1149: Who Are You Really?

What's the most difficult decision you've ever had to make?

In this series, we've talked about how action reveals character, but we've left out one critical piece of the puzzle: 🧵

PRESSURE.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett inhabits a world where a woman's security revolves entirely around men and marriage, but:

Worse still ... she is one of five unmarried sisters.

Worse still ... her family home will pass to a cousin when her aging father dies, leaving the girls destitute.

200 years on, it's hard to imagine this suffocating reality, and yet:

... when that same secure cousin selects her as a wife (in literature's least romantic proposal), this is what she says:

“You forget that I have made no answer. Let me do it without further loss of time. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than to decline them.”

It is in this moment, under all that pressure, that we see who Elizabeth truly is.

When push comes to shove, she shoves back:

In business, we tend to prefer to tell success stories ... how we achieved this or built that.

Then we wonder why no one is paying attention...

As a business-man, I can talk about building my digital agency in the dot-com boom, or how I coped with near-failure in the dot-com crash.

Which would tell you more about who I am?

Nick

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This is one of 30 riffs on #Business #Storytelling. Follow me to get the series.