Patrick O'Shaughnessy

If I'm listening and I'm curious about, I'll just keep it grounded in business, like the story of my business at these three levels.

Is there a good question that I could ask, like prompt myself with to get at the external, the emotional and the philosophical?

Can you think of a question for each?

So maybe to rebuild it in the other direction, the questions are something like, how should the world be in a general sense?

How do I believe the world should be?

The second layer is, why am I doing this?

What is it about my specific story that maps back onto that?

And the third is, what are we doing about it?

And if you tell the company's story in that way, what does it galvanize that makes it worth pursuing in the first place?

Because it seems like the thing that I encounter over and over again is even companies making something really great don't know how to talk about themselves for whatever reason.

I'm curious why you think that is, why companies struggle with that, and then why there's such a payoff to doing the work to figure it out.

We're going to talk a lot about applying some of these principles to the world of building companies or making things.

One of the very first things I can remember you teaching me is something to the effect of everyone focuses on the new when trying to tell you about their thing, but that the right approach is maybe only 20% new and 80% familiar or something like that.

Can you say more about this principle of storytelling or of delivering a message or conveying something to people that the trap we fall in of trying to just focus on the exciting new thing?

Tell me about the short film that you like so much that's nothing more than a camera panning back and forth.

If you think about the power of communicating by starting with the familiar and the known, how would you encourage CEOs, companies, people talking about their thing, use that truth?

What is the method that you've seen the best explain accepted reality before trying to explain their new thing?

Is there a method that comes out of this that you think is useful to founders, especially as the group that I'm the most interested in?

Does that mean that in trying to reach the mind of a customer, let's say, the right thing or allocation of time for the founder is to spend most of their time understanding the story of the customer as it currently exists versus how it should be and then build off of that?

What did you learn running studios?