Myths: Why Stories Won’t Stay Still
Transcript:
Welcome to Reculture.
This is a podcast about better messages.
Messages that don’t just tell us what to react to, but help us understand where we are. Messages that don’t just pull us in or grab our attention, but point us somewhere.
Because whether we're navigating a brand, a team, a family, or even just our own lives, we're all living inside stories—whether we’ve chosen them or not. The real question is how we navigate the story we’re becoming.
Why We Misunderstand the World (The Sloth Story)
We live in Columbus, OH, so we have one of the best zoos in the country. Sometimes, they’ll even bring animals to our local library—and recently, they brought in a sloth.
My son is super into animals, so obviously we had to go.
And I’m standing there, holding my coffee, checking my phone, half paying attention, when the trainer starts explaining something that actually made me look up.
It turns out sloths contain entire ecosystems on their body.
Because they move so slowly, moss grows on their fur.
That moss attracts moths.
So the sloth moths lay eggs.
And when the moths die, they fertilize the moss.
The moss protects the sloth.
And in turn, the sloth sustains the whole sloth moth lifecycle.
I’m listening to this—I’ve put my phone down now—and I realize…
I’ve gotten sloths completely wrong my entire life.
We literally named a deadly sin after them.
Sloth.
Laziness.
Useless.
Slow.
This whole time, the sloth was doing something incredibly important that only works because it moves slowly.
And I had this strange thought while my son is recapping this whole thing to me on the way home like he’s David Attenborough with a juice box…
How many things in our lives have we misunderstood like this?
How many stories have we inherited about the way the world works…
that made perfect sense once, but don’t quite fit anymore?
What Is a Myth (Beyond Stories and Content)
We inherit stories all the time.
The older I get, the more I realize—the stories I loved most as a kid weren’t just entertainment. They were teaching me how the world works.
And who I was inside it.
“Stories” is actually too small a word for what they were.
They were something bigger.
They were myths.
Anything can be a story. A sitcom is a story. A news article is a story.
A myth is different.
A myth is a story that forms us—that teaches us how the world works and who we are in it.
And often, we don’t realize that’s happening while it’s happening.
We just think we love the story.
Later, we realize the story has been shaping us the whole time.
I learned collaboration from the Muppets.
I learned about friendship from The Lord of the Rings.
About adventure from Calvin & Hobbes.
About sincerity and failure from Charlie Brown.
I learned that pizza must be healthy because the Ninja Turtles were all super muscly and jacked.
I think Mr. Rogers taught me about who God was.
How Myths Shape Identity Without Us Realizing
Those myths all formed me. And looking back, they were pretty easy to identify.
They had puppets.
They had cartoons.
They had theme songs.
They were obvious.
But just because we grow up doesn’t mean we stop collecting myths.
They just don’t take the shape of stories anymore.
They look like assumptions.
They look like rules.
They look like “the way life works.”
And if you carry responsibility for other people—at work, at home, anywhere—you know how powerful those unspoken stories can be.
You’ve watched them shape others.
And you’ve watched them shape you.
I think many of us, myself included, find ourselves still living inside stories like the sloth—stories that may have made perfect sense once, but don’t feel like they fit anymore.
When a Story Stops Fitting (The Rudolph Example)
I go to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with my daughter for the first time.
And you notice how the Rudolph story hits a little different as an adult.
As a kid, it’s a sweet underdog story.
Different. Left out. Teased.
And then one foggy Christmas Eve… suddenly he’s useful.
And now everyone loves him.
As a kid, you think: “Justice. Acceptance.”
As an adult, you think: “Wait a second.”
He was only welcome once he was useful?
That’s the myth?
Be different quietly.
Be rejected politely.
And hope one day your difference becomes valuable.
That story worked for me for a long time.
Until it didn’t.
Until I started to feel the tension of living inside it.
There are a lot of stories like this.
“If I keep everyone happy, I’ll be okay.”
“If I don’t rock the boat, life will be simpler.”
They’re not bad stories.
They’re survival stories.
And sometimes we come to the realization that we’ve outgrown them.
Alignment Drift in Teams and Organizations
The challenge happens when we don’t notice when a story stops fitting.
We just keep living inside it.
This happens in companies and teams all the time.
And when that happens, sometimes the work isn’t to create a new strategy.
It’s to repair the myth people are already living inside.
I’ve been with leadership teams where nothing was technically wrong…
but something still didn’t feel right.
People were moving in different directions.
Not because their strategy was off.
Because the story underneath it no longer fit.
They were still trying to live inside a story the company had outgrown.
And before we could even talk about a new message, we had to repair the myth underneath.
Why Myth Repair Matters (Identity, Leadership, and Belonging)
The strange thing about myths is—they don’t ask for your permission.
You don’t choose them.
You just live inside them.
And if you never stop to notice, you can spend years living inside a story that no longer fits.
I think about that scene in The Lion King.
Simba has run away.
He’s built an entire life around a new story.
“Hakuna Matata.”
No worries. No responsibility.
It’s a great story.
But it’s not who he really was.
And the turning point of the whole movie isn’t the battle.
It’s a voice saying:
“Remember who you are.”
Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, talks about something similar.
The thing that changes people isn’t correction.
It’s belonging.
It’s someone saying: “I’m proud of you. I’m here for you.”
He calls it a “no-matter-what” kind of love.
That’s myth repair.
Not shaming.
Not forcing.
Just reminding.
Why Some Myths Scale and Endure
Because we all forget who we are sometimes.
So do teams.
So do companies.
And the reason reminders work is because some myths are strong enough to survive when we drift.
They don’t break.
They might change shape.
But they never stop pointing back to something we never stopped needing.
You see this everywhere once you notice it.
In the Muppets.
In Star Wars.
In belief systems that have lasted for generations.
Why?
Not because they’re trendy.
Not because they’re nostalgic.
But because they can evolve without losing their center.
The cultures that last aren’t the ones with the best strategy.
They’re the ones whose myths outlast the moment.
Final Thought: When the Myth Changes, Everything Changes
The cool thing about the sloth is that nothing about it needed to change.
The ecosystem was always there.
The only thing that needed to change was the story we believed about it.
And once that changes…
you don’t just see the sloth differently.
you see everything differently.
