Using Stories To Influence People
I found a mentor, a man named Ed Lawson. I write about him in my book. He was known as the California Walkman. He was a great civil rights leader of his time and Ed was a black man coming up in the 60s and 70s and he would constantly get harassed by the police. This is before Black Lives Matters. This is before all that kind of stuff and he took the police department to the supreme court by himself. He's not an attorney.
He was just a guy who believed in justice and fairness and when I met him, he had gone through all that. He had won a supreme court case and he had decided that he was going to mentor some young people and there I was. And I was mentored by him for a period of time and he really shifted my view on the world and taught me a lot about how the world works, how business works, how deals are conducted.
But most importantly how to influence people and he was more than anybody I've ever met to this date. A master of influence. He was a master storyteller and if you can master those two qualities, it doesn't really matter where you are, what you have, what resources are available to you because everything in life involves one person giving something to another person. So if you hold the tool of influence and if you can do that through storytelling, the most impactful form of influence, there's nothing that can stop you.
