I was doing research for a talk to leaders in a company.  One of the points that I was making was that extraordinary leaders are story-tellers.  I ran across a reference to the 2005 Stanford University commencement speech given by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Pixar Animation. I remember reading the transcript, emailed to me by a friend, shortly after the speech was given.  What I had forgotten was that the structure of the speech was three stories from Jobs’ life.  In fact, he starts off by saying, “I’m going to tell you three stories from life. That’s it.” He goes on to tell three touching stories about following your heart, loving your work, and living your own life and not someone else’s. 

I was curious.  In less than two years, how far had these three stories traveled?  It had spread through traditional media, books and magazines (the author of the book that mentioned the speech had first read it in Fortune Magazine) as well as word of mouth. I went to Google and searched on “Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement.”  The number of matches? 720,000.

One of these matches was a YouTube listing of a video of the speech.  So naturally, I clicked and watched the 14-minute video.  I could see that the delivery matched the brilliance of the content.  The video was posted in March 2006 and has been viewed over 200,000 times.

That’s the power of story.  We should all learn to be story-tellers.