Guess what this special character did to me?

I’ve been watching British comedian Michael McIntyre on Netflix and losing it. He does a whole seven minutes on how we choose passwords. Seven minutes. On passwords.

He nails the slow creep of password rules. First, it was ‘use a capital letter’. Then ‘add a number’. Then came ‘add a special character’. And we all reacted with: what on earth is a special character?

They show us a whole sea of options. @ # % & * ? …

After all that chaos, almost everyone picks the same thing: the humble exclamation mark. It feels special without being confusing. Millions of people, independently, alone in the dark, all typed the same thing!

And that’s when it hit me: we do this exact thing with storytelling.
You hear ‘share a story‘ and assume it must be extraordinary. A near-death experience with a life lesson wrapped in fireworks. So, you scroll through your life like a keyboard full of symbols, thinking none of mine is special enough.

But the stories that land are rarely the fanciest. The best stories are those everyday human moments that make your audience go, ‘Oh, I know that feeling’. The Bunnings* trip that somehow took three hours, cost $400, and you still don’t have the one thing you went in for.

Michael McIntyre built a career out of noticing relatable everyday moments. Your story works the same way. The ordinary moment is the story. You just haven’t seen it that way yet.

So, here’s your challenge this week: notice one ordinary moment and write it down. That’s the seed of your next story.

P.S. For my non-Aussie readers: Bunnings is an Australian hardware and garden centre chain. It’s our retail crush and a national love story