Richard Branson is an entrepreneur, billionaire, adventure and risk-taker. He’s also a storyteller, which he made clear in my recent conversation about his new book, Finding My Virginity.
“My dad was a great storyteller,” Branson told me in this video interview. “In his generation and the generations before him, they didn’t have television, so people would sit around a campfire listening to each other tell wonderful stories. Those stories got passed down.”
The campfire still plays a role in Branson’s success. Branson says he gathers his team around a campfire at his home on Necker island to exchange ideas. “Storytelling drives change,” he says. But Branson doesn’t just like to tell a story. A natural storyteller, Branson knows a good story when he sees it. In his new autobiography, Branson writes about his successes and his failures, his triumphs and adversity. “If your life is one long success story, it won’t make for a good read ,” Branson says.
Branson’s life follows a dramatic arc . He dropped out of school at the age of sixteen, partly due to his struggle with dyslexia. The condition, which makes reading and writing difficult, was misunderstood at the time. Branson said his teachers treated it as a handicap. Branson viewed it as a strength, “a massive advantage that helped me think creatively and laterally, and see solutions where others saw problems.”
When entrepreneurs pitch an idea to Branson, he doesn’t want to see a PowerPoint; he wants to hear the entrepreneur’s story. “I’m not always caught up in the details of what a particular app will or won’t do,” Branson writes in Finding My Virginity. “I’m more interested in the personalities behind the companies, and the purpose within their visions. I’d happily invest in a company that ends up failing in order to find a young entrepreneur who will go on to change the world.”
“Today, if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, you also have to be a good storyteller,” says Branson. He adds that storytelling does little good “if your idea is rubbish.” But in today’s highly competitive world, it’s not enough to have a good product. You need to stir up excitement—a skill that Branson has mastered in his fifty-year career as an entrepreneur.