• 04 Jan, 2026 *

Ever wondered why your wives and girlfriends seem to have the best arguments—and why, as a man, you usually don’t? And how they often turn out to be right?

“Storytelling” is a word that gets thrown around a lot among professionals. Not just by creative people, but mostly by organisations trying to sell you something. Scroll through LinkedIn and you’ll find posts insisting that storytelling is the most important skill for everything—quarterly business reviews, sales meetings, marketing plans, you name it. Stories, we’re told, sit at the heart of every conversation.

The reason it’s so popular is simple: it works.

My issue is with people who recommend the method without explaining its fundamentals—what storytelling actually is, and why it continues to work. So, like with most problems, I prefer to approach this one from first principles. As someone who has read a lot of stories and published a few of my own, I know a thing or two about how they function.

“The king died, and then the queen died” is just a set of facts stitched together. You may or may not care, unless you’re personally invested in the king or the queen.

“The king died, and then the queen died of grief”—now you have a story.

One small change turns facts into narrative. That change is causality, something we conveniently overlook. Causality governs the structure behind every form of creative expression. Films do this by arranging events through characters, moving the story forward via cause and consequence embedded within scenes. The structure can be linear or non-linear, but causality remains intact.

Great paintings work similarly. They draw your attention to a focal point, then conceal their causal relationships within the broader frame. This is also why monuments attract us—they come with stories. And those stories are shaped by causes that lead to events, which in turn become causes themselves. That is how history is formed. Every work of art is a story. Some are told explicitly; others demand perception.

So while a great story may have many moving parts and require considerable effort, at its core lies a simple structure governed by cause and effect. All you need to do is identify the components of your argument and stitch them together so that one naturally leads to the next. Do that, and you’ll have a tight narrative that explains your entire pitch.

Nobody buys a product because of its features alone. You begin the way a movie does—with a scene full of problems. Think of a small mining town where contractors are ruthless and workers are exploited. Make it compelling enough that the arrival of the hero feels like hope. Your product is that hero.

Start with the status quo—life without the hero—and highlight the problems already embedded within it. Don’t list them mechanically. Weave them together so one problem leads to another.

Then let your hero enter. Instead of parroting features one by one, introduce each feature in the same sequence in which it solves the problems you established earlier. By the time you’re done, every problem from the beginning should feel resolved. The listener feels satisfied because the beginning and the end are connected through a carefully constructed middle—a clear, linear chain of cause and effect.

There are many techniques for storytelling, but no story exists without causality. That’s why people’s lives often seem boring, but their biographies don’t. A biographer imposes causality—attributing outcomes to choices, circumstances, or luck—while always anchoring events to the individual. Behind every good story lies a meticulously arranged sequence of events bound together by cause and effect.

This is exactly how advertising works. This is exactly how propaganda works. This is exactly how this essay is flowing—without you realising it. That’s why, at the heart of every religion, lie great stories. And the reason those stories endure is simple: there is a cause, and then there is a consequence.

So the next time you’re in an argument with your wife, pay attention to how she stitches multiple facts into a coherent chain of cause and effect, forming a pattern about you that you didn’t even know existed. The only sensible response then is to say sorry—because I understand how storytelling works, not how to win those arguments.