Alfred Nobel, the story goes, once read his own obituary.
It was 1888. His brother Ludvig had died in France, and a French newspaper mixed the two brothers up. It printed a notice for Alfred instead, the man who had made his fortune from dynamite and explosives. The line people remember from it is short and cruel: “The merchant of death is dead.”
Nobel was alive to read it. He saw, in black and white, the story the world was going to tell about him when he was gone. And he did not like it.
Seven years later, in Paris, he signed a new will. He left most of his fortune to a set of prizes for the people whose work had done the greatest good for humankind. He died the following year. Every 10 December, on the anniversary of his death, the Nobel Prizes are handed out, and somewhere in the coverage someone tells the story of the obituary again.
Nobody has ever found that newspaper. Evan Andrews, writing for History.com, notes that historians have never located an original copy of the “merchant of death” obituary. Some now call the whole episode a myth. Others think it was one reason among several.
So the most famous story about how a man changed his story may itself be only a story. And we tell it anyway.
On the other side of meaning
I have written about meaning before, about doing the work with joy when anyone can do it. The more I think about meaning, the more I come back to the power of a story.
I believe that in the end, we all become stories.
Think about the people who have left this world. What do we remember of them? Mostly their stories. How they lived. What they said at the kitchen table. The one time they did something nobody expected. That is what we tell, at funerals and late at night.
Human beings are creatures of stories. Stories keep us alive. They make us believe. They give us meaning in ways we do not fully understand. A story is the reason people fight, and the reason people decide to change their lives.
Joan Didion opened her 1979 collection The White Album with one sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Nobel, if the story is true, heard the story the world would tell about him and decided to live a different one. Most of us will never read our own obituary. But you have probably heard the question in some form. What will people say about me when I am not here?
Whether you are a good story in bad shape or a bad story in good shape, keep the story going. The story is part of the foundation of meaning.
A $35 mark and the story it grew into
At the heart of design is a story.
The way a logo is drawn tells a story. The colour someone chooses tells a story. Sometimes the mark says nothing literal about the product at all, and it still gives the thing a personality, something you can recognise across a street.
Carolyn Davidson was a design student at Portland State University when Phil Knight asked her for a mark for his running shoes in 1971. She charged $35. By her own account, Knight told her he did not love the design, but maybe it would grow on him.
That mark became the Nike swoosh. Nobody looking at it today sees a $35 student sketch. They see every story Nike has told since. The shape did not change. The story around it grew until the shape could carry it.
You cannot do design beyond the story. Now anyone can type a few words and generate an image in seconds. The pictures can be very good. But where is the story? What is the human part that weaves a soul into the work? A machine can give you a shape. It cannot give you the years of telling that turn a shape into something people love.
The story we are too close to see
Every human being is a storyteller. Each of us tells a story in the way we do our own things. Most of the time we cannot see it, because it is us. We are too close.
Now imagine someone else talking about you. From the good side or the bad side, it does not matter. Suddenly you can see the human story. The sadness in it. The beauty of it. The failures and the imperfection. The little things that broke and the little things that went well. The small joys. The moments.
A lot of that you can capture in moments, in a photograph or a colour. Other times, words are going to fail you. That is where design earns its place. It can hold the part of the story that will not fit in a sentence.
Tell it until you believe it
If we tell ourselves a story enough times, we begin to believe it. That is true of the stories we tell about our lives, and it should be true of the way we do our work.
Storytelling will outlast every wave of machines we are about to live through. I notice that the most famous story about the Nobel Prize may never have happened, and that we still tell it every December, and I cannot ignore that. People do not keep a story alive because it is proven. They keep it alive because it means something to them.
The next struggle, in a world where anyone can make anything, is going to be the struggle for meaning. In design, story and meaning go together. When you start a logo or a colour palette, begin with the story it is meant to carry. Ask whose story it is. Ask what it should feel like when someone tells it after you are gone.
Do not abandon the story.
