Genius does not guarantee success, a shared vision does.

This article is proudly written in partnership with Abbey Heffer and Nimarta Verma

The self-help and business gurus of the world love to draw on “great minds” – usually taken to mean “great men” – to make broad generalizations about how “success” works and where it comes from.?

When Steve Jobs announced Apple’s new marketing campaign in 1997, he set out to honor individuals who “think different” and who push this world forward by doing so. Though Jobs was, of course, targeting current and future Apple customers, he did so by speaking to a history of great thinkers whose daring and courage forced the world to reckon with itself. These great thinkers of the past, he said, “if they’d used a computer, it would have been a Mac”.?

What Jobs failed to mention, however, is that sometimes a great mind is not enough.?

Humankind’s greatest achievements were rarely the work of a single person or even just a single idea. When our society becomes ancient history, will humankind remember Steve Jobs, or will it remember The Computer, The Internet, The Smartphone, and the communities of companies and consumers that made these transformations possible?

The contorted mishmash of symbols and carvings that became the cuneiform written language are not remembered for having been “invented” by any individual. The “invention” of written language was a communal, cumulative effort. It was a shared vision for a more efficient future, in which a community could hold individuals accountable to something greater than themselves. In the case of written language, the Mesopotamians sought to hold all people accountable to formal employment relations; it was mankind’s first recorded attempt at labor rights.

Genius is not what propels ideas between the lines of written and recorded history, people are.

Without a shared vision – and a community to follow that vision – a genius stands alone, a force to be forgotten rather than reckoned with.

Some of the longest-lasting human institutions are not statues to celebrate single great minds, but sites upon which ideas are shared and visions created.?

The historic significance of the Mouseion at Alexandria cannot be reduced to any single author’s work stored – and then lost – in its library. The books burned, but the shared vision of collegiate learning, established by the Mouseion community, lives on in universities across the modern world. The Mouseion at Alexandria was less about collecting the work of individual great minds – as the modern usage of the word museum would suggest – and all about facilitating the meeting of minds.

As active participants in today’s transformations, however, it can be difficult for us to conceptualise the changes we see and hear as “shared visions”.?

Watching the rise of Bitcoin after the moral failure of the financial crisis, many minds met to discuss and develop a shared vision for a better, more ethical future. What may have begun as a white paper written by Satoshi Nakomoto became Bitcoin, Bitcoin became the cryptocurrency industry, the industry became an entire transformation away from fiat money and towards ethical finance. In place of an individual, we have an entire community with a shared vision for a financial world beyond banks.?

But, as this article will show, visions are vulnerable to corruption and not all transformations necessarily lead to a net benefit for humankind.

Many of the greatest civilizational developments in human history were not actually very smart ideas.?

The agricultural revolution, which saw hunter-gatherers become communities of farmers, traders, priests and kings, did not necessarily result in a better diet or standard of living. This transformation took communities that had for centuries been engaged in stimulating and varied work, and turned them into employees, vulnerable to starvation, disease, and, increasingly, death by war. The agricultural revolution led to a population explosion and the creation of a pampered elite – a pampered elite with a shared vision about civilisational superiority.

The vision in question is perhaps the world’s oldest marketing campaign: Progress.

The early agricultural communities believed that each technological improvement was a step towards something better. With each generation of farmers and elites, the story was retold and modified to include new technologies and methods of societal organisation. Suddenly, a thousand years passed and societies were wholly dependent on this flawed vision and its real-life consequences.

Visions may be fictional at conception, but they shape the world into which they are told. Our ability to share visions, to build on the past, and create a cumulative culture is what differentiates us from our closest biological relatives, the chimpanzees:

Not all historically world-changing visions have been quite so disastrous for human health as the agricultural revolution, however.? The 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets unearthed in modern-day Iraq regulated and formalised employment relations, but also allowed Mesopotamian visionaries to maintain their cumulative culture and pass down stories from one generation to the next.

The Code of Hammurabi not only formalised a vision the ruling elite had of their citizens, it shaped the real-world consequences of straying from that civilisational vision. The Hammurabi Code was the earliest example of a vision of “justice” that continues to define modern understandings of the concept: “An eye for an eye”.

Without the ceremonial and ritualistic formalisation of a shared vision – admittedly, often accessible only to a select, literate, and often religiously-ordained elite – the written word might never have become so widespread. Our world might never have been changed.

Where would Rome’s roads be had the nation’s leaders not already paved the way with a vision of a military might that spans continents? Where would China’s northern centre of political power be without the Grand Canal and the very visible displays of wealth, consumption and products making the slow journey up to the future capital??

A technological innovation is less about the thing itself and all about the perception of that thing, the stories told about it. So, how do we tell a good story? In the following section, veteran storyteller and Harvard Business School alumni, Nimarta Verma, will provide some insight into the scientific process behind telling a good story.

Storytelling, vision and selling an idea

A story doesn’t begin with an idea, it begins with an audience. Without a listener, a story doesn’t exist. Without someone to receive it, a story does nothing, is nothing. Before considering how to tell a story, therefore, it is first necessary to identify to whom the story should be told.?

Know your audience

Identifying your audience is less about cold demographics and more about a set of attitudes and perceptions.?

This is where social media advertising fails and succeeds. When planning a promotional post, marketing wannabes are given the option of what demographics to target, which countries and age-ranges. Yet the algorithms dictating the use of these platforms are more than able to pick up on what someone likes, what they engage with, and what they ignore – a far better measure of what frustrates or inspires someone than their age and gender.?

The now-infamous campaigns against democracy conducted by Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data didn’t target “middle-aged white British men”, but rather those who fit a certain “feature set” based on their perceptions, self-image and the content they engaged with.

If you were an algorithm watching your ideal listener, what would they want? What do they fear? What do they aspire to be? We may not be trying to rig elections, but in identifying a target audience, we want to create a community. Your story not only speaks to their fears and desires, it offers them something – a way out or a solution. In short, you want to create a community that wants something you can offer.?

Once you’ve established who they are, you need to ask yourself: Why should they care?

Why your story matters

There is a difference between a story’s purpose and the vision behind it. Something led you to develop the story or solution that your audience needs to hear. Whether that something was a gap in the market or a pressing social need, it has guided your every action up until this point. Why? You need to be able to justify to your audience why this matters.?

If purpose is the answer to the why does this matter question, your vision is the answer to what happens now? Purpose is where the journey begins, it is the problem and the solution. Vision is where that solution leads, where you and your community are heading.

Again, we return to the original question you need to ask of your audience: Why should they care? Your story needs to answer this question. You need to show your community what they have to lose and gain from buying into your story. It’s not enough to tell them, you need to show them where your story will take them.?

A well-told story doesn’t just inspire thought and reflection, it calls to action and demands change. To trigger such changes in behavior, we need to explain why the current state of affairs is untenable; we need to attack the status quo.?

What do you stand against

What you stand against is as important, if not more so, than what you stand for. A good story requires tension, a sense of a quest or raison d'être.?

Regardless of how good your solution is, change means the destruction of what came before – and you need to justify that. Your story needs to justify the destruction of something that has, ostensibly, worked for many years, perhaps, like the traditional banking industry, something that has worked for centuries.?

Without something to oppose and overthrow, a story means very little and will certainly not trigger any change in group behaviors.?

Telling a story and creating a shared vision is no small thing. Revolutions based on flawed visions can start wars, attempts at economic reform can trigger famines. As a storyteller and visionary, you need to take responsibility for what your story seeks to destroy. It is also your responsibility to find the right platform through which to frame that story.

Where are you telling your story

In many ways, the medium is as important as the message in storytelling.

?You need to understand which mediums will do justice to this story, while respecting the integrity and values of your audience.

You need to decide whether yours is a vision for mankind which requires a soapbox and a political platform or a marketable solution that seeks consumer approval and ratings. All visions are equally valid, but the medium needs to match the tone of the story being told.?

Is your call to action a change in personal behavior for the individuals in your community, and therefore something to be shared, customer to customer, across mediums such as social media? Or is yours a demand to change an entire system, and therefore a story which needs to be told through both official and specialized channels such as news media and industry-specific reporting?

Respect your story and respect those who will share in your vision by choosing the correct medium through which to address it and them.

Stories aren't static

Stories? adapt and evolve. Some, like Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech, evolve and change while they’re being told. Just as Dr. King called upon the dream he still had, long after the phrase had become cliché in his usage, so too are stories told and retold years, decades, and even centuries after they are born.

The story of decentralized finance has evolved and, in many ways, this is not a good thing. Much of its story has become confused with that of traditional banking: Too many in the industry are cheating, creating sh*tcoins designed to fill the pockets of new-wave millionaires without any real value backing them.

This is why visionaries need to keep looking forwards in their storytelling, envisioning and re-envisioning the world they want to see even as they seek to bring it physically into being. In telling a story, you need to understand that there is no such thing as an ending – whether happy or not. You will need to keep telling, adapting, and refining your story indefinitely, and you need to be open to doing so pragmatically.?

A case in point from the DeFi industry

When Sinofy was invited to work with Marhaba DeFi to tell its story, it was clear that this idea was more than just a potential product to be developed and marketed.

?The resulting story, told in the form of a pitch deck and one of the most iconic white papers of its kind, is now public and here I would like to invite you to learn a little more about it.

The lack of ethical practice in the crypto world means those with experience take advantage of the less secure and uninitiated without being held accountable. This is particularly true in less and least developed countries and among lower-income households making between 2-5K a year. As such, this has created an entire community unable to benefit from the potential offered by decentralised finance.?

And even this community can be considered privileged. Aside from being sidelined for their low-income and lack of experience in the decentralized financial world, these communities enjoy relative geopolitical stability and are not physically threatened by war, violent crime, or worse.

Many of these communities are stuck not because of any personal failings but because the system itself is unable to change and accommodate anything beyond the most basic picket-fence lifestyle. Why should these communities be forced to operate within a system that never sought to serve them?

These communities make up Marhaba DeFi’s target audience, the recipients of a story and vision that could turn a $3 trillion traditional banking industry on its head.

Marhaba’s purpose is to rewrite the script, retell the story, and make sure the mistakes and dangers of traditional banking don’t come to define the DeFi industry. Marhaba has a vision to help these communities benefit from a financial revolution that others in the industry would sooner see them excluded from. But why should they care?

Marhaba wants to give control back to these communities, to empower them, and earn their trust.?

And it is working. An unprecedented 80% of the Marhaba project is funded by ordinary people who care and who trust this story enough to invest their life savings into it. The story we have told and the vision we share as a community reaches beyond the vulnerable, beyond those in need, and has inspired the Al Maktoum ruling dynasty of Dubai.?

With such trust placed in our story and our vision, we have no option but to deliver. We are wholly responsible for both the destruction of what came before and the potential of what is to come.

As visionaries, we stand against a decentralized finance industry that seems determined to repeat the mistakes of traditional banking and exclude vulnerable communities from the benefits of this revolution. And we are telling this story everywhere we can: Social media, industry circles and forums, across personal networks, Ted Talks, and so much more. Our medium is every communal platform available to us.?

And the story continues to unfold, would you like to be a part of it?

You could clean up an industry overrun with greed and fragmented from a lack of ethical regulation. You could support and invest in young, talented innovators from some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. You could help break down the structural barriers excluding entire nations from the DeFi revolution.

You could be a part of this story, you could share in Marhaba’s vision.

Interested in learning more? check out more at www.marhabadefi.com