How did you get started, Bill, with story builders or storytelling?
You mentioned thousands of years of storytelling.
I mean, you've obviously a little bit of a history buff with that.
But how did you get started with helping people tell their stories?
Well, I had always loved stories and storytelling.
You know, as a young kid, I was the one who was, you know,
reading the cereal box five times every morning, just sucking up
any word I could over breakfast.
And so I always love stories.
You know, I majored in English and history.
You know, what are the stories? How do you tell them?
And then and then life happened. Right.
And I met a wonderful woman.
We got married. Kids started coming. Had to pay the bills.
I got involved in education.
And so I was doing something that, you know, Stephen Pressfield
talks about a shadow calling.
I was doing something that was close, but not quite what I was really wired to do.
And so help start a start a school up in Ohio, led that for a dozen years.
And then, but this felt this stirring within that I was supposed to be doing more,
especially around writing and telling stories.
And so eventually I stepped away from that school and stepped out into the unknown.
We had six kids, one a year with no income as we engaged that.
But I've never worked harder in my life.
Dove in, became a student of story and just unpacking all that began writing.
And over the next few years, began writing books, helping people
bring those books to life and learning how that's done and really seeing a need,
a need for people who had had like that you showed on our website
that who had a message the world needs to hear.
But they they weren't they didn't have the skill set to say it well,
or they didn't know how to say it well.
Or maybe their their skill set was as a speaker, not a writer.
Or they're trying to put all pieces and parts together.
And they had so many pieces and parts and ideas that they just, you know,
what I call a creativity conundrum.
Right. You get so many ideas that you're paralyzed and can't do any of them
in that place.
And so, you know, having that kind of
seeing that need began to coalesce this team of story builders
who want to help bring these stories to life in a way that is high trust
relationships.
And so that's really where we focused.
And that's how story builders came to be.
It actually started with a book.
This book right here, in fact, by the name of Hugh Hewitt.
Way back in 2003, I picked up this book and read it and it changed
the trajectory of my life, caused me to lean into saying things,
actually led to a relationship with Hugh, which led to an opportunity
to create a book, which would be any it all.
It all started with a book.
So it's not surprising that I spent a lot of time with books
and all things books related, helping tell those stories,
because that's really how the story began in the first place.