could I get a show of hands of who here in the audience has had a bad Airline experience or knows somebody who has everybody didn't didn't even wait right that means we have something in common and that relatability has fueled one of the most successful customer service complaints in history I'm told back in 2009 nearly 15 years ago uh I had an experience with an airline and I wrote a song about it and it got popular very quickly when social media was just getting started and uh amazing things happened you can see uh on the slide it's at nearly 23 million views today and when I posted the video in July of 2009 amazing things started to happen and if you had a video that did something outstanding on YouTube at the time uh they awarded it what they call honors and in July of 2009 United brace guitars had a lot of honors it was the number one most watched music video in the world for the entire month of July yes but it was also the number six most watched video of any kind in the world so it became more than just a song it became a social statement as too as well uh there were mothers who didn't mind taking videos of their little kids singing words like liel and and to things like United breaks guitars and uh you're probably familiar with South by Southwest big Festival down in Texas there's two components to that there's the interactive P portion where I was and it was only 18,000 delegates this is Giant conference and then then the next week is the busier week of the music uh component but I was in the first week and I was doing a talk in a small room with maybe 50 people in it and I walked out and a man in uniform came up and he said Mr Carol I'm with the United States Marine Corps I just want you to know that all of the top Generals in our military have studied your video and as a Canadian I was concerned right I was looking for drones and wondering what this all means and probably the coolest thing that's ever happened to me because of United breaks guitars is the video and myself was a $1,000 question on Jeopardy so it it went uh in a whole bunch of different directions I wasn't prepared for any of it and so I'll tell you a little bit of that story but before I get into that I have to tell you how we arrived there and I am a proud member of a band called sons of Maxwell thank you and Vanessa Burns used to book us in downtown and uh we were just getting started together but uh our dad's name is Max that's how we came up with the name sons of Maxwell and we've toured all over the world and were wildly successful in the music business not because we had millions of fans who made millions of dollars but for 20 straight years at the time in 2009 we had managed to avoid the dreaded day job and just played music and that's how we made our living so that's hard to do and we were proud of that and we got to travel all over Canada the us we traveled as far as China across Europe a little bit in the Caribbean and we had a really great career and uh we were playing in 2008 at a a showcase and the audience is filled with people who might buy our show and at the end of our our 20-minute showcase a man came up and he said I'm with the University of Nebraska we represent the state of Nebraska we'd like you to come play a few shows in our state if you're interested we said absolutely and so we booked five or six shows and on March 31st in 2008 we flew United Airlines from Halifax to go to Nebraska I'd never flown United before and uh there was myself and John Park wheeler on guitar and Mike hilts on bass and my brother Don and they took all of our guitars and they put them in the belly of the plane they didn't give us the choice on whether that was an option or not and we landed in Chicago to D plane and catch our connector to go to Omaha and we were sitting I was sitting on the left hand window seat and there was uh Mike was on the right hand window seat and behind him was a woman that didn't know that we were musicians but we're landed we're on the ground and she looks outside and says oh my God they're throwing guitars outside I said what did you say and she said it again and it sounded as is bad the second time she said it so I waited for everybody to get off the plane and I walked up to the flight attendant we met in the middle of the plane and I said excuse me our guitars are being thrown outside can you help us and she put her hand up and she said don't talk to me talk to the lead agent I said where would that person be and she says she's just outside the plane so I walked outside the plane and in the gang way going into O'Hare Airport there was a woman in a United uniform walking away and I called o to her and I said excuse me I need to talk to the lead agent and she kept walking away but she says I'm not the lead agent and she walked into the airport so you know at an airport there's always a wicket like this at the gate and I walked in and and right at the end there was a wicket just like that and another woman about to make a phone call so I interrupted her and I said excuse me our guitars are being thrown over there can you help and she stopped her call long enough to say but hun that's why you signed the waiver and she started talking on the phone again right so it wasn't bad enough that our guitars were being thrown around on an International Airport tarmac I just just been rejected by three women in 5 minutes and uh we landed in in uh Omaha it was late it was after midnight and there was no one really to talk to I had two guitars with me everyone looked at the at the their guitars no one saw any damage and I had an ovation guitar and a Taylor Guitar very much like that one and the Taylor Guitars they're kind of high-end guitars I bought mine for $3,000 when I didn't have $3,000 and it had a nice hard shell C that had this brown skin on it and I didn't want to get the brown skin all scuffed up so I had this soft spongy black uh case to protected so I put my hand in between those two cases I didn't feel any damage and we went back and we went to sleep because we only had four hours of sleep before we were going to be picked up to go to the university to play our first show so first thing in the morning we get picked up we go do our sound check we open up our guitar cases and my ovation guitar is fine but the tailor is very badly damaged and I think it was thrown in that position because you can see that cable that I have to plug it in you could fit the tip of your finger in that but I could now fit four fingers in there and it had a nice Cedar top and there was pieces coming off it was awful and uh I bought that guitar like I said when I didn't have actually $3,500 that's what it cost me and uh but I used it from the time I owned it for every song I wrote anytime I went to the studio that was the guitar I used and if you know musicians uh they don't just order them from cataloges and that sort of thing you got to try them all out and I went through the whole process and arriv did that guitar for for myself and they're made by Taylor Taylor there is a Bob Taylor who owns it and he's still alive and I like to think that every guitar he makes uh is special to him I like to imagine that he lies in a bed and someone puts a guitar in bed with them and he says I love you baby but I got to let you go right so I was pretty upset but I knew they wouldn't just send me a check as though money could solve the problem they'd want to see it so after four or five days we finished our tour I went back to the airport and I tried to get the the woman uh that I met at checking Us in to take an interest and I said can you look at this guitar and she says I don't want to see that here you have to go back to the airport you started at which was Halifax Nova Scotia so we landed in Halifax again it was late and there was no one to talk to but there was a blue 1800 form so the next morning I called the 1800 number and I spoke to the good people in India right and they were the most sincerely apologetic people I spoke to for the next N9 months but they weren't empowered to do anything right so I said what should I do and they said well just bring it into O'Hara Airport and I said you don't understand I'm a a Canadian I live two time zones away I just can't bring this in and so they said well you have to go back to the airport because Air Canada is the Star Alliance partner and they will do a claim for you and that was the beginning of a really frustrating customer service maze because I went back to Air Canada at the Halifax Airport and I uh showed them the guitar and they said yep it's broken I said but we'll open up a claim but we're going to deny it because we're not going to pay for the damage that we didn't do to your guitar in another country and that actually made sense but so they gave me a starting point and that for 9 months became the the cycle that we've all been through where you call a number no one can help you they give you another number maybe uh in my case I called this number once and the lady said how did you get this number that's all she wanted to know and when she said you can call back tomorrow I imagined her desk was covered with files with people like me and I called her the the next day and she uh that whole number was disconnected so it was that kind of thing and my wife Jill worked for customer service at Bell and so she was working at the VP level managing a team at people who take the angriest of the angry calls and so she was always coaching me along she'd say don't get mad at the person you're going to talk to I take calls from people like you every day you be nice and so I was as nice as I could be and I just tried to move things along but they never seemed to and uh eventually uh after about 9 months I heard from a customer customer service rep named Miss earwig Miss earwig from United Airlines by email now this isn't the real Miss earwig this is my friend Christine bodman from Halifax she played Mr earwig in all three of the uh the videos for United breaks guitars and I only had $150 to make that first video thanks to my friends donating their time and stuff so Christine didn't get paid but she did get marriage proposals for her work as as uh on YouTube YouTube proposals and uh so Christine uh or Miss earwig and I we communicated by email for about nine or t times and uh she was really good at her job she never crossed the line she was never impolite never improper but they say sometimes you uh when you get kidnapped you fall in love with your kidnapper I started to develop a crush on Miss earwig and my wife Jill said I had to stop and after like nine or 10 emails Miss earwig finally broke up with me and she said Mr Carol uh you didn't open a claim within 24 hours nine months ago so we're not responsible for the damage to your guitar right and so you can imagine after all that time you'd be frustrated so I started typing back door without even thinking real time at like 11 at night I said Mr olwig if I was a lawyer I would sue United Airlines but I'm not and I looked and I had a perfectly intact guitar sitting right beside me I said I if I was a lawyer I'd see you but I'm a songwriter so I'm going to write three songs and I'm going to make three music videos and I'm going to put them on this thing called YouTube that I'd heard about and I said I'm going to try and get 1 million views in the next year with all three videos combined and uh I said you don't need to respond to me like you promised you wouldn't I'll keep you tabbed so that when that first video goes up I'll let you know and together we can get to a million that much quicker that was my goal and that's the last time I ever heard from miss earlwick that was in December of uh 2008 and so Christmas com comes and goes everyone's busy bus and in January I'm one of these people that like to set goals I think about what I want to accomplish in the next year and it's also the time of year where I forgive myself for the things I didn't do that I promised I would the year before and so I'm thinking okay what am I going to do in 2009 and I remember that I'd promised one of the world's biggest airlines not one song but three songs about the same thing and not one video but three videos without any money to pull any of that together and writing one song is hard uh about anything uh but if you want to try and write three with being redundant that's that's tricky so I said why did I say three one probably would have been enough but I did promise three so I said I'm I'm going to do three and like anything else you have to understand that songwriting is like any other business you have to know where you are today and then think about where you want to be where your goal is and you have to have guideposts along the way because if you don't and you're off by a degree on a long journey you'll never wind up at the at the goal so songwriting is part creation and part science uh there's things and rules you have to to apply and I had to think about who my potential audience would be when I wrote the song because you just can't write uh uh like I say without the guide post so I had to know who my audience was and I kind of figured who it would be and I could tell you that but I'd rather show you graphically so graphically uh the reason I'll do that because fast forward when the video went viral about a month into it I got my first call to do a speaking event and my brother dawn did most of the talking in Sons of Maxwell and uh so I'm kind of an introvert and so if I was talking and I ran out of things to say I could just sing a song right but uh I got called right out of the blue from a company called right now Technologies and they said Dave Carrol uh we're having our biggest event in the year in Colorado Springs at the Broadmore Hotel this beautiful hotel and we want you to be our opening keynote speaker you don't have to speak for very long just 40 minutes right and they said you don't even need to bring your guitar unless you really want to and uh uh they said uh would you like to do it I said of course and they saidy you do this all the time right I said of course I do but I'd never given a speech in my life and they said great well the events next week can you send us your slides and and so we can check them out in advance so I had to think fast and I said I'd like to customize those for you if you don't mind and I got off the phone and I called my father-in-law Brent and I said Brent uh what's a PowerPoint presentation musicians don't use PowerPoint uh and and so to make matters work I had to go touring I I had gigs booked in Saskatchewan so I left for Saskatchewan and I gave I learned what slides were and I gave content for the slides to my father-in-law to make this slideshow and he would meet me in Colorado Springs so the day before my first ever keynote I'm in a room with 750 empty chairs of 750 of the biggest brands in the world the US Air Force was going to be there Sears Disney like the biggest of the big names and there's 30 foot screens on either side of the stage that will be project in close-ups of my face giving my first ever presentation and in walks my father-in-law Brent I haven't seen him in a week and he hands me the USB stick with my slid show on it I give it to the person who hired me and he gives me one of these he says just Advance your slides to make sure they're in order and I'm blown away and Brent did a great job I'm not just looking at the slides I'm like that's a good one right and I look at the guy and he now knows I've never given a speech before and he's getting really nervous right and so we had this sort of uh standoff in the old western movies where we were looking at each other and I started to feel like a fraud right because I had said I could do this that I was qualified they were counting on me to deliver the keynote address to kick off the whole thing and he knew that I had never done it and so I had to calm myself down and I said well this stage is not unlike a stage that I would play music on I've been on in front of people many times but and I'll just go back to my room and practice the cards that I cheat notes I'd given myself until I have it down but at 2: in the morning I'm still pacing back and forth in my room and I'm getting really nervous thinking about this and I had to remember um that I'm just there to tell my story right nobody else had that story but me I was there to be myself and nobody else and uh so that really calmed me down and the next day I broke my uh presentation down to eight five minute sections eight five minute stories that I felt comfortable I could move along through and it was a success I I like to think I've gotten better since then but the first one was was a success and a guy came up to me after and he said if that's your first time you did really well but I noticed you didn't have any charts or graphs you got to have charts or graphs we're business people we don't make any decisions with those charts or graphs we have to have a chart and graph to account for everything we do and so I decided I would make a charter graph to describe to you who my perfect audience for this would be and we're Limited in time here I know so this is over your head we won't have time to dig in too deeply to it but this is what the science scientists and analysts who helped me build this chart and graph from all over the world have told me of who my potential audience could be pretty much everybody there's been a a movement towards micromarketing and everybody saying you got to know who your target audience is it's got to be very narrow get them and you and forget about everybody else I kind of reject that especially when it comes to songwriting because that's not what songwriters do we cast a widenet we try to hit as many people as possible by finding the commonalities with each other first rather than looking for the very specific unique differences and focusing on that and I think that was a Difference Maker that's why threeyear olds were singing United breaks guitars and so were 100y old people that were singing it and it's reached so many different countries around the world I think because uh I cast a wide net so that was a that was a good experience and I came back from uh uh so when I I started to write the song I was in Waverly living in frame subdivision and uh I just sat at my kitchen table and I thought okay I can only write one song at a time so I wrote the first one I decided that the lyrics would be chronically uh chronologically accurate this and tell the real sto story but the video is wildly exaggerated but the lyrics are accurate and it came really fast like in three hours I had the song written and I was laughing thinking about all the things that I could put in a video maybe one day and uh I had reclaimed my power right I'd stopped being angry it had been so long that it just became sort of a comedy of errors and the song wrote kind of wrote itself and I sent that song to I made a demo I sent the song to my friends in the music business I said youit have broke my guitar can you help me make a a good sounding song and they all said we'll donate our time so I had a really good sounding of record and then uh I took that recording and I sent it to my friends in the film business at Curve Productions and I said I'd like to make a music video for this United broke my guitar can you help me and they said sure what's your budget and I said zero dollars is that a problem and because they were friends they said they would so we all uh but I was told that I had to do almost everything and I had no experience with videos but they said uh uh you have to find a location you need to find the actors makeup uh lunch all that stuff you got to do we'll show up with a tiny crew behind the camera and you got to find everyone else so I had been a volunteer firefighter at Station 41 in Waverly for a few years at that point so I called my fire chief and I said Chief we need something that looks like an airport tarmac can we use the parking lot in front of Station 41 and he said okay so that we had our location I had 150 bucks I spent that on sombreros and mustaches and uh and a little bit of makeup and some lunch and we descended on Station 41 on this really nice day in April I think it was sunny day and we shot the video there and in studio in 8 hours and it went really fast I just had a piece of uh full scap paper with like 30 ideas on it things like bagage Handler stand this way guitar go by this way way and it would be cut and then go to the next one we just knock them off uh and uh Lara Cassidy uh did a fantastic job as the Director she hit it out of the park uh I didn't know what to expect and I remembered at the end of that day thinking it doesn't matter if a million people ever watch this because we're this is worth it the process uh is is the best part of the journey and so I'm really enjoying this day we're all laughing our heads off and coming together so that that made it worth it for me but when I saw what Lara Cassidy did I got it on July 1st and I said wow lar knocked it out of the park uh I should probably develop a social media strategy for this and a week went by and I hadn't done anything I was busy so I said why don't I just post it to YouTube and that became my social media strategy for United F guitars uh on Monday July 6th I posted it to YouTube at 11:30 p.m. and I sent out two messages this is the Glory Days of social media right in in Facebook terms if you sent out one message and you wanted all of your friends to get it they would get it as a private inbox message so I had 400 friends I said United broke myar can you watch this video and I had 300 friends in oook express that was my uh email database and I sent it to them said youit have broke my guitar can you watch this video and that's the last two times I've ever asked anyone to watch it I went to bed uh I put up 11:30 p.m. I went to bed at midnight and I had six hits and I thought all six were mine right I was prepared to watch it a million times to get there but after six viewings I started to get tired of myself I said I better go to sleep start again in the morning and uh and what I didn't know though is that at least at that time if you watched a video a thousand times from your home it only ever counted as one hit so social media had actually started to work I just didn't know five other people had watched it when I woke up in the morning though there was 300 hits and I was super excited because i' had been sleeping the whole time I knew none of those were mine right but I called Steve Rashard the cameraman for United breaks guitars and he's a great friend really great guy but I learn very quickly that you don't contact certain people certain friends when you're trying to get some energy behind something because Steve's a realist right you never call your realist friends first so I said like Steve we got 300 hits this is great and he's like don't don't get excited this could be over by noon but by lunchtime there was 5,000 hits and 25,000 by dinner time and and ironically Don and I had a gig in New Glasgow that night uh in to 500 Fire Chiefs from around Canada maybe and so we drove there and I didn't even have a smartphone at the time just a regular cell phone so normally you would be glued to the number right but I had to leave kind of leave it all alone played our show put my phone away and when I got off stage though there was a message on my phone from the LA Times They had heard about United breaks guitars from the Halifax Chronicle Herald and wanted to do an interview on it so while I was driving home from New Glasgow I was doing an interview with the LA Times and they said it might be in the online overnight Edition we don't know and sure enough it was because the next morning at about 6:00 in the morning I got a call I was lying in bed asleep and uh it was c100 the radio station and it officially started a media frenzy c100 in my experience if a radio station calls they typically ask if you want to be on the air but c100 just put me on the air so I was lying down like Dave Carol it's C 100 we want to talk about United R guitars and I gave my first interview lying down and they said it was going bananas so after the interview we rushed to the kitchen where my laptop was opened it up and the video had started to go up exponentially and that's the true definition of a viral video at least it was at the time not just a big number but going up from 4 to8 to 16 Etc and we were getting messages from people from all over the world some people couldn't speak English but they were trying to communicate we love your video uh often it was don't take the money United's going to be offering you you're doing something good for customers every where there were uh media sources from everywhere calling on every possible way phones my phone Jill's phone my brother DA's a firefighter full-time he was getting calls at the station saying can you get us five minutes with your brother and it was insane so we were firsttime parents at that moment our son Flynn is only three months old so we were tired all the time and I remember being in the kitchen on that first couple of days and and I'm on the phone taking an interview Jill my wife is a good multitasker but even she was overwhelmed she's uh taking a phone call about an interview answering an email and breastfeeding Flynn at the same time like that and it was insane so we had to to double the size of our homebased business I went to Walmart and I bought a a card table and a two-line phone and we went home and we hunkered down for this really crazy couple of weeks where I was doing interviews all day from sometimes like 6:00 in the morning you'd go do the morning TV things interviews all day stop at maybe 11: at night and then go get 2 hours sleep and then you'll be doing the European morning circuit you get up at 1:00 a.m. to start doing that it was it was unbelievable and Julian maret was uh uh he drums with sons of Maxwell sometimes and he was my right-hand man he left his job at the Cancer Society for about a month to work for me and with me and uh and we went to Staples and bought a black book which was all calls went through Julian he would write down where we were going next and we found ourselves driving from Global News to ATV one day across the bridge and uh and I was doing an interview on the phone while we driving and always interested in who was calling Julian because it was always somebody interesting so as I'm doing my thing I pick up that he's now talking to Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars right that's like God calling you on the telephone if you like Taylor Guitars and then he just as soon hangs up on him says Bob I got to go and he hangs up and I'm like dude you just hung up on Bob Taylor says yeah but we got David Letterman on the line and he starts talking because he had David Letterman's producer and it looked like that fr Friday we were going to be going to New York City to be on Regis and Kelly in the morning uh uh Letterman that evening and Mike Huckabee the former presidential candidate played bass guitar and he wanted to play bass guitar on his Fox News show and CBS wanted to talk to us on Monday morning so we were pretty excited and then they all called and they said nah uh maybe some other time something came up and it was because I think they all felt that they were two weeks late on the story so they didn't want to do it so we were kind of bummed but the phone kept ringing and turns out you've heard the saying of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon well the reason uh Taylor called or Taylor called and talked to us and the reason that Letterman's people called is because Taylor does work with Kevin Bacon Kevin Bacon called Letterman and that's how we made that connection and so we ended up going to San Diego which is near El Cahone where they make Taylor Guitars and had this great meeting we went did the Today Show and did CNN Hollywood where Larry King's Studio was and all this fun stuff and uh the best part was going to the tailor plant where I got to see how they make these guitars and they had this big wall that had all the types of guitars that they they make and they said thanks for the publicity Dave take your time and pick two when you're done so that's that's the guitar that replaced the broken one and I don't really really play Electric but they had this one electric guitar that was a sexy electric guitar with the F holes and the w w that that bar that does that the bar that your only good guitar players they use it but very sparingly right but my first gig when I got home everything was right so I I still have a good uh relationship with Taylor to this day but the one thing I noticed during all of that media business was that the media Source uh would change how people uh saw the story if you thought the media Source was cool you would think the story was cooler right so for my friends when it was in Rolling Stone that was legitimizing right but I remember coming home from interviews and and uh my wife met me at the door with a TV remote and a plate of finger sandwiches and it's Canadians we know finger sandwiches mean A party's about to break out or someone's died right so I grabbed a finger sandwich and it was on CNN The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and my parents were there and now that I have kids I can appreciate that uh they were happier for me than I was for myself right it's nice to see your kids having something good happen and they were they were proud and all that stuff and uh my dad at the time wasn't a big fan of CNN but he appreciated the moment so he's like wow CNN I'm I'm proud of you son that's a big show right and there was Wolf Blitzer he's rocking out on the situation room wall screens with my friends behind them on the sombrero rocking out and Wolf Blitzer dancing like this given everything he's got right and and so that was the way it was the different sources in interested different people and several months later I got a call from ABC television asking if I wanted to to be on The View with whoopy Goldberg and the ladies and that's my mom's favorite show right so before I even could email them to say yes I'd love to be on the show I called my mom and I said ma this is giant I'm going to be on The View and she's never at a loss for words but there was this dead Eerie silence and then holy this turned my mother into a potty mouth right my dad not a fan of the show but he's like that's a popular program son I'm happy for you right but about a week later I come back from that and I did an interview with Readers Digest on the phone and I call home uh to talk about other things but I said to my mother said mentioned to Dad I just did an interview with reader digest and hung up the phone and I've never heard my dad so excited he calls back son reader digest this is huge this is going to help your CD sales he says and uh that's exactly what happened the CD sales did go crazy my mom has been doing our uh our mail order forever our dad gets the credit with sons of Maxwell but our mom has been the one that's actually kept us in business especially in the early years and we didn't have an internet uh connection there was no internet at the time when we first started playing so if we were traveling across the country and somebody wanted a CD and they didn't get it out a show they wouldn't probably get it in a store because we were Indie artists and it's hard to get your stuff in stores so people would have to become private detectives so my parents living in Tim's Ontario would get these handwritten letters sometimes saying dear M of the sons we like your sons music can we buy a CD and theyd put 20 bucks in there and she felt so honored that she liked that people liked her kids but she loved that someone trusted her with 20 bucks so she would knit them a dish cloth as packing for the CD right and we still have fans to this day say I still use your mom's dish cloths right and uh and so my parents then moved to to uh Waverly just up behind me and so you know a few weeks into this it occurred to me that CD sales might be going crazy so I called her and I said how are the CD sales and she saids you got to to come over and see this so I drive up the hill park outside and I go in the house but she's nowhere around so I called out I said where are you and she says I'm in the basement but look in the living room so I looked in their living room and they had this brown leather sofa and it was covered with yellow man manila envelopes two rows 10 high the whole length of the sofa I said this is incredible she says it's our third sofa full today said get in the car I'm taking you to Leon's I'm buying you a [Laughter] sectional so the Cy sales those those spiked as well but I say that this is this experience was like living inside an onion because every time you would sort of Step Up another ring would fall away and you'd have a greater u sense of awareness of what this could be so initially you know selfishly I was thinking well this could be good for my career then I thought well maybe this is this could be good for all musicians because as an indie band i' been waiting for years for something that would allow me to reach people who might want to hear my music without having to uh depend on the right manager the right agent and all these impediments that stand in the way of talented in Independent Artists just trying to get a break so now the internet could do that you go right over everybody right to your direct audience and then I thought well no this is bigger than music this is for anyone who's got customers anybody who has an audience they'd like to reach you could now reach them directly with social media that was pretty cool but then I thought even more that this was even bigger than that that this isn't really about what you do for your living this is about the story you tell right storytelling is the key to this whole this whole experience and for all of us because storytelling is the thing that sets you apart from anybody else in the world just like on my first speaking event I was really nervous because I didn't feel like I belong there I felt like a bit of a fraud but the truth was I was being asked to tell my story and nobody else in the world had that and every single one of you in this room have a unique story that's worth telling and that's worth being heard you might just need to work on how you tell it but I guarantee you you all have a story that's worth uh standing out in a sea of sameness and so I had this experience where a man sent an email that taught me this or reminded me at least very early on where he said Mr Carol I hate country music which wasn't good for that song anyway and he says but I love everything about the way you're doing it I love the way you're treating Mr earwig I love the way that you're using humor I like the the U the whole vibe around this whole thing so I'm going to go to your website I'm going to buy everything you've got for sale site unseen and at the time iTunes was the way you might grab a single song for 9 cents and because uh this man liked the story he said I'm going to buy everything you've got so he he bought $300 worth of stuff some T-shirts and like eight or nine CDs and it came to $300 so I would have lost 99 Cents if I was selling him what I did which was a country song but he bought what I was trying to do and why I was doing it and that's the difference there was a 300X difference on on uh what and why so that was really important to remind me again that why you do things and the story that you're telling is even more important than whatever it is you're selling or what you do everybody's probably familiar with Maya Angelou famous poet writer she's just type her name in and there's a long list of of incredible things that she's thought of and said but one thing I really like that she said was that people uh will forget what you have done and what you said but they will never forget right on and that's so true and it occurred to me that that's what storytelling is about it's not storytelling doesn't come from the head that's where charts and grass live that's where you make logical statements but storytelling comes from the heart and there in lies kind of a superpower that I'll talk about in a second but it occurred to me that if you were in the storytelling business and we all are that we are actually in the M&M's business because we're trying to create memories and moments that's the whole story it's that moment when something happens when you love somebody and you have never said it before and they haven't said it to you and you have the courage to say I love you and you wait and maybe they say I love you back that's a good feeling right that's the moment that you remember we probably hopefully both remember it and uh that's why I say that M&M's memories and moments are the Crux of the story and that only comes from the heart and this isn't just you know hopes and dreams talk I'm talking about this is backed up by science Paul Zach is a researcher and he did a study on cortisol and oxytocin the two hormones that get released cortisol would be if you're being chased by a bear you you want your body to release some of that to motivate you to move faster and if you uh have that experience where you tell someone I love you and they say it back your body's probably going to be filled with oxytocin so that's something you also want your body to uh anchor as a memory and he had this experiment where he had a control and experimental group come in of people they reach pay to stipend the first uh trol group came in and they were put in front of a movie screen and wired up to measure their oxytocin and cortisol levels they showed them a movie that was very charts and graphs very data driven and it was all for all intents and purposes it was boring and of course as expected nothing happened there was no big swings then they sent everybody home and they brought in the experimental group and they did the same thing wired them up and showed them a much different movie this little short film was showing a man pushing a little girl on a swing and there was a voice over and it's the father talking and he says it's bittersweet because every time he pushes her it's one less time because she's got terminal cancer and you can imagine what happened to the oxytocin and cortisol levels they went bananas as they expected so they had some proof there and they said thank you very much and sent them home but what they didn't tell the people is what they were also studying was their reaction to what they did with their stien because both groups were offered the opportunity to donate money to a booth outside to some charity and the first group with no swings and oxytocin or cortisol passed by and kept the money almost all of the people in the other group donated their money that's incredible it's incredible for a few reasons but it means that if you tell a compelling story you can affect the generosity and the kindness of people and the very next move that they make it also means if you tell a negative story you could probably influence people to carry that forward as well but I like to think about the positive side that's what good storytelling is all about something else I've noticed uh is that and through this experience is that your brain cannot tell the difference between what's true or only imagined to be that means that with good storytelling you don't have to experience pain and suffering to uh really understand what pain and suffering in other people is like if the storytelling is good if the narrative is strong and uh uh if you were to perhaps look at a a pot of water on your stove you can't look at that like a like a Marvel super hero and make that boil but you can pick up a phone you can call somebody 10,000 miles away and tell them a compelling story that makes them cry makes their body temperature increase uh the physiologically change their physiology that is a superpower we all have that ability just like a Marvel person character we have a superpower and it's called storytelling if you tell it right and you can change people's lives with that and you don't need to be right beside them you just need to convince the brain of the person who's experiencing that by telling a story from the heart to the heart it will make them feel something like my Angelou said and they will be forever changed That's The Power of story to so why was United breaks guitar so successful and why would it matter to you here at Mount St Vincent at the leaders and Learners conference well initially uh I when this first happened I just thought it was because it was a slow news time and they're all the superficial factors that allowed the story to to emerge but I've since thought about it and I've decided that I I thought for a long time that the reason was we were all connected you and I and everybody in the world are all connected with one another and we have more in common with each other than we don't I believe that and that is why storytelling is is even made possible if we weren't mostly in common we wouldn't be able to communicate at something that happened to me and make you feel it we have to have so many commonalities for that to work and I had this experience where I was early on with this in Australia delivering a keynote had a great time and I was going home but I had four extra hours so I jumped in a taxi and I I asked the person at the front desk if I had 4 hours in Sydney where would I go and they said go to Bondi Beach it's this Crescent shaped Beach where you can go swimming or surfing or just walk around by t-shirts is a good place to go so I jumped in the cab and they drive on the other side of the road so I'm sitting over here and the driver's there and we just start talking and he has this strong Eastern European accent so I said where are you from and he says You must guess where I am from my friend and so I start naming countries and eventually I said Romania and he says that is correct I'm Romanian and I didn't have to talk anymore he started doing all the talking and he was a real chatter box and uh out of the blue though he said started talking about social movements and he says my friend there are no social movements in the world without money you must have money to have a social movement except sometimes maybe like the man from United I said what did you just say he says my friend you wouldn't know but there's a man from Halifax Canada who wrote a song called United breaks guitars I said I'm that guy and he couldn't believe it he's driving like that he looked over and he pulls the car over he grabs his phone off the dash for some reason and he's like I will call my wife on the phone she will not believe it the man from United is in my cab I talk about you all the time right me and this guy should have had nothing in common because he came from a communist country under chesu and he was in the Navy and now he's driving cab 14 time zones away from me in a remote part of the world and for that time anyway he was telling anybody who was getting into his cab about United breaks guitars because he understood it and he felt it and he knew that other people would get it and resonate with them too that's a pretty cool experience to have and it's because of this belief I think that we all are connected so that's kind of where I went for five or six years when I was telling the story but then I started thinking more and I thought there's got to be more than just that we're connected and what do you do with that if that's the case what what Insight can I can I take from this story and it has to do with the fact that I think that there is an elephant that has been uh sitting unintroduced in every room that we've entered for a very long time especially in business and I think it's starting to change a little bit but it's been unintroduced in a very long time and it's this opportunity of a lifetime and the Elephant that I'm talking about is compassion compassion is a tool in business that we've had and we could have used many times but we didn't because the traditional business model is you got to win the business you got to destroy the competition and that's not necessarily the way to be successful right I don't think it is and when I talk about compassion I use a simple definition that it's the Deep awareness of the suffering of another and the willingness to alleviate it without causing harm to anybody else along the way so it could come in any form compassion can become in any form if you were walking down a hallway and you saw a mop in the middle of the floor picking it up so no one else trips on it is an act of compassion if you took the mop though and you threw it over into another part of the floor to get out of your way you might be hurting somebody else that's not necessarily compassion right so if you do something in the service of somebody else without hurting anybody else along the way that's what I Define as compassion and there's room for that in every business and organization and every personal uh interaction that you have you can always be a little bit Kinder and uh that's been a powerful realization for me because compassion unlike so many other things it's free and it's highly contagious when you introduce it into any room it explodes in all directions and just like Paul Zach showed show a little kindness to other people and it has a ripple effect and it never runs out right so it's a it's a powerful thing so I developed a very simple uh intentional process that I call Compassionate design and it has to do with um metaphorically with a triangle so this is a pretty good looking triangle as far as triangles go nothing really big about it just a blue triangle but there are five stakeholders with every business I believe and they are your clients and your employees and your suppliers the people who Supply your businesses the greater good like the Comm and your shareholders because profit isn't a bad idea and if you were to only try to accomplish one of these uh wins for one of these five stakeholders you would be a flat two-dimensional triangle like this if you only cared about profit and left all the other four uh items on the table you'd be a flat two-dimensional triangle and there are companies like this that make a lot of money but their employees aren't happy and their suppliers are hurting and the community doesn't doesn't benefit and their uh and their customers probably aren't happy either but I discovered when I was looking at this triangle and I started doodling with it that if you added a line to this triangle for every one of the five stakeholders it becomes a different thing if you put a line there for your clients and one for your employees and one for the suppliers and the greater good and didn't forget about the shareholders you turn that triangle into a pyramid right and that's a wildly different thing than a triangle a pyramid has this big giant square base it's got four sides not just one it lasts pyramids last thousands of years they stand high in the Horizon they stand out in the sea of samess and walking in the desert you're going to notice a pyramid and uh they can withstand a lot of force on one side because they have three other sides backing them up in the base and the one thing I've noticed is that millions of people go to these pyramids every year so they can stand there and take a selfie and show all their friends look who I'm standing beside today if you wanted to create a brand try to find as many winds in the five stakeholders as possible because then you your brand will become become a pyramid rather than a triangle that's attainable for everybody just by caring one of my pandemic projects how was your pandemic by the way uh I wrote a book for my kids called Tom the tomato plant and it was my first attempt at a kids book and uh I I kind of wrote the story uh a couple of years before the pandemic but I I took the project on during the pandemic and uh my dad had taken my son fiser who was young at the time to church and they were coming home it was winter time fiser must have looked at the cemetery and he said what's that over there and my dad said well that's where you go when you die and then probably a driving took his attention away and that was the whole death and dying conversation right so I'm lying in bed at night with my son and I would often tell stories and just riff uh they could sometimes decide what the content was going to include and I would have to riff a story and almost always they would say that story sucks dad but this one night night he's upset and I said what's wrong and he says well I don't want to die and and be in a box under the snow in the dark forever because of what my dad had told him about death and dying so I came up with a story arc of the story life of uh a tomato plant named Tom now Tom is smaller than all the rest and his earliest memory is going in the back of the farmer's market truck bumping along and uh when they with all the other tomato plants and when they get to the farmers market they put them on a table all the bigger ones in front and they put a sign saying Tom for sale and they put Tom at the back as he's smaller and every day as expected uh people were more interested in the bigger tomato plants the farmer was always busy he he gave water to them every day but sometimes too much so they were cold and wet and other days not enough so they were dry and thirsty but every day people were coming by and picking those bigger tomato plants first until late in the season the sign was hanging there and Tom was foror with his Vines hunched forward because he knew he was never going to find a forever home because nobody was showing any interest until one day one day a family came along and there was a little girl and her brother and Mom and Dad and the little girl looked on the way by and she said Mommy why is that tomato plant all by itself and the whole family went over and took an interest so this little girl didn't have any power she didn't have the money she didn't get to call the shots she wasn't authorized to say where and when but she persuaded the family by taking an interest in Tom and they all went over and they all had a discussion and they decided that they would give Tom a forever home and bring him home and that's what they did they put Tom in this bigger uh pot with fresh soil threw the other one out and they put Tom in the sunniest spot on the deck that they had and every day Tom was so appreciative that he reached up and he tried to touch the sun knowing he would never touch it but he wanted to get close because he knew he would grow bigger tomatoes for them if if he was closer and sure enough eventually Tom grows four big tomatoes for each of the four family members and they take turns showing gratitude and the little girl was laughing cuz that was the best friend and she they all said thank you Tom and they took turns and they went into the house and enjoyed their tomatoes that he had grown just for them and he felt like a million bucks he had that was his life's purpose was to to do what he had done and outside the window it was late in the in the season and it started to snow and he'd never seen snow before it felt a little cool on the outside but he was so warm on the inside that he didn't really even notice the snow and he started to notice that his Vines were get starting to wither he was so encapsulated by growing these tomatoes that he didn't even notice that and he was filled with gratitude and he started to remember what he was before a tomato plant and he looked through the window and he watched his family enjoy those tomatoes and he took one last look at them and smiled and then he let sleep come and that's the story of Tom the tomato plant and at the end of that my son said that's a pretty good story dad so I wrote the book and uh I'd like to sing a song that comes with this this this uh song or this book because they say dance with the one that BR you and I didn't write the song for the book but I think it it has the messages that I wanted to go along with it and it's called the Giant and so I wrote this for my my sons and uh I decided that uh in life if you're lucky cuz I I became a dad at 40 I was a little bit older and I I thought the best thing a father could do or a parent I guess would be to make sure your kids are loved unconditionally and uh because then no matter where they go they're going to have two people that love them unconditionally in the world their mom and dad but I figured if things go as they're supposed to there will come a time when uh I'm not there his mom's not there and uh I didn't like the idea that they might feel that there was nobody that loved them ever so I thought maybe the better gift that a parent could give to their kid would be to teach them if you could influence it would be to teach them to love themselves and that way no matter where they go they always have somebody that loves them so that's what the message in this song is and uh has there's three levels of awareness the first one is if you're lucky enough you'll come to a point in your life where you see a giant within you right and then if you're luckier still you get to know that giant within you and the luckiest people of all are the ones who real iiz that they are and always were the giant so that's what this song is [Music] about there's nothing you could do there's nothing you could say to cause the love I have for you to shrink or fade away there's nothing about you I change but one thing I regret is you don't recognize the giant I see as a yet but I'm going to work on you yes I'm going to work so hard so hard on you one day you will realize the impact that you made when you look behind and see the giant Footprints have remain and you love the one you've always been without being afraid and I'll know my work is through when you see the giant in [Music] you there's nothing more I want of you but one thing that I fear is that you may never love the face that looks back in the mirror and I know that my words are weak but this is where we start and they'll take on new meaning when you know them and your heart cuz I'm going to work on you yes I'm going to work so hard so hard on you one day you will realize the impact that you made when you look behind and see the giant footprints that remain and you love the one one you've always been without being afraid and I'll know my work is through when you know the Giant in you there's nothing you could do there's nothing you could say to cause the love I have for you to shrink or fade away cuz I'm going to work on you yes I'm going to work so hard and one day soon you'll know the giant is you [Music] [Applause] o thank you very much so that's the giant I'll just move ahead I want to leave you with this story cuz I think uh you might like it but uh when I was really busy a few years back uh I decided that we needed a family vacation so I'd never been to Disneyland and all the commercials say uh everybody loves Disney I don't know if I really believe that I I don't like crowds that much so Disney is all about crowds if you don't like crowds it might not be for you but uh we brought our family and this is what they look like at the time and we ended up taking this it was a great vacation for the most part but at the end of the day of this day we had a little stroller for Fisher who was was uh on me there and uh we were coming back and we were really tired the both both boys were really tired so we're trying to make a be line to get out of the park without them seeing anything they want to go on and we had the Fastpass bracelets to to get us on rides and we're going by the Star Wars simulation ride has anyone ever done that it's awful Isn't it it has the board on it with all the warnings if you're pregnant if you have a bad back if it's like those commercials right will cause diarrhea D all of that stuff and there's a black line that for for the height restriction and if you're not tall enough to make that you don't get to go on the ride so uh Flynn saw it he's said Dad I want to go on that and I thought I'm not going to break his heart I'm going to let Disney break his heart because he's not going to be tall enough so I sent him up and he was just tall enough he made it so I was committed I had to go on this ride so Jill stayed with Fisher outside and we walked in like like guys out of the The Right Stuff the space moving in slow motion like we're going to take on odor space here and we walk in and we got the fast passes so we go right in and first thing I noticed 3D glasses that's not good and the ride had seat belts so I knew it was going to be awful and Flynn goes right to the front row uh front two seats so I'm sitting at the outside he's right beside me we Buckle in get all Buck buckled in and it's as bad as I expected we're moving around it feels like we're going in circles but we're really just being jerk jerked around and during this whole experience I look down at them and and I'm being thrown around and he's being thrown around and I can't help him so it's like son everyone every man for himself and I'll see you at the end of this thing and about a minute later it ends and I'm hot and sweaty I'm I'm feeling nauseous so I communicate that with my son I look down and I said fenny I'm not feeling so good how are you and with his 3D glasses on he says I pooped he says but just a little dad and I thought that's a different that's a difference between a guy who's who's five and 45 right cuz for adults it's it's really ones or zeros it either happened or it didn't there is no just little bit right so we leave the doors open we walk out and Jill's we've gone five minutes but I look like I've been in the drunk tank all night and Flynn's got the Gate of a guy that's just pooped his pants and she goes fenny what happened did you poop your pants he says yes Mommy but we were in space so we talked about a whole bunch of stuff but the one thing I want you to remember is that in life happens but you have the choice to decide if your pants are going to be half full or half empty thank you everybody thank you very much