The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These new storytellers – artists, inventors, designers, caregivers, writers, architects, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

This Hero’s Journey in Paris – The New Storytellers describes a seismic – though as yet undetected – shift now under way in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Storytelling Age. The New Storytellers is for anyone who wants to survive and thrive in this emerging world – people uneasy in their careers or dissatisfied with their lives, entrepreneurs and business leaders eager to stay ahead of the next wave, parents who want to equip their children for the future and the legions of creative professionals whose distinctive abilities the Information Age has often overlooked and undervalued.

In this hero’s journey you will learn he six essential storytelling aptitudes on which professional succes and personal satisfaction increasingly will depend. Story Design, Story Plot, Story Symphony, Story Archetypes, Story Resolve and Story Meaning. These are fundamental human storytelling abilities that everyone can master – and helping you to do that is my goal.

A change of that magnitude is complex. But the argument at the heart of the Hero’s Journey is simple. For nearly a century Western society in particular has been dominated by a form of thinking and an approach to life that is narrowly reductive and deeply analytical. Ours has been the age of the “knowledge worker”, the well-educated manipulator of information and deployer of expertise. But that is changing. Thanks to an array of forces – material abundance that is deepening our nonmaterial yearnings, globalization that is shipping white-collar work and powerful technologies that are eliminating certain kinds of work altogether – we are entering a new age. It is an age animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life – one that prizes aptitudes that I call ‘great story’ and ‘great purpose’. Great story involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty; to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. Great purpose involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

As it happens, there’s something that encapsulates the change I’m describing – and it’s right in your head. Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is sequential, logical, and analytical. The right hemisphere is nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic. These distinctions have often been caricatured. And, of course, we enlist both halves of our brains for even the simplest tasks. But the well-established differences between the two hemispheres of the brain yield a powerful metaphor for interpreting our present and guiding our future. Today, the defining skills of the previous era – the “left brain”capabilities that powered the Information Age – are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous – the “right – brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness and meaning – increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders. For individuals, families and organizations, professional success and personal fulfillment now require new storytellers.

A few words about the organization of this Hero’s Journey in Paris. Perhaps not surprisingly, The New Storytellers is itself Great Story and Great Purpose. Part One – The Storytelling Age – lays out the broad animating idea. Stage 1 provides an overview of the key differences between our left and right hemispheres and explains why the structure of our brains offer such a powerful metaphor for the contours of our times. In stage 2 I make a resolutely hardheaded case, designed to appeal to the most left-brained among you, for why three huge social and economic forces – Abundance, Covid19 and Automation – are nudging us in to the Storytelling Age. Stage 3 explains Great Story and Great Purpose and illustrates why creative people who master these abilities will set the tempo of modern life.

Part Two – The Six Storytelling Abilities covers the six essential abilities you’ll need to make your way across this emerging landscape. I devote one stage of the journey to each of these six storytelling abilities, describing how it is being put to use in business and everyday life. Then at the end of each of these stages is a Portfolio Story – a collection of tools, exercises, and further reading, culled from my research and travels in Paris that can help you surface and sharpen that storytelling capability.

In the course of the nine stages of this Hero’s Journey in Paris, we’ll literally cover a lot of ground in Paris. We will visit nine new storytellers in great venues of Paris. But we need to start our journey in the brain itself – to learn how it works before we learn how to work it. So the place to begin is Philippe Stark’s concept hotel “Mama Shelter”.