
Hacking the Magical Number Seven With Storytelling - mspeiser
http://gigaom.com/2009/09/06/hacking-the-magical-number-seven-with-storytelling/
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wallflower
Maybe putting the gist of what you want to communicate into a story context is
a hack for making what you want to communicate more memorable. Because most
stories, as Ira Glass says, are action, action, action, then how you felt
about something you did. However, personal stories are much more effective
because you are sharing part of you - anyone can tell stories of people like
Ray Kroc or Sir Richard Branson but I believe when you tell a 3rd party story
- you're not putting yourself out there. And you can argue that the value of
Y-Combinator is the private founder's dinners.

I'm not the best at remembering names but I remember many people's personal
stories. I love personal stories. And some of the best are told by the
storytellers of The Moth.

"The stories range in length from approximately 5 to 17 minutes. Sometimes
funny, occasionally sad, often poignant, we hope you will find the stories
memorable and representative of many aspects of human experience."

<http://www.themoth.org/podcast>

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NathanKP
Very fascinating! I read about this "rule of seven" in "The Tipping Point".
Apparently the concept that most people can only remember a max of seven items
is the principal behind using seven digits in a telephone number.

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jhancock
"it’s the reason that U.S. phone numbers have seven digits"

I used to believe these sorts of things until living in China and noticing
cell numbers are 11 in length and Chinese don't have a problem remembering
loads of them. I saw an article not long ago pointing out that CJK languages
have only one syllable per number word, which may enable them to deal with
longer strings of them more easily.

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klipt
<http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html>

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ZeroGravitas
" _For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five
parts, take three.'"_

You could also say that _three-fifths_ is literally "out of five parts take
three" too, just more tersely. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that in
Chinese languages the meaning has not atrophied to the same degree or is more
verbosely specified (which kind of counters the brevity argument they use for
integer digits).

~~~
jhancock
Perhaps a bilingual Chinese person could weigh in on this. For this exercise,
we are concerned with the language in their head, not what they say when they
talk to another. I'm guessing they think in terms of math notation with word-
numbers, so "3/5" in their head would be "one-syllable-number" "slash" "one-
syllable-number".

