You know how everything is smaller in Europe? Cars. Elevators. Mugs of coffee.

So is this—the 10th issue of Total Annarchy, because right now I'm in Europe, and I'm trying to fit in. Welcome to today's compact, Euro-sized edition!

This morning I'm writing from Belgium—stuffed with waffles, chocolate, fries, beer. (Yet I haven't seen any sprouts, the Brussels kind. Weird.)

Later this week I'll be in Scotland, home of shortbread and whiskey.

My bottom will not be Euro-sized if I stay here much longer.

In both places, I'm talking about marketing and writing and standing out. I talk a lot about thinking BIGGER in your marketing: sharing a bigger story to put your company in the larger context of what people care about.

But in this week's EuroEdition, I'm focusing not on big... but on small. I'm focusing on the need to tell the smallest story possible.

Small stories are specific. Small stories are human-scale.

Ira Glass, host of This American Life, recently spoke at Columbia University about the need to tell important stories—about refugees and climate change, to name but two—even if most of us are sick and tired of hearing about them.

We're sick of them, Ira told the Columbia Journalism School graduating class of 2018, because such stories have "the two key ingredients of any story you don't want to hear anything else about: (1) it's depressing and... (2) YOU ALREADY KNOW THE STORY."

Refugees: 60 million displaced people. The largest refugee crisis since World War II. Respectable middle-class people from Syria and elsewhere whose homes were bombed out of existence. Turned away. Dying on boats. Parked in camps.

Climate change: Carbon pollution from fossil fuels warming our planet. Systems thrown out of whack. Hotter temperatures. Stronger storms. Rising seas.

Ugh. Depressing. Scrolls Instagram.

We're not just paralyzed from doing anything about these massive global problems, we're also numb to the narrative. We heard the story already. We got it.

In marketing, we might not talk about important global issues, but we all have our own versions of important but ignored stories.

Our products or services might solve very real problems, but still it's hard to get anyone to listen to a story about, say, your B2B solution or your law firm or your pharmaceutical products.

The key, then, is to make the story smaller.

Ira Glass says the goal of This American Life is to get listeners pulled in and listening before they actually understand what the story's about. He says it takes some "cunning."

I love the playfulness of that word "cunning." It always makes me think of my Irish aunts grating carrots into the meatloaf just to get us to eat our vegetables. My aunts were cunning, the way they maneuvered those carrots right where they wanted them to be.

We need to do the same.

Real-life example: the building industry in the US struggles with the lack of skilled building-trades people, particularly home framers. So the content created by Norbord Industries (manufacturer of wood building products used in over 80% of home built in the United States) talks a lot about the labor issue. It's a great example of Norbord owning a "bigger" narrative.

But to really make the story resonate, Norbord made it smaller: At ThankAFramer.com, Norbord's Ross Commerford tells the story from the framer's perspective. The program was focused on spreading that message far and wide via social media—mostly video.

It's going nuts—3.7 million views on Facebook and counting—because it tells a smaller, specific story of actual people who actually build the houses that actual Americans live in.

Big and bold stories are often best told in small and specific ways.

Find the specific details—and use them to engage the heart, not just appeal to the head.

The smallest story leads to your bigger story. Cunning, right?

Speaking of specifics, this tip sheet is pure gold: "Always Get the Name of the Dog" and 39 other tips for more lively, accurate, sharper writing.

Many of these I learned in Journalism 101, but I still think of some of them almost every day ("only quote when paraphrasing doesn't do a better job" and "endure the awkward silences in interviews").

Instructions: Print out this PDF. Use a Sharpie to cross out "journalism" and sub in "content." Tack it over your workspace. BOOM WE ARE IN BUSINESS.

Get the PDF here.

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots, say data-obsessed researchers who looked at thousands of novels. These are the foundation for basically every other story:

Here's the narrative arc for The Ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Andersen:

Which I just realized is the exact same narrative arc of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. How did I never notice this before...?

Marketers: The researchers looked at literature. But we can use these narrative structures to inform the kind of tension we need to use in our own content marketing stories, even in something as short as a blog or Instagram post.

Make your customer the hero of your story. Not you. See all six archtypes here.

Slowing down and setting aside as little as 10 minutes a day to record our thoughts arouses the kind of reflection that's critical to making sense of the fast-moving world around us—which is essential to effective leadership.

There's a lot going on in that sentence, I know.

Bottom line: Leaders are writers, because they slow down to put life in context.

And "leader," by the way, means all of us, no matter what your LinkedIn profile says.

"Leader" isn't a job title, it's a mindset.

Leaders notice patterns from which opportunities and threats emerge. This makes you worthy of following. (As in actually following you in real life, not just your Twitter account.) Read how.

Bill Gates releases his summer reading list, and the Internet goes bananas.

To be honest, I went more bananas for the tricolor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Gates used as the spokesmodel for Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci. That squish bears a strong resemblance to my own spokesmodel of a dog, Abby, in her younger days.

Anyway, then I read that 26% of US adults have not read even a portion of a book within the last year (Not. Even. A. Chapter? A paragraph? A Table of Contents?)... and I get depressed.

"Books make you smarter" isn't exactly groundbreaking news. But what is news is what kind of books and how.

Reading essays and fiction helps us be more empathetic and open-minded, because we get inside the heads of other people. We try on their skin. We marvel that it fits, because our skin is basically Sisters of the Traveling Pants same.

We need more empathy in Marketing. Said another way:

Good fiction = more empathy = better marketing.

Books on his summer lists, Gates wrote last year, "helped me better understand what it's like to grow up outside the mainstream." Yup.

Oh and one more point and then I'll shut up about reading and just let you hightail it over your local Amazon browser tab: Leaders are overwhelmingly writers AND readers. Read all the great science here.

(Need a book rec? Here's my annual list.)

Or just look at this puppy in the Gates list.

This week, two of you asked me this question: If we should do less and obsess about what we do... where should we focus our marketing efforts?

Long answer: Well... what are your goals?

Short answer (because we all just really want tactics, don't we?): Here are three I'd look at in 2018:

Food 52 has used these three tactics to build its home brand, and I especially love what they say about email. It aligns with my own sensibilities of what I'm trying to do right here on Sunday, right now from Brussels, with you:

Too many marketers think of email as little more than a canister for a sales message. But what if we thought of it as more like a magazine that people actually, you know, wanted? Read Food 52's thoughts on that here.

AWeber named this newsletter one of 12 Exceptional Newsletters That Will Change Your Approach to Email Forever. Do you feel changed?

You know how you think you're the only one who does something and then you find out literally everyone else does the exact same thing?

For years you think you're the only one who watches raindrops race down a window to see which one "wins" or (for me this week) you're the only one who procrastibakes. (See? Same skin.)

Procrastibaking—the practice of baking something completely unnecessary, with the intention of avoiding "real" work—is a shockingly common habit that has only recently acquired a name. Early in my career as a freelance writer (in a pre-YouTube era beeteedubs), I taught myself how to make bread because sure you can buy a perfectly good loaf at the store but why work when you can procrastibake?

I guess Emilia Clarke is OK as Daenerys Targaryen... but her true talent is channeling Barbara the businesswoman in stock photos. Also, OMG this face. Watch the video. (Thanks, Stephan Hovnanian!)

What makes for a happier, more fulfilled marketer? If you have a spare 6½ minutes, take this survey and tell us over at MarketingProfs what's the what. You could win a $100 Amazon gift card to buy all those books you're going to read this summer. Take the survey here.