Ben Caddy — Entrepreneur & Writer
The story got there first.
Stories shape what we believe is possible, what we believe is normal, and what we believe is ours to change. Some of those stories are working for us. Most of them are working on us. This is my work, in progress, about the difference.
Read the newsletterAbout
The long way round
I’m an entrepreneur and writer based in the UK. From Bristol, through Cape Town, Côte d’Ivoire, Bahrain, Dubai, Bangkok, California, now Bristol again. Thirty years of standing in different rooms and watching people try to make meaning out of what’s in front of them.
That work has mostly been commercial. I built an agency in the Middle East that scaled to fifty-odd people and served some of the world’s biggest brands. I ran a live events company that delivered cultural events at a scale that changed what people in that region thought events could be. I’ve advised the smallest startups to the United Nations, and spent the back half of my career helping founders and owners see what they couldn’t see from inside their own thing.
I currently work across a portfolio of clients, am co-founder of a game studio developing collaborative story products for positive impact, and am a trustee of a foundation creating career pathways for young people from underserved communities.
Most of it has come down to the same instinct. Stand at enough angles, and from far enough away, that things start to look weird. Until you see the story in the room that is older than everyone in it.
Now I write about that instinct, and about what happens once you can see it.
From Myth to Meme
The Stories Underneath
You are living inside a story. So is everyone you have ever met.
For most of human history, narrative was how we stayed alive. The first human technology. The soft, slow, badly-equipped species, with the neat trick of getting what was in one head into all the heads, and across time into heads that hadn’t been born yet.
Two-thirds of human conversation is still doing it, and there is no civilisation, no movement, no brand, no version of yourself that wasn’t built on it.
So, what do Captain Caveman, Han Solo, and a dead Roman Legionary travelling to unknown lands have in common? As it turns out, me. And who I’ve become.
From the stories that got into you before you knew what was happening. The team, the song, the universe you’d have lived in if you could. The Jedi, the Hobbit, the prophet, the parent. The characters who walked into your head and rearranged the furniture. The things you loved before you had language for why, and the things that got you through.
This is a book about how that happened, what it means, and what becomes possible once you can see it.
It won’t tell you to stop believing in stories. That would be like telling you to stop breathing. It will give you, I hope, a new perspective on what stories actually are, and what that might mean for us in the societies we’ve created.
Newsletter
Join the Next Chapter
A book is on the way. The newsletter (Fellow Space People) is on Substack, and is where, while I continue to figure things out, the work somewhat inevitably becomes a story about the work, on a book, about story. :)
Come for the thinking.
Contact
Get in touch
Any enquiries, observations, collaborations, or just good chats are welcomed. Drop me a line if you’d like to.