Chapter 4Tell Me a Story
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—Isak Dinesen
So What’s the Story?
Telling stories isn’t a modern invention. Long before humans had a written language, we were swapping them. Our ability to create and share stories is one of the few truly universal human traits, found in all cultures throughout history and serves an essential purpose; they help us understand the world and our place in it. Storytelling helps us educate1, entertain, preserve history, pass on traditions, show affiliations, and reinforce social mores. You can learn a lot about a society’s belief system by looking at its fairy tales, parables, proverbs, legends, myths, jokes, ...
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