Tell better stories about your life, your work, your causes, and the people you care about — at dinner parties, at family gatherings, in friendships, in the relationships that matter most. Internalize that the stories you tell shape the relationships you have. Personal storytelling is event-sourced narrative for relationships. You are replaying selected events from your life — chosen, sequenced, emphasized — to update the listener's mental model of who you are. The relationship deepens because their model becomes more accurate (and more present). Same shape as event-sourcing in an app you've built: the projection is the relationship; the events are the stories; the consistency model is the trust the listener extends as the events accumulate. Most engineers default to summary projections in conversation ("how was your week?" "fine, busy") which is the equivalent of throwing away the event log and storing only the current state. Storytelling is replaying the events — not all of them, but the load-bearing ones — so the listener can rebuild a richer projection. A second engineer's frame: the stories you tell about yourself are the public API of your identity. The methods you expose — the moments you make available for telling, the framings you use, the through-lines you emphasize — determine how the rest of the world can integrate with you. Right now your public API is small (a Rails developer, a bridge-builder, a father, a husband). Each of these is a high-level method that returns a summary. The Module 6 work is exposing the underlying objects: the specific scenes, the specific decisions, the specific people whose names you've never said aloud in certain conversations. A richer API surface lets people interact with you in more interesting ways — partnerships you couldn't have imagined, friendships that go from acquaintance to close, advice from people who finally understand what you actually do. The cost is the work of writing the API; the benefit compounds across every relationship for the rest of your life.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
There is a separate curriculum (Communication for Engineers) with a full storytelling module aimed at technical audiences and public talks. This module is the personal version: st…
The Communication for Engineers curriculum's Module 3 taught you to convert technical work into narrative. Module 6 here is the social-currency twin — telling better stories at di…
Approach: READ Parts 1-2 closely. SELECTIVE Part 3 (case studies — pick 5 that interest you).
Approach: READ cover-to-cover. The audiobook in Guber's voice is excellent.
Approach: RE-READ if you did the Communication curriculum. Otherwise READ cover-to-cover. SHORT. Do the exercises.
Approach: RE-READ Ch 1-6 if you did the Communication curriculum. This time with the social storytelling lens — the listener is your friend, your spouse, your kid, your father, no…
Approach: READ Chapters 1-3 (the hero's journey, the function of myth). SKIM the rest.
Approach: READ cover-to-cover. The audiobook in Iger's voice is excellent.
Two parallel deliverables, both required:
9 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.