If you have followed my work you know that I like telling stories. Stories are the single most important tool in my Chief Evangelist and API Evangelist toolbox. None of the code matters in my opinion, and the stories surrounding the code is what makes the actual impact on our reality. The stories we tell each other, as well as the stories we tell ourselves. Everything in the world of technology and APIs is made up of stories. I am hovering around 5000 stories here on API Evangelist, which reflects everything I am when it comes to API Evangelist. Stories are how I make sense of the API world that has unfolded in the last twenty years. Storytelling is how I work through all of the things I do not understand, moving everything API from a very abstract realm into something that is more tangible, visible, and sometimes more meaningful to me in the real world. I couldn’t have done any of this without stories.
Throughout my storytelling as the API Evangelist I have also taught myself to work through my own personal baggage over at kinlane.com. Applying the same methodology to my past and figuring out who I am today. API Evangelist has always been very much a performance, but the storytelling I engaged in as part of the performance went much deeper than being just a business production. Over the years, both of these streams of storytelling (apievangelist.com & kinlane.com) have influenced others in the world, having an impact on their storytelling, or help them embark on their own storytelling journey. I’ve learned a lot from these engagements, and made a lot of friends around the world because of a shared love for storytelling. This shared storytelling journey has recently manifested itself as a video conversation between Mike Amundsen (@mamund) and Aidan Cunniffe (@aidandcunniffe), which we are simply calling API Storytelling. We only have one discussion under our belt and we aren’t quite sure where we are going with this, but the result for me is a nourishing 60 minutes of storytelling goodness.
Why did we choose APIs? We talk about it a little bit in the video, but APIs are something that can be associated with almost every aspect of our world, making for a pretty good switchboard for endless storytelling. The three of us are all API storytellers, but we also have witnessed first hand how storytelling helps you personally grow and make sense of the world as well as ourselves. I love hearing how Mike and Aidan wrestle with storytelling and how it works in their world. Listening to how they use storytelling to break down their business worlds, but also their personal life. We don’t have a plan for our API storytelling conversations. We are just showing up with our storytelling bag and sharing little bits this and that and seeing where it all goes. If you watch the first edition of this API storytelling conversation you’ll see that we talk about what we’d like to see this turn into, as well as just the wandering through each of our views on storytelling.
We are going to do another API Storytelling session tomorrow. I am curious to see where we go with things. I can’t articulate just how important storytelling is in my life. I know it sounds corny, but it is true. It is what keeps me going in this crazy world. Stories are really the keys to everything for me. I am also very happy to have others to share this with. I am fascinated to learn how Mike and Aidan approach their version of telling stories to keep moving forward. I am not sure if this is anything that others will want to tune into but it is something that I am glad to have happening right now. I feel like there needs to be a while lot of storytelling going on in this moment, and somehow this is what will elevate us out of this very strange set of times we find ourselves in.
