If You Do Not Tell Your Story, People Will Make One Up
A communications adviser uses a Nabokov story to argue that scattered facts invite audiences to supply their own meaning.
David Senra · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of RostraLulu Cheng Meservey, the founder of the communications firm Rostra and a former communications chief at the defense technology company Anduril, was explaining why founders cannot just release facts and hope for the best. As she puts it, “people will weave that into a narrative whether you want them to or not.”
To make the point, she retold the plot of “Signs and Symbols” by Vladimir Nabokov. An older immigrant couple living in the United States has a son in a mental hospital. He has been placed there after suicide attempts, and he suffers from what she describes as referential mania, the belief that everything happening around him refers to him and points to conspiracies against him.
On his birthday, his parents buy him jellies and bring them to the hospital. They are turned away and told that he does not want to see them after another recent attempt. They go home, sit up late at the kitchen table talking about whether to take him out, and at midnight the phone rings. A little girl asks for Charlie. The mother says it is a wrong number and hangs up. After the mother hangs up, there is one more call, and the story stops.
Meservey calls it a complete story, but says listeners experience it as unfinished, so they stay up puzzling over the jellies, the missed visit, and the calls, and trying to decide who Charlie is and whether the son will live or die. She believes that restless reaction reveals something ordinary, that everyone carries a milder version of the same urge to find meaning in events, Meservey says, “because our brains crave a story” and “need to believe that things around us are pointing to something.”
For a founder, she says, the facts are hires, office openings, fundraisings, and current events. Without help, listeners will connect those facts on their own. Told in a slightly different form, she argues, the same facts could imply tragedy or a happy ending. That connecting tissue, she says, is the founder’s job: “It’s the space in between the facts that ties them into a story that is our responsibility to fill in.”
Questions people ask
What is referential mania?
It is not an official diagnosis, but a term for the belief that ordinary events, objects, or remarks carry a special message meant for you. It is often discussed as a symptom that can appear with schizophrenia, severe paranoia, and other conditions. Nabokov uses an extreme case in the story to show a tendency Meservey says all of us share in milder form.
What does a founder's story actually consist of?
Meservey means more than a slogan or company history. It is the explanation that links separate announcements, like a hire, a product change, or a fundraising, into one direction of travel. That link tells employees, recruits, and outsiders where the company is going and what is likely to come next.
Why would telling facts in a different order change what people think?
Order suggests cause, importance, and momentum, even when none is stated. A success placed after failures can read as a turnaround, while the same success placed first can read as a peak before decline. Meservey argues founders must therefore choose the order and the connections deliberately, rather than leaving listeners to do it.