Humans are inherently narrative-driven creatures. We are driven by the stories we tell others, and the stories we tell ourselves.
The idea that you can somehow argue someone out of a position and into an opposing one, just by using logic, or by presenting evidence, is fatally flawed. People are not influenced by logic, and often times they are not even influenced by facts. And if you think you are? Well, that’s just a story you tell yourself. The story may well influence how you engage with the world, but sometimes it’s just a story.
This is not a very popular opinion amongst those in fact-driven professions: scientists, engineers, and others, will argue against it. To an extent they are correct. You can’t tell the Universe a story and expect it to believe you. While you might not believe in the laws of physics, they believe in you. However, in other ways, the fact-driven crowd is wrong. Most endeavours among humans impact other humans, and those humans are driven by the stories they believe.
The secret, therefore, is not to assume that facts you hold will change the world around you. They can, and they might: but your facts need to be set inside a story. It is the stories that change the world. The facts do not.
For myself I think the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth, is the key to understanding how people think. The monomyth is the common template of stories involving a hero who goes out on an adventure, is challenged, but then is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Championed by Joseph Campbell in his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” the Hero’s Journey is applicable far more widely than in badly written stock fantasy novels. If every story follows the Hero’s Journey, and everything is a story, that means that most people think of themselves as the hero.
The idea of “Main Character Syndrome,” a pop-culture term for a pattern of behaviour where an individual perceives themselves as the protagonist, often viewing others as only supporting characters or merely as background extras, has gained popularity amongst social media users. While most of the time the phrase is used as an insult, sometimes it is used in admiration. Because, while it implies a mindset of self-importance, it also describes one of confidence.
This idea isn’t necessarily recent, or unknown. Because it is where we live, where we undertake tasks. Even the most mundane task we undertake becomes a story we tell ourselves: “…if I move one more barrow of soil, then I’ll be half done, and then there are four more barrows to go, which isn’t so bad really,” and for the last fifty years Silicon Valley has become one of the biggest stories of all time.
The Silicon Valley founding myth mirrors Campbell’s monomyth so well that you’d suspect it was designed that way, except that it wasn’t designed at all. It emerged, because the Hero’s Journey is the shape that stories almost inevitably take when we tell them to others.
Consider the tech founder. They are the classical Campbell archetype. A young person (almost always young, because youth is narratively important), perceives something that others do not. They have an insight into a problem. This is Campbell’s “call to adventure.” They leave the ordinary world, often literally, dropping out of university, leaving a comfortable job; and they cross the threshold into the unknown. They gather allies, a co-founder perhaps, some early employees, and wise advisors who see their potential. They face trials: the product doesn’t work, the market doesn’t respond, or the money runs out. They descend into the abyss, that moment when everything seems lost, when lesser heroes would turn back. Then, transformation. The product works, the market accepts them. The hero returns to the ordinary world bearing their MacGuffin, the technology that changes how people live, work, communicate, or think.
This is not simply the story of one founder. It is the story of every founder, as told in pitch decks, on podcast interviews, and in the prose of technology journalism. It is so pervasive that it has become invisible, like water to fish. It’s how Silicon Valley is supposed to work. It’s the story of the Valley.
The pitch deck is perhaps the purest expression of the monomyth in modern times. Strip any successful pitch to its bones and you find Campbell’s structure staring back at you. There is the ordinary world, the market as it exists today, with its inefficiencies and frustrations. There is the call to adventure, the founder’s insight, the problem they cannot ignore. There is the crossing of the threshold, the moment of founding, the first line of code, the first prototype. There are trials and allies, early traction, the team, the advisors. There is the ordeal, the competitive landscape, the technical challenge, the regulatory hurdle. Then finally there is the return with the MacGuffin, and the world transformed.
Founders who understand this tend to raise capital. Those who present numbers and spreadsheets, without narrative scaffolding, don’t. A chart showing exponential growth, the classic hockeystick growth curve that appears in every founder pitch deck, is a narrative tool. It’s not a serious attempt at analysis.
Product-market fit, the elusive holy grail of the startup world, is itself a narrative tool. When we say a product “fits” its market, what we really mean is that the story the product tells about its user resonates with the story the user already tells about themselves.
Apple understood this before almost anyone. The famous Think Different campaign didn’t describe a product. It described a character, the creative rebel, the misfit, the round peg in the square hole, and then invited the customer to recognise themselves. The product was secondary. The story was everything.
This is now so well understood in consumer branding that it barely needs stating: some of you will be wondering why I’m even bothering to mention it. But it is routinely ignored in enterprise sales, in deep technology, and in the hard sciences. The assumption persists that in serious domains, where serious people do serious work, the facts speak for themselves.
They do not. They never have.
I spent years as a research astrophysicist, working in fields where objective truth was, at least in principle, accessible. The universe does not negotiate. Fundamentals of physics are inescapable. Yet, even there, the history of the discipline is not a history of facts accumulating in neat rows. It is a history of stories. Thomas Kuhn understood this when he described paradigm shifts in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” the moment when one narrative framework for interpreting the universe is replaced by another. The data didn’t change. Instead, the story around it did, and the data was suddenly understandable in ways it wasn’t before.
It’s important that we understand this, because it reveals something that people who like to think that they are driven by facts find very uncomfortable. The quality of the story matters independently of the quality of the evidence. A true thing, badly told, will lose to a false thing, well told, far more often than any of us would like to admit.
Which brings us to the danger.
If stories are the operating system of human cognition, if they are how we make decisions, evaluate opportunities, assess character, and choose whom to trust, then that operating system has vulnerabilities. And those vulnerabilities are exploitable.
The most instructive cautionary tales in recent business history are not stories of incompetence or bad luck. They are stories of narrative excellence deployed in the service of falsehood. Elizabeth Holmes didn’t build a working blood-testing technology. She built an extraordinary story about a young woman who dropped out of Stanford to revolutionise healthcare. A story so perfectly structured around the hero’s journey that it attracted billions in investment and years of credulity from people who should have known better. The black turtleneck, the carefully modulated voice, the invocations of a sick relative: these were not incidental. They were narrative architecture, and they were devastatingly effective.
Adam Neumann didn’t build a real-estate company worth $47 billion. He built a story about the elevation of the world’s consciousness that happened to involve subleasing office space. The WeWork IPO prospectus used the word “community” over a hundred times. The numbers, when anyone bothered to look at them, were catastrophic. But the story was intoxicating, and for years, the story was enough.
We are narrative creatures, and the lesson we should take from these cautionary tales is that we need an awareness of the narrative layer. We need the ability to recognise that we are inside a story, and to ask whether that story is true.
At Negroni much of what we do when evaluating an early-stage company is, in effect, literary criticism. We are reading a story and asking ourselves: is this story internally consistent? Does the protagonist’s motivation make sense? Are the obstacles real, or have they been narratively constructed to make the eventual triumph feel more dramatic? Is the evidence supporting the story, or has the story been constructed around pre-selected evidence?
This is not cynicism. It is the opposite of cynicism. It is taking stories seriously enough to read them carefully, because we know how powerful they can become.
Campbell knew this, and his genius was not in inventing the monomyth but in recognising it as the deep structure of human meaning-making. The Hero’s Journey is not just a template for novels and films. Instead it is the template for how we experience our own lives. We are all, always, the hero of our own stories. We are all responding to a call, crossing thresholds, facing trials, seeking transformation.
This is not Main Character Syndrome. Or rather, it is Main Character Syndrome, but understood properly, it is not a pathology. It is the human condition. The question is not whether you are the hero of your own story, because you are, inescapably. The question is whether you are aware that everyone else is the hero of theirs.
Because if you look around, the Hero’s Journey is everywhere.