

or

· An advertising campaign

Our ideal clients, our only clients, had unused strategy reports on their shelves and multi-million-dollar ad campaigns, brand refreshes, websites, and taglines that didn’t answer a fundamental question: “Who are we?”

Somehow, nearly always through word of mouth, they found us.

In trying to figure out an organization’s master story, Shawn and I first thought we could put a bunch of smart leaders in a room together and draw it out of them with probing questions and deep conversations. The early results were depressing.

We had quit our jobs and started a new company for this?

Again and again, in these research and engagement sessions, we failed. Everyone in the room battled to be the first one to say innovative. They spoke in taglines and clichés. They worked hard AND played hard. Why, they wondered, weren’t they going after the low-hanging fruit as they punched above their weight? They argued over the meaning of the words sustainable and resilient, and swapped corporate values like integrity, excellence, and collaboration.

Then we went back to our training. Both of us, in our younger days, had been newspaper journalists. It would take longer and cost more, but what if we took all of those smart people out of the hotel conference room and listened to them, one-on-one, for an hour? We were good at asking questions, finding examples, being politely relentless.

Isn’t everyone innovative? Do your competitors lack integrity? Are they against excellence?

We wanted to understand why they chose this software company, this bank, this university, this city. How did they come to be here? What was their opinion of it before? Did it match the reality? What was their best day and why? What can only happen here? Examples of their favourite interaction with a customer, a citizen, a student? Were they proud? Why? We used “for example” as magic words, to coax them out of the abstract, out of corporate jargon, and into something personal and meaningful.

At about minute twenty, most people were relaxed enough to be honest. We weren’t journalists. We were more like corporate culture anthropologists, curious and a bit naïve, on their team. And sometimes, the listening turned into an unexpected form of therapy.

It wasn’t long before it started happening: people cried.

Bankers, insurance adjustors, benefits administrators, software engineers, ivy league MBAs, cabinet ministers, nurses, property developers, university administrators, and accountants had something in common. There was always nonsense at work, dumb systems and bullies and people who annoyed them, and they were all pretty skeptical of what it said in that dense strategy report and the latest ad campaign. But they were always happiest and most fulfilled when they helped someone.

We all spend so much of our time at work. We are desperate for it to mean something. And it always does. What Shawn and I discovered was that no one asked. There wasn’t a venue for it or a KPI demanding it; the strategy consultants ignored it and the ad agencies weren’t paid to do it.

Our job, at Story Engine, was to bring that meaning to the surface and to find the links between what those software engineers and their customers had in common, the shared story between the university administrators and the students, the ivy league MBAs and the new hires, the nurses and the patients.

They would arrive at that moment, that favourite day when they helped someone. The more powerful the effect they had on people, the more emotional they became. And sometimes, far more than I had ever imagined, they would tear up. They would be embarrassed and surprised, as though it were unprofessional to cry.

I often thought of the scene in A League of Their Own when Tom Hanks, playing team manager Jimmy Dugan, shouts at Bitty Schram, playing Evelyn Gardner, “There’s no crying in baseball!”

There was crying in banking, insurance and company benefits, in software development and senior leadership, in city administration and healthcare, property development and university and finance. And as soon as we heard it, we knew we had the foundation of the master story and the strategy. I started carrying around little packages of Kleenex.

One of the reasons I am so devoted to place-branding is that people cry all the time in our interviews. Where we choose to live is deeply meaningful, and when people get past infrastructure, Facebook-y complaints, and jargon they become brilliant storytellers.

Out of the two hundred interviews I conducted as CEO of Brand Gold Coast (lucky me!), almost thirty people cried. People come here to reinvent themselves, to change their lives in a positive way, to say yes.

Our feelings will have even more corporate value in the coming years. Listening and distilling these feelings, and the stories that inspire them, into the core of our brands and our strategies make us more than corporate entities. They make us human.

This year my daughter, Avia, had to do a presentation in one of her classes at the University of Sydney. She grew up listening to me talk about storytelling and its application in business, and it seems she wasn’t entirely annoyed or bored. When she tested the presentation on me, I was proud and honoured.

Why?

(it is easy to inspire people to yawn and look at their phones)

In university, at conferences, and even in our day-to-day work, we are subjected to presentations. Many of them feel like a cruel punishment. This is how it works:

· The presenter clicks to her first slide

· On this slide is a summary, in point form, of what she will say over the next twenty to ninety minutes

· We immediately read the words on the slide, and try not to be crestfallen when we encounter misplaced apostrophe’s

· The presenter then reads each of the words on the slide aloud

· Next slide, same thing, a bunch of words in point form

· We read the slides

· Again, the presenter reads the slides aloud, exactly as they appear

· We begin to daydream about the weather forecast, luncheon meats, and whether American democracy will survive

· Next slide, same thing, and dread ensues as we understand this is our near-term future

· Maybe an earthquake will save us from this ordeal

· We look at our phone to browse real estate listings

· Eventually someone claps and we join in, pulled out of our dream state

I do not blame the presenter. She is only doing this because she has sat through innumerable presentations just like it. We present like this for the same reason we write in the passive voice and use jargon words in meetings and memos. This is what we encounter in business, in academia, in government.

This is what serious people do in the serious world.

Yet at night, in our living rooms and dorm rooms and hotel rooms, we watch movies and series that make us laugh, cry, even scream in terror. We read novels and thrilling narrative nonfiction before bed. On our PlayStation, we battle Borfün the Incorrigible on the Fields of Shlârp. We meet our friends at the pub, or at their place, and reminisce about that mean guy who drank too much at the music festival and lost control of his bowels.

(these guys didn’t hit 100% on Rotten Tomatoes by reading their slides aloud)

In my personal time, I write novels. In my work life, I try to solve business problems using narrative. What I try to do is take what we all know about storytelling, how it makes us feel, and apply it to a world that is overly bound up in stale and dead language, unnecessary complexity, and curiously inhuman rituals and traditions.

Like the standard PowerPoint presentation.

I would often express this, at the end of a workday, in comedic frustration at the dinner table. My daughters probably rolled their eyes at each other. Between them, when they were not yet teenagers, they created a phrase to delight me with the idea that they were paying attention: “So, umm, like, in terms of a blank perspective.”

When I do a presentation, I try to use as few words as possible. My slides are usually photos, which is useful because I have no design skills. I start with a story and try to make my points through example stories, whenever possible.

We do not sacrifice our professional integrity when we use human language. When we seek to entertain people who have given us the gift of twenty minutes of their short time on the planet. It is easy to express complexity. It is difficult to make a memorable argument through storytelling because storytelling is difficult.

Taking a complicated idea and making it simple and memorable is one of the hardest things we can do, and it takes practice and failure. We never get it entirely right. Martin Scorsese and Kathryn Bigelow sometimes make boring movies.

Avia told me what she was planning to do, for her class. It was a fifteen-minute presentation, and she used photographs and stories to illustrate her points. She called me to practice and I gave her some feedback, as a curious observer, but I was entirely compelled. While it was an academic presentation it carried drama and humour, intellectual surprise. She is in law school, and in an adversarial system it helps to tell the best story.

This is not magic. A generation of TED talkers and speakers-for-hire have taught us how to entertain an audience while making a point. Some of us are naturally gifted, a bit theatrical, and some of us are desperate introverts.

(the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on storytelling)

The first time I had to do a presentation, in graduate school, I stopped on the way to the auditorium to throw up and I spoke so quickly my professor had to stop me and ask me to breathe. I got better slowly, awkwardly, and practiced in front of a lot of blank walls.

A few hours after Avia’s presentation, she called me. Her fellow students enjoyed the presentation. They laughed in all the right places and did not look down at their phones. They thanked her afterward.

Her professor, a serial reader of point-form slides, did not appreciate it. All the practiced simplicity, the photographs instead of words, the master story and micro stories, seemed unacademic. While Avia did not fail, she was deeply disappointed in her results.

I apologized for giving her poor advice. We talked about knowing our audience and thinking of our professors like clients in business. I told her a few sad and funny stories of my own failures and assured her there is a long life after university.

One night, when I was fourteen, my mom caught me reading the New Testament and scolded me as though it were an issue of Hustler. My aunt, a euphoric recent convert to evangelical Christianity, had dropped off the attractive leather-bound Bible and had pitched it enthusiastically.

Mom swiped it out of my hands and stared at it. “You want to turn out like her?”

Well, my aunt seemed happy. Beyond happy. When she talked about what Jesus had done for her, there were tears in her eyes. But there was something about the conversion, unknown to me, that terrified my mom. My aunt was not the person she had been.

Christianity was too powerful, too seductive. Mom worried I would be lost to it and therefore to her.

Until that point, my only experience with Christianity had been attending Sunday school with a friend, after a sleepover, and all I remembered about it was colouring an optimistic donkey.

(I tried to find the actual optimistic donkey and failed but here is one)

And, of course, Christmas.

We had a plastic tree, and I liked putting it up and decorating it. I am colourblind, and the branches and slots were marked with grey, brown, green, and pink, so occasionally a long limb went where a short should have been, but I insisted. In a dark season, the playful lights and glass balls made me feel cozy. I liked egg nog and mandarin oranges and Nat King Cole and, of course, the cartoons.

The Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge, Charlie Brown… Christmas transformed heartless grumps and misunderstood losers into heroes. All the reborn Christmas protagonists were like my aunt: better somehow, after a peep into the abyss.

(Then he growled, with his Grinch fingers nervously drumming, “I must find some way to keep Christmas from coming!”)

Somehow, Mom did not see the connection between Christianity and Christmas. She went deep when my brother and me were little: Santa, presents, stockings, turkey, and an olde tyme village on our mantel, surrounded by off-white cotton that was supposed to represent snow. Even though, if you wanted filthy snow in my hometown, all you had to do was look out the window.

Today, as I prepare for a visit to the snowy realms of Northern Canada, I understand how my mom and my aunt were both right. And, weirdly, the story at the heart of Christmas has been on my mind for months. The religion, its jolliest festival, and its secular interpretation are all about rebirth.

(my daughter, Avia, playing a Cratchit daughter)

In different years, my young daughters were both cast in a dark and atmospheric rendition of A Christmas Carol. We pulled them out of school and they worked with professional actors and crew, for two months at a time. I saw many, many performances. Scrooge, haunted by ghosts, imploring and threatening him with change, change, change.

(Esmé played a rich little boy)

My mom was afraid of change but longed to be happy. Change, somehow, without change. The Christmas aesthetic, in our house and at the mall and on TV, calmed her anxious heart for a few weeks every year. My aunt created an entirely different personality, through the religion, and Christmas reminded her that redemption was possible.

Of all the plots, rebirth is the most powerful. Storytellers, songwriters, designers, artists, copywriters, and creative directors have gone back to this bottomless well since Dickens. Every year there are new songs, new movies, new interior decorating themes.

My last novel, The Spirits Up, is a Christmas story. My next novel, What Gentleman Do, takes place in a forgotten city blanketed with filthy snow and ends in mid-December. Writing a novel means spending years with imaginary people in imaginary places. Clearly, I have found this season both strange and inspiring.

I am less than a year into a new job, in a new city, in a new climate, and our youngest daughter is joining her older sister in university — somewhere. Our house is sold. Everything is anew!

And after doing 230 interviews with Gold Coasters, almost all of them newcomers to the city like me, I have heard multiple rebirth stories. My job, in the coming years, is to make it a dominant strategic and design theme, to reflect this master narrative back to Gold Coasters in a relentlessly positive way.

Scrooge was terrified by change, and entirely closed to it, which is what makes him such a good character. “I am too old! I cannot change! I cannot!”

(“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. Whoop!”)

Like most Gold Coasters, I tend to be at least eighty percent open to change — often to my detriment, Mom would say. Hence living on the other side of the world. But I no longer argue with her. I look forward to listening to her loving criticism in the coming weeks, by the light of the little tree she now keeps up year-round.

“The ultimate competence of any chief executive has become storytelling,” says Scott Galloway, who has done a rather good job of anticipating what comes next in the business world.

(that smart guy with dark-rimmed glasses and a shaved head, Scott Galloway)

It sounds nice but… how do chief executives learn to become storytellers? How do CEOs even meet storytellers? At the chamber of commerce? MBA school? Board meetings?

The title above is crushingly self-serving, and I apologize for that. But do look at the make-up of corporate boards around the world. Governance and strategy have come to be synonymous with a lifetime of experience in finance, accounting, and law. These are crucially important skills, for any organisation, but let’s reflect on what drives human decision making.

Analysts once relied on numbers to discover value in the public markets. The multiples we now see in stock prices, even home prices, make this seem trite and old fashioned. There may be a spectacular crash coming but based on the numbers, even historical precedents, that crash should have come years ago.

(Tesla’s preposterous price-to-earnings ratio is almost entirely about storytelling)

If we apply the 80/20 rule we are running at about 80 per cent emotional and 20 per cent rational, in almost every aspect of global politics and economics. The seven deadly sins — wrath, lust, envy, greed, pride, sloth, and gluttony — run the internet, and the internet runs our lives.

It’s important for boards and executive teams to eliminate fraud, bullying, and outright lying, even though an entire generation is growing up learning that fraud, bullying, and outright lying are central to the 21^st century growth mindset.

There is a deeper well, even deeper than a Simon Sinek book, though in business we learn to walk right past it.

Our education system doesn’t help. It separates the numbers people and the storytellers in high school, and they don’t meet again. We don’t learn how to harness emotions, how to apply radical empathy, in business school.

Where do we learn it? In the heartbreaking endeavour of writing novels and screenplays.

Storytelling is not fanciful. It is a three trillion dollar industry. What do most of us do, on evenings and weekends, to unwind? We consume stories.

And storytellers are entrepreneurs, operating with the same constraints and even worse metrics of success as tech startups. Storytelling is at least as competitive as any other industry and follows similar rules. It’s crushingly hard to get a novel accepted and released by a major publisher and even harder to convince a studio to invest tens or hundreds of millions in your series or film or video game. Then there is figuring out a way to let audiences know the thing exists.

Some of the most successful and sophisticated businesspeople I have met are in the film industry, where the story is the absolute foundation of every word spoken, every dollar spent, and every decision. In time, it either feels right or it doesn’t. You can spend ten million dollars on consultants, for your business strategy, and never reach that point.

(Greta Gerwig, whose films have grossed $1.75 billion, would have some pretty good ideas about your strategy)

When a board engages someone with years of experience, as a storyteller, it changes the room. If the novelist is confident enough, board room conversations about workplace culture, about customer acquisition, about market trends, about corporate reputation, about sales and marketing, are different — more human.

Storytellers have learned to understand what it feels like to be someone they are not. We are all selling something to someone, and it helps to see the world from their point of view. Yet we don’t see this on a corporate board’s skills matrix.

This is why so many businesses have nearly identical missions, visions, and values. We follow the corporate fads outlined in the latest bestselling leadership book. A novelist might not know what you are talking about, when you mention your blue ocean strategy or your atomic potential, but you don’t have to teach them what human beings want from leaders, from workplace culture, from products and services.

Novelists and filmmakers learn to make a science of consistency. A novel or a film fails whenever the reader or viewer is pulled out of the story. We know it, instinctively, when the hero does something or says a line of dialogue that feels out-of-character. We no longer believe.

This is exactly what happens when an organisation veers from its purpose, when it is off-brand.

When you invite a storyteller on your board, and you invite them to be themselves, you make a superpower of curiosity. You get a walking, talking summary of most leadership books: it’s not about you.

In the early days of Twitter, I tended to post intentionally bad haikus and observations designed to make my brother laugh. Then it shifted. I had two little kids and I was busy starting a new business. Twitter was for a few years an encouraging place, the public square that the local newspaper used to be, and I met people who would become allies, clients, and friends at home and, increasingly, around the world. Some of them were progressive. Others conservative. It didn’t seem to matter much, as we were focused on building things, on supporting and entertaining one another.

the good old days

Politicians and political activists posted on Twitter back then, but it was either bland and sanitized or inspirational, even selfless: fellow human beings, let’s get out there and solve a problem together.

Then Twitter shifted again. A feeling I recognized from the worst classes in university leaked into the platform. Curiosity and empathy were out. Identity was in. Progressive Twitter turned furious, then confusingly vengeful, and I watched people I once admired tilt into cruelty. Other friends — fellow entrepreneurs, writers, organizers — said the wrong thing or allegedly did the wrong thing, and disappeared.

Then, inevitably, it shifted again. Even before its current owner, either deeply disturbed or pretending to be, tweaked the algorithm, Twitter had rewarded extremism. You want ten likes? Write something reasonable, based in fact. You want a thousand likes? Write about wanting your ideological enemy stripped naked, publicly mocked, dipped in acid, and burned alive.

A successful Tweet no longer made us laugh or revealed our shared humanity, despite our differences. It was the woke mind virus versus the fascists. Today, when I open the app, all I see are extreme right-wing people shouting the lie of the day, demanding retribution. To see the other side, I have to visit Bluesky.

It all reminds me of that frenzied turn in The Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss. We pay to change badges, based on fashion and self-interest, and we end up divided and feeling terrible while Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who owns the division machine, gets rich.

the tech entrepreneur of his day destroys the Sneetches and drives off happy and wealthy

I love newspapers but that intellectual meeting place, as we once knew it, is dead. So is the nightly news and the holiday dinner table. Old friends and colleagues, and family members, have fallen for preposterous conspiracies and grievances. They have lost the ability to debate.

Instead, they shout. And, I am afraid, they suffer.

This is storytelling at its most crass and dangerous. One of the oldest plots in human history is “overcoming the monster.” In sophisticated novels and films, there is a reason why the monsters are the way they are. Something happened to them when they were little monsters. They were unloved, abused, misunderstood. In bad novels and films, they are just evil.

When my youngest daughter watched the initial Star Wars trilogy, she cried when Darth Vader died. A lot. In politics today, we don’t see enough humanity in our opponents to cry when they die. They are Goldfinger, Le Chiffre, Dr. No, Bond villains driven by an incomprehensible hatred for all that we love.

le chiffre is evil, and that is all you need to know

This is not the way things are. This is a deliberate strategy, to dehumanize our opponents so we will believe anything. In 2017, on Twitter, questioning the latest left-wing orthodoxy was denounced as literal violence. It could get you cancelled, or worse. Today, on Twitter, expressing a mild version of those same left-wing views could get you fired or thrown out of school.

While it damages our mental health in the long term, you can feel the pleasure in it, in hating. Houses are grotesquely expensive, and food prices are going up again. Young people, even the hard-working ones who played by the rules, are facing a bleak future. Someone did this to them. Someone is doing it, right now, making it worse.

Their enemies.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine returning to the moment, in 2008, when John McCain corrected one of his supporters who believed the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama.

“No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues,” said McCain.

when McCain corrected the woman, the crowd booed

It is fashionable, among both right-wing and left-wing activists, to denounce centrists. How dare they see bits of human truth in conservative and progressive thinking? How dare they struggle when it comes time to vote, as neither extreme is palatable anymore — even comprehensible?

If you are reading this, you are an empathy machine. You feel lost and afraid, as the modern Sylvester McMonkey McBeans work hard, on the most powerful communications platforms on the planet, to use narrative techniques against humanity.

Things will turn again, and hopefully not because we had to learn another hard and bloody lesson. I long for bad haikus.

In 2019, I started a new job in a new country. In my first week, the jet-lag overwhelmed by terror, I gathered with twelve esteemed leaders who constituted the board. We took a break in our two-day strategic planning session to visit the home of INCAT, an inspiring manufacturer of wave-piercing catamarans. It was to be followed by a press conference, where the Premier of Tasmania would introduce me and I would answer questions. 

The wave-piercing catamaran was invented in Tasmania

The head of media for the government had explained what they wanted from this. It was weird to hire a foreigner for something called Brand Tasmania, so they had to explain it to people — even justify it. What made me so shit hot? Wasn’t there anyone in Tasmania, let alone Australia, who could do this? Most of the board members I had just met were asking themselves the same questions. 

This was a tricky moment. Since I sound like an American, and there are powerful stereotypes about Americans, I didn’t want to play into it with overconfidence or bravado. Who made me an expert in Tasmanian-ness? Yet I didn’t want to come off weak, passive, or clueless.

A cameraman from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) followed us on our tour of the manufacturing shed. We wore high-visibility vests and hard hats. I don’t remember much about the press conference, but the hull of the giant ferry was a thrill to behold. 

The next day, there was an online ABC article about Brand Tasmania. It was published with a picture of me, not a photograph but an image captured from the videographer.

We all know, from pausing television shows and movies, that even Natalie Portman and Idris Elba can appear odd. Mouth open, visible neck vein, too much forehead. It is an easier feat to make me look awkward. And that is what the ABC journalists did. They deliberately paused the video at an unfortunate moment to create a headshot, and the article itself made me sound like a puffed-up jackass.

I woke up the next morning to a text from Shawn, my business partner back home. There was no commentary. It was just the image of me from the ABC article, one eye open and one eye closed, hardhat on, high-viz vest over my trying-too-hard camel overcoat. I could almost hear him laughing across the Pacific Ocean. I can’t find the picture online and Shawn can’t find it in his iCloud, otherwise I promise I would have shared it here, to further my humiliation. 

This is more-or-less what I looked like in the article

Shawn and I worked with CEOs and other leaders, to help them build what we were careful not to call their personal brands. We would interview them, exhaustively, and then knit what we learned back together into a compelling story, an honest and authentic way to answer the question, “Why me?”

What makes you so shit hot?

Crafting that personal narrative is as relevant as ever, even if the media have changed. Instead of newspapers it’s podcasts. Instead of Twitter it’s short-form video. This makes everything harder, as the foundation of these core business skills are not only literary but theatrical. 

There are, of course, limits. I do not like the word cringe, as it harkens back to the worst of Gen-X culture, the fear of sincerity. But there is a line between powerful self-expression and making a complete ass of yourself. I follow “Influencers in the wild” on Instagram to marvel at an emerging competency: utter shamelessness. 

Have you seen the new Wes Anderson movie? Should we order hummus?

The temptation in this attention economy is to forget the foundational story and to seek clicks and views. It feels good, in the moment, for a lot of people to notice. But if it doesn’t mean anything, if it doesn’t reinforce who you are and why you do what you do, what makes you different, the value you provide, this is ultimately a waste of time. 

Regional newspapers are often just compendia of local stabbings, youthful misbehaviour in cars, lazy opinions, and real estate coverage. They are not dying because young people are illiterate or dumb. Newspapers are dying, and have been dying for twenty years, because they have forgotten their purpose.

The brands you love, the people you trust, the celebrities you follow, where you live, little choices you make every day go back to elemental feelings. Narrative, not tactical marketing, is the realm of feelings. But ideally, these feelings are grounded in meaning.

The humiliating ABC News treatment of my first week in Australia was on-story. Tasmanians often feel overlooked and misunderstood. There is a long history of arrogant “blow-ins” showing up, pretending to be experts, and telling locals in a loud voice how to do everything better despite all of the extraordinary things Tasmanians have delivered to the world: including the wave-piercing catamaran, in that INCAT shed.

It worked for me too, which is why Shawn felt like he could send me the photo. He knew I would laugh at it too, and get to work listening and understanding. No one gains enduring trust by organizing perfect photo shoots, by influencing in the wild. 

When I was a kid, my mom read five or six novels a week. At least one dog would be in the chair with her, as close to her head and neck as possible, and she would be smoking. We did not have John Updike or Alice Munro in our house. It was all Clive Cussler, Stephen King, Sara Paretsky and their swashbuckling, spooky, stabby peers.

Every few months we would cart a giant box of smelly mass market paperbacks to the used bookstore in my hometown. At the counter, according to some economic magic, my mom’s box of eighty novels would transform into credit for five or ten.

In the early days, when my reading interests tended toward Dr. Seuss and Archie double digests, I liked to spend my time browsing in the romance section. The sexy illustrations on the front covers did mysterious things to my heart rate. But eventually, in the latter years of elementary school, I picked up a copy of Cujo and soon I had something new to do in my bedroom.

Thanks to my mom and my horror-loving cousin Rick, it seemed normal to read novels in bed and on rainy days at the family cabin. And then, when I was twelve, on one of those trips to the used bookstore, I picked up a slim copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in the adventure section. The title sounded like it fit our shared taste, and there was no need to negotiate with Mom. We didn’t have much money but used books were like bread, milk, eggs, and Kraft Dinner.

Kurt Vonnegut didn’t follow the rules of adventure. The novel was strange and melancholy and complex and funny, like a smart friend telling me a long secret truth about human beings. I didn’t know a novel could be like that, and when I told Mom about it she made a face and declared Slaughterhouse-Five an unfortunate mistake. But I thought about it all the time and wanted more, so when we were next in the used bookstore I asked the birdy-looking woman in giant glasses who owned the place if there were other novels like it.

“It must have been mis-shelved in adventure,” she said, and took me to the small section where it belonged: Literary.

Here were new names and relatively boring covers. Margaret Atwood and Philip Roth, Updike and Munro, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, and then thirty or so beige Penguin Classics. Dickens, Eliot, Austen.

Apart from Charles Dickens I had heard of none of these sad losers. I might have walked away if the used bookstore owner had not reached over my shoulder and grabbed The Catcher in the Rye and Goodbye, Columbus.

No need to report what happened next. Reader, she changed my life.

I don’t want to be too grand about this, but I was not on a trajectory toward writing a Substack about storytelling someday. My hometown, Leduc, was an oil services centre with an industrial park. The popular kids were hockey players and what we called headbangers. But novels, what they did to me, led to a different group of friends and the possibility of university, to politics and economics and philosophy, to film and theatre, to journalism, to a certain kind of business that prioritized the way novels teach us to think.

These novels led me to other novels, and to people who read novels. I suppose if the owner of the bookstore in Leduc had not reached over my shoulder for Salinger and Roth I might have ended up with the normal obsessions of my peer group: muscle cars and pickup trucks, televised sports, hunting, snowmobile apparel.

Psychopaths don’t bother reading novels. Neither do assholes and narcissists. Apparently, men don’t read novels anymore. I suppose I did not need a piece in The New York Times to tell me this. My dad was still alive for a year and a half after I published my first novel, and I know he tried to read Choke Hold but lacked the constitution for it. He admitted it to me over a beer once, lacking the focus, blaming himself.

But then, after his second beer, my dad told me what he was really thinking: “What is a novel for?”

My dad never read an entire book in his life, but if he had it would have been a how-to guide of some sort, a way to be better at drywalling. I understand. I read nonfiction about business and economics, the peculiarities of leadership, the mechanics of narrative, for transparently selfish reasons.

I don’t remember how I responded to my dad, back in 2001, but I wish I had told him what is true: I have learned far more from a lifetime of reading novels than anything in the business and leadership section of the bookstore.

All the data show it is good for us to read novels. It makes us clever, happier, and more empathetic human beings. It’s good to be vaccinated against measles too, but that doesn’t seem to be working.

How do we make it fashionable for people who don’t read novels, especially men, to give it a try?

For a while, some friends and I held a literary discussion group called The Plimpton Society, after George Plimpton, the founding editor of the Paris Review and a clumsily masculine figure, insinuating himself into professional football and hockey teams as an active participant, boxing Archie Moore, and performing high wire acts in a circus. He spoke with a British-y accent and made fun of himself for it, hosting Mouseterpiece Theater, where he introduced Disney cartoons as though they were performances of Waiting for Godot. George Plimpton was, in short, the greatest man of all time. But our society only convened twice, as we were busy with young children and some of us didn’t like each other.

(George Plimpton: reader of novels, sportsman, actor, man of business, dandy)

As a visiting author, I was invited to a male book club called Cliff’s Garage a couple of times when they discussed my novels. The meetings took place in the loft of an actual garage, and the members drank craft beer and roasted venison sausages in a fireplace. They are actual heroes to me and I hope they are still meeting. I sometimes imagine them scaling Cliff’s Garage, like a franchise, so that it happens in unheated rooms around the world. BookTok but with moose sausage and no phones.

Apart from the utterly heartbreaking activities of writing novels and trying to figure out how to convince people to buy and read them, I am conducting an experiment lately. In my new city, I have no friends. Who needs friends when you have novels? But I am trying, however gracelessly. Whenever a conversation tilts from small talk into something deeper, I ask, “What are you reading?” instead of questions about jobs, sports, and children.

It is a startling question that does a lot of work. We either end the conversation with solemn awkwardness or fast-forward our acquaintance into the borderlands of friendship. I have plenty of lifelong pals who “prefer nonfiction” or don’t read for pleasure at all, but there is a weird glow about people who read novels. It is like we have been through something strange, melancholy, complex, and funny together, like we both know secret truths about human beings.

Try it with me for a couple of weeks. What are you reading?

Shortly after I graduated from university, I was lucky enough to publish a novel. The main character returned to a pickup truck-ish town like the one I grew up in, and he shared my obsession with self-defence and fighting systems. Most readers of novels are smart women, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu is not among their chief interests. But the novel found a weirdo readership and did well enough that I felt encouraged to keep writing.

If I have an undiagnosed disorder, it has something to do with repetitive behaviour. Writing every day, despite its money-losing and heartbreaking qualities, is a core part of who I am. I get up early and I write for myself, usually hacking away at a novel, before my day of business begins. I’m sure you have your own version of this, a thing you do on a Sunday when you could be watching sports and drinking beer like a normal person.

It wasn’t until journalism was dying, as an actual career, that I began to understand what storytelling had given me. I had learned to imagine myself into other people, seeking to understand their pain and ambition, their fragility. When I failed as a writer, I failed at that. I didn’t work hard enough to understand what it felt like to be another human being.

It turns out there is a marketplace for this repetitive behaviour, beyond media. Story Engine, our company, helped clients paint the gap between what we learn in the liberal arts and what we learn in business. We used narrative to help make businesses, products, policies, and places feel more human.

(our first client was a really curious bank)

And then, just as search engines and social media came for advertising, AI came for writing. Another cascade of doom from the Bay Area.

While I use AI, like everyone else, I have also learned to resent it. Just as the internet itself destroyed publishing, I read, AI would destroy human storytelling. Large language models would displace this thing I had been doing my entire working life. There would be no more use for novelists and screenwriters, for researchers, for those who had learned to distil and synthesize data and complex ideas into something elegant and true and strange, into a story.

I treated New York Times and Wired articles about AI the way I treat news about politicians who hate vaccinations and protected bicycle lanes. It is grotesque but there is nothing I can do about it, so I do my best to focus on what I can control. I can get up early every day, keep thinking and writing, using my imagination in the desperate hope that someone out there might like to read my next novel when it comes out.

Then, a few weeks ago, Robert Capps, a former Wired guy writing for The New York Times, published an article about the jobs AI could create. My first instinct was to ignore it. But since the headline wasn’t apocalyptic I read it and immediately shared it with my daughters.

(the impressive Robert Capps, former editorial head of Wired and now a story brand guy)

Capps writes that AI will still need humans in three broad ways: trust, integration, and taste.

Taste is the one that interested me the most, though all three themes made intuitive sense based on my own use of AI. We can define taste broadly, but it is distinctly and mysteriously human. It’s certainly relevant for a novelist, but my full-time job, marrying story and strategy, relies equally on human mystery.

I am, at the moment, interviewing two hundred Gold Coasters to understand the story of the city, its position in Australia and the world, and its unique potential. These people are a representative sample of the Gold Coast, and I spend between thirty and ninety minutes with each of them asking why they live on the Gold Coast.

Their responses, their personal stories, are various and moving yet consistent. The people who choose the Gold Coast have something in common, and it is my honour to take these hundreds of thousands of words, these examples, find the special links between them, and use this distillation to create a unifying cultural expression and strategy.

Of course, there is a role for AI in the plan. It can help with benchmarking. But there is no way AI in its current form could have done this human listening. Without this part, this messy yet crucial part, this story engine, the Gold Coast would be where most cities and organizations are. The best place to live, work, and play. Innovative. World class. A city of opportunity. A chatbot could do what ten ad agencies could do, and we would drown in the fine but ultimately random tactics that lead us all to use the universal synonyms of civic goodness.

Human taste is still worth something, and — again, with luck — will always be. In the Times article, Capps references a 60 Minutes interview I have watched several times. Its wisdom lives in pieces as reels and TikToks.

(“I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music”)

Anderson Cooper interviews Rick Rubin about why he is so successful, about the bizarre work he does, about the nature of creativity, and in this lovely moment between now and artificial general intelligence, Rubin reminds us that we are still magical.

Of course, I am hypocritically working on my own AI idea. We need a purpose. Even if Capps is wrong, and Rubin is wrong, and AI will do anything a human can do, only better, and we are all destined to be economically useless, we are still better off writing fiction in the early mornings, reaching out to each other in our Substacks on Sunday afternoons, knitting and dancing and singing.

my alma mater, East Elementary, in the spooky gloaming

I tried to write journal entries about my life but quickly figured out there wasn’t much to say. Hockey was important to me, and skateboarding. I had a tragic crush on a girl in my class named Traci but I wasn’t about to tell Mrs. Steen.

Dear Diary, yesterday I rode my BMX past Traci’s house thirty-seven times hoping she would come outside and fall deeply in love but she did not come outside. So me and Cousin Brad got Dr. Pepper slushies and played Super Mario Bros.

Instead, I wrote stories.

I did not grow up in a literary household. The only books we had were Dr. Seuss and horror novels so that is what I read. And, I guess, wrote. My hero was Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers. The team’s big rival at the time was the New York Islanders, whose goalie, Billy Smith, was fearsome with his stick. He would occasionally hack Gretzky’s golden legs with it.

the great one, Wayne Gretzky, with the Titan stick I bought to be like him

In one of my stories, Billy Smith goes beyond on-the-ice aggression and starts decapitating random people with his stick. When the authorities try to take him in, he slashes his way out of their grasp and escapes into the autumnal countryside.

Meanwhile, my family is enjoying a lovely Thanksgiving at Skeleton Lake. My teenage cousins, Scott and Rick, are smoking cigarettes. Their mom, Aunt Judy, is threatening to beat us with her shoe. My dad is drunk and stumbling around, my mom is teary and exasperated, and my grandfather thinks everyone should just calm down god damn it.

Billy Smith arrives at the cabin, angry and hungry, and he stalks and slashes and devours my family members, one by one. This is a first-person story, and I am honest about my cowardice. I hide under the bed, hoping someone – Uncle Martin? – will defeat Billy Smith but no one does.

with apologies to the actual Billy Smith, who is apparently really nice

The New York Islanders netminder is just about to murder and eat my younger brother, Kirk, when I realize no one is coming to save us. It has to be me. So I slide out from under the bed, grab a set of numchucks (sic.) and challenge Billy on the leaf-strewn front lawn.

It’s gory. He gnaws at my flesh. Just when he is about to finish me off, with my last flourish of strength, I knee him in the groin. Then I find the strength to whap him with the numchucks (sic.) and in a final blow I punch him in the stomach.

It's more than powerful. There is magic in it. Billy Smith falls to his knees and vomits up my family members, one by one, and somehow this process un-murders them. Wet and smelly, yes, but alive. Billy Smith lies upon the grass and together my family chants my name, and we dance in a circle over his desiccated body.

You know, normal stuff!

skeleton lake in a rare photograph without mosquitoes

Mrs. Steen called my parents in for a meeting.

Mom and Dad were nervous, I could tell, because Mrs. Steen had said it was a serious matter and that it had to be in-person. My parents had asked me about fighting, about drugs, about a disrespectful tone. No, no, and no. I was genuinely confused.

When we arrived, Mrs. Steen, a tall and birdy woman with enormous eyeglasses, asked me to wait outside the class. Did she think the door was soundproof? I heard her tell my parents about my stories of murder, cannibalism, and whatever I thought sex was when I was eleven. Mrs. Steen turned emotional and admitted that after reading my stories she came to see me as a dark spirit in her classroom.

this is Sally Jesse Raphael, not Mrs. Steen, and Steen is not her real name

Was I violent? Disruptive? A bad student? No, but somehow that made it worse, said Mrs. Steen. There was something about the way I looked at her. She asked my parents to take me to the doctor for a psychological examination. Then she slid the notebook across the desk, as proof.

The drive home, in the dark, was quiet and weird. My parents were not equipped for this, and I was terrified. Soon, I was sure, I would be taken from my bedroom and thrown into a mental institution. In a year’s time I would be hooting and eating my own hair, like in the movies.

Bedtime was normal-ish though I continued to worry that men in white lab coats were coming. Then, distantly, from my parents’ bedroom, I heard laughing.

Mom and Dad did not take me to a psychologist. They chose not to see me as a dark spirit in their home. Instead, they photocopied the stories and gave them to family members who starred in them – Scott and Rick, Aunt Judy, my grandfather – as gifts. I remember when they first read the stories at my uncle’s house, laughing out loud and pointing at me, this weird kid who made them feel something.

I was hooked, of course. But it took me a long time to figure out what to do with my love of stories and storytelling, especially how to fuse it with my love for business. There wasn’t really a place for this fusion in school, in university, or in the market. You were one or the other. Art and business came together only through patronage and philanthropy.

Steve Jobs helped bring it all together.

Early Story Engine clients might have reacted more like Mrs. Steen than my parents if I told them the Billy Smith story. But later, I understood. There was nothing special about me. We’ve all been that kid in some way. I worked with so many clients who moved from “I am not good at that” to feeling like a natural.

Storytelling is a powerful thing we can learn, later in life, after we have in some cases forcibly unlearned what came naturally to us when we were eleven.

I didn’t want to seem dumb.

Albert Camus (don’t pronounce the T or the S, young friends)

The anxiety exploded in an economics class when a professor pointed at me, asked for the definition of a social market economy, and all the blood and wisdom left my head.

For hours and years thereafter, I would return to that moment of not-knowing. Instead of just apologizing and telling the truth, that I did not know the definition of a social market economy, I stumbled and stuttered my way through a meandering non-answer about Northern Europe that made me sound not only ignorant but a bit defensive and arrogant.

Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war West German Chancellor and a big fan of the social market economy

Years later, one of my novels was optioned to become a television series, and I had the honour of developing it into a pilot. In a meeting, the network executive in charge of broadcasting asked why Edmonton, my hometown, was the funniest city in Canada.

I didn’t know! Instead of saying so, I blathered unfunnily. The pilot was never shot, and I always suspected it was because, in that meeting, with the ultimate decision-maker, I didn’t know.

Anton Leo, to whom I should have said, “I don’t know.”

Now I think I do know: if anything, the executive lost confidence in me because I lacked the courage and humility to admit I didn’t know.

I have just started a new job, as CEO of Brand Gold Coast. Like all new jobs, it’s terrifying. I desperately want to succeed.

The week before I started my new boss leaned over and asked me, conspiratorially, what I thought it was. What was the story? What was the brand?

Of course, Gold Coast, Australia has a brand. I’ve looked at quantitative surveys, so I have a strong idea of what people who don’t live on (in?) the Gold Coast think about the Gold Coast. But I have learned, through decades of failure, how to answer this question. I told him I didn’t know.

One thing I do know: this city is gorgeous

I don’t yet know what Gold Coasters think and feel about where they live. I don’t know why. I don’t know what they want this place to be.

At Story Engine, Shawn and I learned to stop ourselves from guessing. Before we did the research, we didn’t know. Our feelings, our initial impressions of a bank, a university, a startup, a Mexican bread conglomerate, a city, a state, were irrelevant. We started Story Engine because we didn’t want to leap immediately and boldly into a well-furnished meeting room with mood boards, flip charts, design-thinking consultants, scarves, whimsical glasses, and multi-coloured sticky notes.

In time, I will know.

But only after listening to Gold Coasters tell me their stories. I’m doing two hundred one-on-one interviews with a representative sample of my new neighbours. I have only done ten interviews so far but I’m already ten times smarter than I was last week.

With experience, it can be tempting to apply past success to new problems. But it is better to be humble before the new problem, to embrace ignorance and to not-know with curiosity and hunger. Random but attractively faddish ideas, things that worked in Stuttgart, are also the enemies of good strategy. Guessing is just dangerous.

The only way to know is to listen, to study, to test and try and test and try again. Not knowing is powerful, if we allow ourselves to embrace it.

But I don’t know.

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