The Significant Objects Experiment: Why Storytelling Can Shift Perception and Change Behavior

Can a story make something worthless become valuable? In this episode, Zach shares an incredible real-life experiment that demonstrates how a simple story transformed ordinary objects into something people valued nearly 30 times more. You'll learn how great leaders use stories to shape perception, strengthen commitment, and help people connect everyday work to a greater purpose.

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Transcript

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What if I told you that two journalists once bought just over $100 worth of random thrift store items and then somehow turned them into more than $3,600 of profit after reselling them? We're talking about objects that a lot of people would ignore: a ceramic horse, a meat thermometer, a jar of marbles. None of them were rare or necessarily significant collectibles for that matter. And yet somehow these very ordinary objects ended up just reselling for nearly 30 times what was originally paid for them. So today on the podcast, I want to tell you the story about how these journalists did it. And more importantly, I want to explore why this lesson I think extends far beyond marketing. Because whether you're a coach, a leader, a teacher, a parent, or just anybody that's trying to help someone change or influence someone else's behavior, I think this experiment highlights a very valuable skill for all of us as leaders. The ability to tell a compelling story. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. So this story and experiment dates back to 2009, and it was with two journalists, one by the name of Rob Walker, the other one by the name of Joshua Glenn, and they launched a project that was called Significant Objects. Their question was very simple. Could a story increase the value of an otherwise ordinary object? Now, to find out, they purchased a collection of very inexpensive thrift store items that totaled about $129. So then they asked writers to create fictional stories connected to each object. Now keep in mind as I share this experiment that the stories were very clearly labeled as fiction. These journalists were not trying to be deceptive or misleading. They just wanted to see how impactful storytelling could be as a marketing tool for others. Now the objects were then relisted online alongside these fictional stories. And the result was that those same objects eventually sold for more than $3,600. So they went from $129 to $3,600. The ceramic horse, though, it was the same horse. The jar of marbles was still a jar of marbles, and the meat thermometer still measured temperature and meat. Nothing about the objects themselves changed, but how people perceived them did. Now it is very tempting, I think, to hear this story and just conclude that this is a simple lesson on storytelling and marketing. But again, I think it extends far beyond that. The experiment, I think, reminds us that information alone will rarely change behavior. There's a lot of times where people don't just buy into an idea because they receive more facts about something or because they hear more details about a product's features. They buy in when they understand why something matters and why it has value. And stories have a unique ability to create that connection for us. I think this is something that a lot of really good coaches can do. They can help people understand why their work matters, why their role matters, why today's effort is actually connected to something much larger than just to today's outcome. And I think what happens in coaching and really maybe other areas of leadership too is that one of the easier traps to fall into is that believing that if we simply give people more information, that will be compelling enough for them to change. But this is, again, not always the case. Especially in our current era that's so data informed, or even I would say data driven in many instances, it's a common tendency that sometimes we give as much information as we possibly can to ensure that you don't leave something out, especially something that you think might help a player. And it all has really good intentions. But as a byproduct of this, we default to explaining more and providing more details. But again, that information isn't always sufficient. So I think about it like this information can help us explain things, but stories are what help persuade people to really change. Information will tell people what to do, but it's stories that help people understand why it matters in the first place. So a few years ago, when I was full-time uh with the Arizona Diamondbacks, we made a decision regarding our fall instructional camp. Uh, traditionally, uh, you can make a pretty compelling argument that one of the best times to do some sort of instructional camp is right before the season begins. Players are fresher, their energy levels are higher, the timing makes a little bit more sense as like a build into the actual season and spring training. But we decided we were going to do it at the end of the year. Now, on the surface, this may, for some that don't know baseball necessarily, may not think that this is quite a big deal, but I want you to think about it for a moment from the experience of a player. For a lot of these minor league players, they've they've already endured a long season. They're physically, mentally tired, they've spent months competing already. Uh, some of which, or many of which are actually for the first time experiencing the long kind of grueling schedule of being a first-year pro baseball player. And now you're asking them at a time of the year where some are, again, not only just recovering, but they're now starting to build up their base, their physical um stamina and strength and so on for their upcoming season. Now you're asking them to continue working and continue honing things. Now, we could have framed that as an inconvenience, we could have framed it as just this is more work that we're piling on, and here's, you know, we're just gonna do it in the fall because we're gonna do it in the fall. But we wanted to emphasize something a little bit differently because if you want to be a championship team, a winning organization, you have to learn how to finish. And the reality is that if you want to compete for something meaningful, you're gonna have to perform when you're tired. If you want to be a championship team in baseball, you're gonna have to be able to compete in October, in basically November, when you're tired, when you're fatigued, and when the circumstances aren't ideal, that initial buzz and excitement that you experience at the beginning of a new year, that's all faded. And so that's a really important way that we tried to kind of frame this is this was our opportunity to practice finishing as a team, as an organization, as individuals. And so, one of the things that I think I've also learned over the years is that every athlete, on top of the stories that we share with them, they have their own stories running too. Uh, every coach does, every leader, every parent, just every person in general. And we all create these narratives to make sense of our experiences. So, one way you can leverage this if you're a coach is like, let's say you have an athlete that gets moved to the bench. One story that they may create for themselves is that maybe coach no longer believes in me, maybe he no longer trusts me. But the other way that you can help create a different story is framing as this is an opportunity to develop maybe another part of your game, or to see the game from a different lens, or to honestly just get uh your head down and keep working on something that again needs to be at a different level, a different skill base, in order for you to take that next step and actually crack the lineup on a regular basis. Another one is when a team maybe hits adversity. Uh, it's very easy to think, okay, and now all of a sudden things can start to feel like they're falling apart from the inside. And in the moment, this is an opportunity to frame it as this is the challenge that will define us, likely three, four, five, or however many months from now, uh, once we're at the very end. In other words, these are the same circumstances, but you can use different stories to create different responses. Now, I'm not suggesting necessarily that we just create a bunch of fictional realities or we ignore hard truths. That's not what great storytelling is. Great storytelling, I think, helps people find a useful interpretation of reality, one that can help you move forward, keep persisting, uh, or just continue growing. So, my question for today is what are the stories that you're telling? And how can you present the information needed to help someone change or take the next step in their career, but do so with a story? This definitely applies to those in leadership roles, but the reality is that all of us can help someone change and influence their behavior through storytelling. So whether we realize it or not, our stories they shape someone's perception and ultimately how much they're willing to invest in either us, our ideas, or just something that we're selling to them. So I love this significant objects experiment because again, it wasn't really just about these random thrift store items. It's a story and lesson on value. Two people can look at the same object, one sees junk, the other sees something meaningful, and the objects themselves don't have to change. But when you change the story, you can change the outcome. And I think that's part of the power of great storytelling.