When they want to make a point, many people look for a story to illustrate it.

They think, “I want to talk about persistence, so let me find a persistence story.” And they end up telling the same story about Lincoln’s long string of failed campaigns and political setbacks that everyone else tells.

The problem with that approach is that it’s deductive storytelling. You’ve chosen the moral first and then gone hunting for a story that fits. That leads to hearing the same tired stories over and over again. You’re just borrowing from work that’s already been done.

I teach leaders and speakers to do the opposite. I tell them to start with the story that fascinates them and then ask, “What would give me the right to tell this story? How could I earn it?"

In other words, what does this story teach me or reveal to me that I didn’t see before? What’s the part of the story that never makes it into the headline, but changes how I see it?

That’s the difference between inductive and deductive storytelling. But I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it as letting the object lead. The story is the object. You don’t impose a lesson on it. You let the lesson emerge from it. You let it show you what you didn’t know.

This approach is not really a technique. It’s more a way of living. You keep your eyes open for stories you’d want to tell, whether you know why or not, and you hold onto them. Later on, you figure out why they’re important to you, and that importance becomes the lesson.

By the way, an outgrowth of this approach: a writer named Lou Willett Stanek once wrote, “Stories only happen to the people who can tell them.” So as you go looking for stories, you start seeing the world in stories.