[Book recommendation] Resonate

Storytelling has become one of the most important skills for both entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. In fact, it always has been crucial in selling one's business or services. Its importance and standard have risen significantly as millions of stories are created, tested, and measured with data these days.

Having been an engineer most of my career, storytelling has not been my strength. I, just like many other engineers, have violated many good rules of thumb in storytelling, such as over-relying on data and getting to conclusions without context.

Fast forward today, storytelling skill is now a must-have skillset for me as a business owner. It's not just for sales. It touches every aspect of the business including recruiting, product, and fundraising. Therefore, I decided to learn more about the fundamentals of storytelling and picked up a good number of blogs, books, and YouTubes.

In this process, two books particularly helped me a lot. 'Resonate' by Nancy Duarte and 'Everyday Business Storytelling' by Janine Kurnoff and Lee Lazarus.

Resonate

I was recommended to this book by Bumsoo Kim, a partner in one of the top VC firms in Korea. I heard that the author, Nancy Duarte, is a famed speaker, presenter, and presenter who helped some of the top Silicon Valley founders build pitch decks. I find this book brilliant as it dissects storytelling into science and provides very specific examples of what makes storytelling great. For example, the book analyzes a great TED talk by Benjamin Zander (which I already watched like 10 times because I was so impressed) in terms of how he engaged the audience, created tensions, and put the audience in a continuous cycle of ups and downs with different emotions. If you haven't watched it, you definitely want to watch it. Here's the link. This book definitely helped me understand the fundamentals of storytelling and utilize some of the components in my own pitch deck.

Everyday Business Storytelling

I stumbled upon this book while browsing on Amazon. This book is helpful when you want to add compelling visual narratives to your presentation. This book covers basic knowledge in storytelling such as the 4 compositions of a story - settings, people, conflict, and resolution. And this book is particularly useful in turning 'boring' information into persuasive and compelling visual information. The idea is not to make it 'pretty' but know where and how to emphasize.

So if you are a newbie in storytelling and want to fast-track this particular skill set, these two books would be helpful.

I have no affiliation with the aforementioned books.

#freelancer #solopreneur #creator

written by Kisang Pak, co-founder @ Ceeya

Ceeya helps solopreneurs and freelancers make more money. Ceeya closely works with each of its users to launch and grow their business. If you're one of the (prospect) solopreneurs, visit https://home.ceeya.io and leave your email to launch and accelerate your solopreneur business. Or send an email to kpak@ceeya.io directly.