G'day, G'day friends,

I stumbled upon a Steve Jobs quote I love:

love AI, but the one thing that's happened that drives me mad:
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Everyone sounds exactly the f*cking same.

Not just a little bit, but a lot.

I immediately scroll when I see the bland, generic slop on social media.

All stories that you read follow the same structure, cadence, random contrasts, as well as overexplaining the plot.

AI has a distinct shape and pacing to its storytelling.

You just know it when you read it.

This is where the communication crisis is happening.

People are struggling to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Storytelling has become rarer as it becomes more valuable.

We buy products to feel closer to the person we're buying them from.

Value has shifted from code to communication now.

We derive a sense of belonging and identity from the products that we buy.

We are defined by the things that we buy, and we buy the things that define us.

It's a self-fulfilling cycle.

This is why, in 2026 and beyond, storytelling is the highest-value skill that you can learn, beyond anything to do with coding or even AI.

People buy into a story first before they buy into the sale.

What people get wrong about sales is that they think it's about being a pushy used car salesman and forcing someone to buy a lemon.

This is the wrong mental framing.

Sales is about telling stories that capture the beliefs they need to buy your product and get value from it.

If you fail to do that, you are fundamentally failing at doing sales.

One of my friends who is a subscriber recently messaged me this:

Even in the way she framed that message, she always starts by talking about how good my storytelling is.

She still clicks and opens my emails, even though she knows I've turned another story into a way to sell my service.

That's why stories are so important.

Never sell something without a story

Never tell a story without selling something.

Let's Launch Together,

Michael ‘the storyteller’ Lim