When I look through my social media feed, I’ll find an overwhelming number of ideas that will transform my leadership, that will allow me to achieve my objectives, that is that will enable me.

If I find a way to follow through.

The image that is being drawn resembles perfection. And to be able to draw the image, the storyteller makes an abstraction of the reality the individuals reading the post are in. One could call this a simplification, but usually, it is a simplification for the storyteller, not for his audience.

What the feed is, in reality, is a wave of people trying to win against the algorithm. They see what others do, see some successful people do it, and they start to copy what they do in the hope that it will work for them too. They bet that if their story is nice enough, people will be hooked and ask for the storyteller’s service or support their cause.

Such storytellers are searching for ways to succeed. It is their job.

The reader’s job is a different one. It is to figure out if and how the storyteller is capable of moving from the story and the promise it contains to deliver on it. But not only. The reader’s job is also to discover if the promise heard is close enough to his reality and allows him to walk towards his dream.

But sometimes, what people get focused on is their dream. One that often will not be clear enough yet. To deal with the lack of clarity they’ll substitute their image with the dreams they’ve just read about.