If you’re like me, numbers don’t really move you.
I’m skeptical of statistics and research and data because it’s often easy for researchers to go into data and pull out the numbers that support their theory and ignore the digits that don’t.
It’s funny how I grew up loving statistics until I realized how bogus a lot of them are. Yet, that might be because I haven’t quite perfected how to use them to tell a story. I’m working on it by tackling the setbacks.
The first setback is there’s too many numbers that mean nothing. I wrote about football the other day and how there are so many meaningless statistics shared during a game.
I think of the number of shark attacks there are each year or the % you can elongate your life by drinking a cup of olive oil a day.
We can combat this setback by choosing one piece of data that supports a universal truth. “96 percent of statistics are made up.” That is statistic that’s funny for two reasons, it fits the story I’m telling in this blog post and it’s a universal truth.
The second setback is working to make the numbers as fun as the story. We have to stop telling ourselves and others how not fun data is.
Visually speaking, data can be incredible. Consider all the infographics you’re awed by. Or consider all the fun you can have creating an infographic by doing the digging to show how effective infographics are to brand awareness.
Before we can tell a compelling story with numbers, we have to tell ourselves a story about how numbers can impact our work in a positive way.
Stay Positive & Slowly But Surely, We’ll Be Fluent In Data Storytelling
Photo credit
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