George Hahn

It's more interesting, and you sound smarter, to catastrophize versus articulate the arc of history.

Things will likely get a bit better.

Every day.

Yawn.

But it's always healthy to ask, what could go right?

Last week, with so many things on Earth going wrong, something went right.

In space.

Let's talk about NASA's Artemis II mission.

One query I get often, what class or skill would you suggest our kids take or learn to compete in the modern economy?

A, storytelling.

The flow of capital, like the trajectory of history, clots around compelling stories.

Entrepreneurs, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward.

Before America was a nation, it was a story told by traitors who recast their rebellious colonies as bastions of liberty and themselves as patriots.

Mastery of narrative is humanity's superpower, as the arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers.

Communities with a larger share of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation and procreation.

Storytelling reinforces their evolutionary resilience, efficiently transmitting survival-relevant information.

At the beginning of the space race, the story was about Soviet pioneering and American stagnation.

The Soviet space program had put the first satellite into orbit, Sputnik, sent the first dog into space, Laika, and completed the first manned mission, Yuri Gagarin.

So how did we beat the Soviets to the moon in less than a decade?

A. We changed the story from one about us falling behind, the space race, to one we could win, the moon race.