What connects our Gen Z, Richard Feynman and Storytelling?
The oldest rule of storytelling has very little to do with storytelling.
One of my favourite principles in storytelling is deceptively simple.
Show. Don’t tell.
It sounds like advice for writers. It isn’t. It is perhaps the most powerful way to persuade another human being.
A few weeks ago, the cybersecurity teams at IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras were reportedly thrown into action after their websites were hacked.
The hacker left behind a short message.
“All I need is just a fair chance.”
Reports suggested that the hacker was a student trying to prove his cybersecurity skills after being denied admission. Interestingly, there are also reports that IIT Kanpur is considering engaging with the student rather than viewing the incident only through a criminal lens.
Whether those reports are eventually proven right or wrong isn’t what caught my attention.
It was the approach. The student hacker didn’t send another email. He didn’t write another application. He demonstrated what he could do. He showed. Not told.
Richard Feynman understood this decades earlier.
During the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, the world’s brightest scientists were building the atomic bomb under extraordinary secrecy. Everything important was locked away in filing cabinets and steel safes.
Or so everyone believed.
Feynman began opening them. Not because he wanted classified information. But because he wanted to prove that the security everyone trusted was dangerously flawed.
He later described how surprisingly easy it was
‘..I noticed the dial mechanisms had a small plus-or-minus tolerance. A setting meant to stop at 20 might also open at 19 or 21, cutting a million possible combinations down to roughly 8,000 options…Up to 20% of my colleagues never bothered to change the factory default combination on their new Mosler cabinets..’
He watched colleagues lock their desks, guessed combinations based on obvious choices like birthdays or mathematical constants like e (Euler’s number), and tested numbers by feeling subtle clicks in the dial and opened cabinets that supposedly held some of the world’s greatest secrets.
He could have written a strongly worded memo. He chose to open the safe instead.
His point became impossible to ignore.
This isn’t a piece celebrating hacking. It is about something far more fundamental.
We’ve somehow reduced storytelling to presentation skills. Voice modulation. Confident body language. Slides. Drama. Those certainly help.
But they aren’t what makes a story believable.
Stories become persuasive when evidence becomes part of the story. People believe what they experience far more than what they hear.
A prototype is a story.
A customer trying your product is a story.
A leader staying calm in a crisis is a story.
A manager giving credit publicly is a story.
A founder shipping before perfecting is a story.
Every demonstration is a story waiting to be told.
Every one of these quietly says the same thing.
“Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.”
The most effective storytellers I’ve met rarely spend their energy trying to sound convincing. They spend it creating experiences that make conviction inevitable.
Perhaps that is why this principle has survived every generation. We see it in founders who build before they pitch. In young people who choose to show up for causes they believe in rather than merely post about them. And in scientists like Feynman, who understood that one undeniable demonstration can be more persuasive than a hundred explanations.
Show. Don’t tell.
Not because it makes for better stories.
Because belief is earned through experience, not explanation.
So here’s the question I’ve been thinking about.
What are you repeatedly trying to tell people... when you should be finding a way to show them instead?
Resources:
The Student Hacker story is all over the press. Here are some links to check
https://www.brut.media/in/articles/denied-an-iit-seat-he-allegedly-hacked-two-iit-websites-now-he-may-get-a-second-chance
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/rejected-cybersecurity-applicant-allegedly-hacks-iit-madras-portal-says-he-only-wanted-a-fair-chance-11830910
On of my all time favourite reads is Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: The Humorous and Insightful Memoirs of Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Theoretical Physicist, Artist, and Adventurer- the safe cracking story incidentally has its orgins on how Feynman used to break open padlocks as a kid!
Here is the Youtube video from Feynman archives
And finally here is link to another #1Minutestories post on Simply, Curious Feynman