Great storytelling makes America’s Team, the story of Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys one of the most binge-worthy sports docuseries now streaming on Netflix.
It has all the ingredients to keep viewers on the edge of their seats: risk-taking, cliff-hangers, painful conflicts, colorful real-life characters, and even near-death experiences.
It’s also a series where you can learn to tell captivating stories, as long as you watch closely to spot the key element all great stories share.
Storytelling magic is in the struggle
The difference between an average story and a great one is in the struggle, the messy middle where a protagonist’s intention meets a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
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For example, an average story goes like this:
Jerry Jones bought an NFL football team. The team won three Super Bowls in the 1990s. It went on to become the world’s most valuable sports franchise.
You just read a story. Yes, it’s only three sentences, but it has a beginning, middle, and end. What’s it missing? Struggle.
The opening scene of America’s Team doesn’t start with Jones buying the Cowboys. Instead, we see Jones in a helicopter, flying over an oil field in Jewett, Texas. Drilling and exploring for oil and gas is “notoriously risky,” he says, because the product is so deep under the dirt “only God knows what’s down there.”
Jones, facing a massive debt of $50 million, decided to gamble everything on one last well. If it were dry, he’d lose his family’s fortune. But when he turned it on, the well began to “roar like Niagara Falls.”
Jones made $100 million from that single oil well and, with his newfound wealth, fulfilled his ultimate dream, one that he called “a bigger risk than the well.” Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys.
Now that’s a great start to a great story.
Jerry Jones takes “The Hero’s Journey”
Mythologist Joseph Campbell created “The Hero’s Journey” based on a pattern he identified in epic stories from ancient times to today.
It goes like this.
After getting called to an adventure, a hero leaves their ‘ordinary’ world and enters a special world full of obstacles and hurdles. Heroes eventually slay the dragons (literal and metaphorical) and return with newfound wisdom or treasure.
Jones’ ‘ordinary’ world was in the oil fields. An inciting incident—the gusher—triggered his adventure into the special and exclusive world of NFL ownership. But, as former Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin says in America’s Team, “The road to a championship is never paved smoothly. It’s always paved with peaks and valleys.”
The peaks and valleys Jones would encounter on the road to building the Cowboys into the world’s most valuable sports franchise are far too many to list. He faced relentless criticism after firing a beloved hall-of-fame head coach and a dreadful losing season when the Cowboys went 1 and 15. The Cowboys looked as though they had turned a corner, winning back-to-back Super Bowls in ’92 and ’93. Then, they stumbled before surging again in ’95.
The high stakes, struggles, setbacks, and surges are what make some great stories irresistible.
Neuroscientists tell me that the human brain looks for patterns, especially “narrative.” When your brain detects a story, it locks on and pays attention. And since, as humans, we all face setbacks in our lives, the ups and downs of a story keep us hooked because we see ourselves in the struggle.
Share the struggle in your brand story
Iconic entrepreneurs who are considered exceptional communicators often follow the storytelling formula that makes America’s Team such a highly acclaimed documentary: they highlight the struggle.
For example, the billionaire inventor James Dyson revels in his 5,126 failed attempts to design a better vacuum cleaner. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Dyson credits his success to “perseverance, taking risks and having a willingness to fail.” Entrepreneurs, he said, fail every day. But they get comfortable with it because “failure is the best medicine—as long as you learn something.”
The magic of great storytelling is in the struggle because success rarely, if ever, happens without first facing hurdles, objections, failures, mistakes, and setbacks. As a communicator, lean into the problems you encountered. If your audience understands the tough road you’ve taken, then they’ll appreciate the success you achieved.
Jerry Jones, reflecting on his first Super Bowl win, said, “At that moment, I had flashbacks of how I got there. That screaming gas coming out of that well. All the traumatic experiences, the relentless criticism, all of that left me like a spirit out of my body.”
People don’t connect with someone who’s had a perfect road to success. They connect to the struggle because it makes us relatable. Don’t back away from your setbacks. Shine a spotlight on them.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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