Narrative Power: How to Cast a Spell on the Masses

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s private reputation has always been a mixed bag. Many stories circulate within AI circles about his tendency to lie and go back on his word. Some engineers even chose to join Anthropic instead of OpenAI because of this. He was even once dismissed by the board for “not being candid enough in his communications”…

Yet, undeniably, Altman’s public image is charismatic.

His interviews are both dynamic and candid, as if he is simultaneously a spokesperson for AI and a conveyor of some divine oracle. The casual snippets he posts on X, devoid of flowery language or complex logic, are nonetheless thought-provoking and poetic.

He always makes people instinctively believe in his cause, and because of this belief, they forgive all his flaws.

Altman is, without a doubt, an enchanter.

Today, every tech giant aiming to establish itself at the forefront long-term and continuously attract public attention needs such an enchanter.

This is not merely a traditional “image spokesperson,” nor is it solely within the realm of a “boss’s personal brand.” Their “magic” is the Jobsian “Reality Distortion Field”—or more accurately, “narrative power.”

As stated at the beginning of this course, narrative is the first principle of the universe. In this lecture, we will explore how narrative is applied in practice—for leaders, this means how to transform your personal judgment into collective organizational action.

The Power of Narrative: Beyond Traditional Skills #

Perhaps many believe narrative is simply storytelling, painting grand visions, or doing ideological work—a mere “soft skill.” To think so would be to greatly underestimate the power of narrative.

When a company is just starting, with no mature product and an unclear market, how do you persuade investors to open their wallets generously, and how do you attract top talent to lend their full support? You envision a great product—beautiful, user-friendly, and reasonably priced—and firmly believe it will change the world. However, engineers tell you that such a product is simply impossible to achieve, not only riddled with technical obstacles, but many critical components don’t even exist yet! Can you still convince your team that they can not only build this product, but do so in a short time?

Jobs could do it. [1]

The “magic” Jobs wielded was extraordinary; people not only believed him deeply at the moment he spoke, but also sustained that belief over time. People would spontaneously devise all sorts of ways to realize his vision, breaking down the “impossible” into solvable problems and gradually filling in the missing conditions… This is an effect that cannot be achieved by merely relying on contracts and bonuses.

A command can only drive one person to complete one task, but a narrative can empower a thousand people to spontaneously complete a thousand unissued instructions.

Narrative can transform your vision into shared organizational knowledge, making everyone not only firmly believe, but also know that others will act based on the same future vision.

We propose three core principles of narrative: setting the agenda, defining the frame, and establishing identity. In short, you exercise narrative power over these three things:

• Which problem is most important,
• What does this mean,
• Who are we.

Core Principle One: Setting the Agenda (Agenda Setting) #

The first core principle: setting the agenda, or “Agenda Setting.”

Setting the meeting agenda is one of a leader’s most crucial powers. Agenda-setting is not about directly providing answers; you can certainly uphold a democratic spirit and let everyone jointly discuss solutions. However, as long as you set the agenda, you control the upstream of the answers—you determine “which problem deserves the core attention of the entire company.”

Communication scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw once made a classic discovery: while media cannot dictate “how you think,” they can powerfully influence “what you think” [2].

Through their study of the 1968 U.S. presidential election, they interviewed a group of undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and simultaneously analyzed the newspapers, television, and magazines these voters consumed. The results showed that the campaign issues repeatedly emphasized by the media were precisely those that these voters considered “most important in this election.”

Subsequently, this phenomenon was more rigorously verified through a series of TV news experiments. Researchers had subjects watch edited television news: some repeatedly saw defense news, others repeatedly saw inflation news, and still others repeatedly saw pollution news. After watching, when subjects judged “the most important problem facing the nation,” they were more likely to rank the issues they had just repeatedly encountered as the most important [3].

Media don’t need to directly tell you “who to support”; they only need to define “what issues candidates should be judged on in this election,” and that is enough to sway election outcomes.

Understand that human judgment does not sample facts equally from all available information, but is first summoned by a question. If you ask “who is responsible,” people will look for the responsible party; if you ask “why users leave,” people will analyze experience and price; only if you ask “how we will survive three years from now” will people discuss strategy.

Issues are never neutral. Agenda-setting aims to filter and highlight certain facts, while also defining what kind of answers are deemed “reliable.” Once people accept the question you’ve posed, even if they disagree with your answer, they have already entered the field you’ve defined.

If a company’s values declare “we value innovation,” but in the weekly meeting, the boss only focuses on sales figures and costs, then you will understand that what he truly pursues is not innovation, but short-term performance.

Consider an enterprise software company where management is constantly debating whether to lower prices. The sales department argues that competitors are lowering prices, and not following suit will lead to lost deals; the product department believes prices cannot be lowered, otherwise resources for continuous iteration will be lacking; the after-sales service team points out that many clients don’t simply find the price high, but rather fail to fully utilize product features after purchase… Finally, one day the boss summarized: We are debating the wrong thing. What clients truly purchase is not a SaaS account, but actual value such as saving the cost of two employees, reducing one error, or shortening approval time by three days.

Thus, the real question is not “can the price be lowered,” but rather “can we transform our product into clearly visible, quantifiable savings for the customer?”

Once this question is reframed, the sales department no longer just focuses on the lowest discount, but actively acquires customer process data; the product department no longer just plans features, but focuses on optimizing aspects that reduce actual working hours; and the customer service team no longer just focuses on renewals and complaints, but tracks exactly where customers are saving time.

The role of agenda-setting is thus evident. If you are unsure how to apply it, consider the following general sentence structure—

“In the past, we’ve been debating A. But the world has become B. So the real question is no longer A, but C. From now on, every solution must first answer C.”

Core Principle Two: Defining the Frame (Framing) #

The second core principle: defining the frame, or “Framing.”

As we introduced in our “Elite Daily Reading” column, Scott Adams’ book Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success [4]. The facts remain the facts, but if you simply switch the frame through which they are viewed, people’s perceptions and judgments will be entirely different.

When facing a failure, you can frame it as “my inadequacy,” or see it as “I’ve received feedback”; similarly, with customer churn, you can frame it as “clients find the price too high,” or understand it as “clients haven’t perceived value savings.” The former framework often leads to defensiveness, complaints, price reductions, and accountability; the latter framework can inspire experimentation, improvement, metric adjustments, and redistribution of roles.

Agenda-setting determines the focus of attention, while defining the frame determines what is observed and how. Framing is not merely “saying it differently”; it fundamentally changes a causal model. Reframing doesn’t require changing the facts themselves, but it changes the “actions you’re permitted to take” by those facts within your mind.

To quote American political communication scholar Robert M. Entman [5], framing drives a particular “problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation.”

When facing a “sales decline,” you can frame it as an “economic cycle,” frame it as “team complacency,” frame it as “outdated product,” or even frame it as “we are experiencing the growing pains of proactive transformation”—each framing leads to distinctly different actions; once the frame shifts, meetings, budgets, metrics, and even responsible parties all adjust accordingly.

Narrative masters often effortlessly find the optimal frame.

For example, when a room full of GPUs stacked as AI computing power is called a “data center,” in the CFO’s eyes, this means cost—expensive to procure, rapid depreciation, high electricity bills—which should be saved wherever possible. However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang renamed it an “AI Factory,” and suddenly the entire profit and loss statement changes completely: GPUs transform into production equipment, data becomes raw material, models are the production line, and the computed tokens are the product!

Is it merely “means of production”? This is clearly a revenue-generating machine! How can it be easily cut?

Reframing is not about slyly swapping concepts; it’s about re-establishing the actionable meaning of a fact. This core principle also has a sentence structure—

“This is not X, it is Y. Therefore, to measure it, we shouldn’t look at A, but B; consequently, the first thing we need to do is not C, but D.”

Core Principle Three: Establishing Identity (Identity Formation) #

The third core principle: establishing identity, which is clarifying “who we are,” or what we previously discussed as “Identity Formation.”

Agenda-setting changes your focus, framing reshapes your understanding, and establishing identity directly adjusts your objective function.

The objective function refers to the element you default to maximizing in a series of choices: whether it’s bonuses, position, security, reputation, or a certain “we cannot do this” bottom line—these are often determined by identity. Most adults don’t calculate the pros and cons of every reward and punishment; they mostly start from identity and strive to play their social roles well [6].

Once one accepts identity settings like “I am a doctor,” “I am an engineer,” or “I am part of this company,” they no longer solely measure gains and losses based on external rewards and punishments. Instead, they will view certain behaviors as “consistent with my identity” and others as “inconsistent with the characteristics of people like us.”

As long as you can skillfully set others’ identities, you can bypass cumbersome commands and directly implant a program that automatically generates behaviors for them.

Let’s take an example. After the Apollo program, humanity had not truly returned to the Moon for many years. Now, NASA has launched a return-to-Moon project and named it the “Artemis Program” [7]. In Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister, and this naming cleverly implies a narrative of succession.

The Artemis Program is not just about launching another Moon mission, but a grand, comprehensive mission system aimed at “returning to the Moon, establishing a long-term presence, and using the Moon as a springboard to Mars.” Such a vast undertaking requires rockets, spacecraft, spacesuits, landers, international cooperation, and the meticulous work of countless engineers. So, how to make this narrative feel grander?

NASA therefore created an identity concept: “Artemis Generation.” Apollo represented the glorious chapter of the previous generation; Artemis, however, is the story belonging to this generation. In this way, astronauts, engineers, contractors, international partners, and even students and the general public are all brought into the same generational community.

High-level identity narrative is not simply standing on stage and shouting, “I declare you heroes! So go forth and conquer!"—it’s more like, “You are already these people; I am merely articulating it for you.” The general sentence structure for establishing identity is—

“We are not X, we are Y. Others facing Z might choose A, but people like us choose B. We do this not because of anyone’s demands, but because we are collectively becoming C; it is this identity that demands we are willing to contribute D.”

The Highest Realm of Narrative Power: Hyperstition #

Through agenda-setting, framing, and identity formation, if your narrative can deeply resonate and form shared organizational knowledge, it can transform private beliefs into coordination signals: everyone not only believes in this direction themselves, but also knows that others will allocate their time, budget, and risks based on the same future vision. Thus, onlookers dare to join, and dispersed actions are synchronized.

The highest realm of narrative power is to prompt an organization to form a “hyperstition.”

This term was first proposed by British philosopher Nick Land, and subsequently developed into a philosophical system integrating cybernetics, occultism, and theoretical fiction [8]. “Hyperstition” literally means “super superstition,” but Land’s original intent was “fiction actualizing itself through cultural feedback loops.” He explained that hyperstition is an “effective cultural element that makes itself real,” whose fictionality “operates like a time-traveling device.”

In short, hyperstition doesn’t explain the present from the past, but rather allows a future “ghost” to intrude upon the present, forming public expectations and thereby changing current actions—once these actions accumulate results, they reinforce that initially fictional future; subsequently, future expectations further reinforce today’s actions—under this positive feedback loop, the future truly materializes, as if it had been calling itself into existence from the very beginning.

Jobs once said that Macintosh computers could still reduce startup time by 10 seconds and declared that “Apple was going to reinvent the phone”; Musk declared “to make humanity a multi-planetary species” and pointed out that reusable rockets are the indispensable path to this future… These statements, much like Chen Sheng and Wu Guang’s ancient setup of “fish belly inscription, fox cries by campfire”—in their respective contexts, were all preposterous, and no one should have believed them. However, they managed to get enough people to act according to that future vision first, transforming belief into a “self-fulfilling prophecy” [9].

Hyperstition is humanity’s rewriting of “destiny.”

Narrative is indeed a magic, but any magic has its dark side. An overly powerful narrative might cause people to fanatically commit to a cause, to the point of completely disregarding reality, not turning back even when hitting a wall; it might even only allow praise, turning a deaf ear to bad news, and even engaging in factionalism. There are also those who indeed use narrative to paint grand visions, making people only talk about dedication without expecting returns.

Yes, humanity must balance narrative with reality. Yes, we must be able to both get into character and step out of character.

However, I must emphasize that getting into character is more advanced than stepping out, and narrative is more profound than reality.

All animals dwell in reality; only humans can play virtual games. Yuval Noah Harari once pointed out that the reason Homo sapiens climbed to the top of the food chain was not physical strength or individual intelligence, but our ability to collectively weave and believe in fictional stories [10].

Other primates can only cooperate effectively with a limited number of familiar individuals—for instance, chimpanzees’ acquaintance circles are up to about fifty, while humans’ are around 150, known as “Dunbar’s Number” [11]—yet humans can break through the limitations of acquaintance circles and collaborate with large numbers of strangers.

The magic we rely on for cohesion is narrative.

Thus, being able to perceive narrative is also a superpower. So, imagine what an immense privilege it is when a group of people entrusts you with the power of narrative.

They are essentially allowing you to cast a spell on them.

Notes

[1] Andy Hertzfeld, “Reality Distortion Field,” Folklore.org, February 1981. https://www.folklore.org/Reality_Distortion_Field.html; Andy Hertzfeld, “Saving Lives,” Folklore.org, August 1983. https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html See also “Elite Daily Reading” Season 6, C. Meaning Followers, Meaning Seekers, and Meaning Creators.

[2] McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972): 176–187.

[3] Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

[4] Adams, Scott. Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success. 2023. See also “Elite Daily Reading” Season 6, “Mind Restructuring” 1: Programming the Brain.

[5] Entman, Robert M. “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–58.

[6] Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development. Harvard University Press, 1982; Kegan, Robert. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press, 1994. See also “Elite Daily Reading” Season 6: Your Five Stages of Mind.

[7] NASA. “Moon to Mars: NASA’s Artemis Program.” https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/ See also Space.com, “Who is Artemis? Meet the Greek goddess who inspired NASA’s return to the moon,” 2026.

[8] For the concept of “hyperstition,” see relevant literature by Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), such as Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011; CCRU. Writings 1997–2003. Urbanomic/Time Spiral Press, 2015; and Delphi Carstens and Nick Land, “Hyperstition: An Introduction,” 2009. The phrase “time-travelling device” in the main text is a reference from Land’s 1995 Catacomic, see “Hyperstition,” Wikipedia.

[9] Merton, Robert K. “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” The Antioch Review 8, no. 2 (1948): 193–210.

[10] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 2011.

[11] Dunbar, R. I. M. “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates.” Journal of Human Evolution 22, no. 6 (1992): 469–493. Actual measurements show that the Dunbar number for chimpanzees is 53.5, for marmosets about 5, for macaques about 40; for humans it is 150.