People have told an infinite number of stories since we first gathered around a campfire in the dark and needed to pass the time and keep the shadows away. How many have you heard? How many do you remember? How do you find yours?

There are an infinite number of stories, but only a few great ones. Because great stories are based on values. So find your story by starting with your values – the way you define yourself.

Are you all about hard work? Then you should be on a Quest. Are you proud of your resilience in the face of change? Then you’re a Stranger in a Strange Land. Do you care about fostering community? Then you should be telling a Love Story.   Is upward mobility, fame or fortune what you crave? Then you need to live a Rags to Riches story. Or are you focused on restoring justice and order to places or people that lack them? Then your story is one of Revenge.

That’s it. Those are the great stories, the story archetypes. The rest are, well, not so great. Or they are not stories at all, but rather anecdotes.

Let’s explore these great stories.

The first of the five archetypal stories, the quest begins with ordinary people in an ordinary status quo situation. Then, a problem arises or an event occurs that forces the hero to leave home or depart from the status quo in order to seek some goal or right some terrible wrong and reestablish the social order. The hero’s hunger for the goal is palpable. Even if the journey is long, the hero hangs in there because of the importance of reaching the goal. The heroes meet obstacles and suffer reversals, but eventually overcome them all to reach the goal.

Here’s the important part. This story has lodged itself so deeply in our psyches that we don’t think of it as a story. Rather, it’s the way life works. If we set off on some quest, the harder we try and the worse the journey, the more we deserve the reward in the end. We believe that, because we want to believe in the ultimate fairness of the universe.

A strange-land story works best in changing times. These stories are our way of handling things when everything changes—the economy, the paper mill, the rules, the demands of a global society. In a strange-land story, the heroes suddenly find themselves in a new landscape, one that offers unknown terrain, language, or rules.

We don’t know the way. We’re lost. What we used to do to succeed no longer makes sense any more. We’re dazed and confused. We need to learn to navigate this strange new place.

Along comes a leader to show us the way. The leader (that’s you) offers a new vision, a new set of rules, or a new way of coping that enables us to survive and eventually thrive in this new landscape. We crave mastery, from bewilderment, and that’s the journey our leader takes us on.

Love stories are simple. Two people meet, fall in love, fall out of love, learn a little more about each other, decide to stick together, and live happily ever after. You know the drill. But their profundity is revealed in the nature of the way the two fall out of love and then find each other again; that’s always symptomatic of what’s wrong with society today. Is it the difficulties of marriage and property? That’s Jane Austen. Or is it the problem of men never growing up, staying immature, and behaving badly in a society that permits them this license? That’s Judd Apatow.

We crave love stories because our future is tied up in them in the obvious ways, but also in not so obvious ways. If men can’t learn to function like responsible adults in a world of too much grown-up play, where does that leave us? How will we take care of each other? What does society owe its people and vice versa? These are the deeper questions love stories investigate.

Rags-to-riches stories help us believe that ordinary people still have a chance to succeed in a society that all too often seems stacked against them, in favor of the already rich and powerful. They’re about average people who, with a little luck and hard work—but not genius—manage to succeed and achieve material wealth, honor, power, or fame. For people who are trying to promote economic justice, they are good stories to tell.

Finally, we live in a chaotic world. But we always have. Most people—throughout history—have believed that the world is the most chaotic it has ever been, right now, unlike the golden age of X years ago. There is evil in this world, and revenge reasserts the order that society all too often fails to give us from the start. We need to be protected. A good villain and justice served are powerful ways for leaders to persuade their followers that they have the right idea about life.

These stories are structures that we impose on reality in order to make sense of it. If you want your message to make sense to your audiences, then you must connect it to one of these five basic stories. You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you might use the elements and the language of a stranger-in-a-strange-land story in order to bring your followers into that magical space without actually telling them bluntly that “you’re on a quest.” It’s better in this case not to be blunt, but rather to evoke the stories with their unconscious power to orient us and bring us into a state of mind where we see the outcome as ordained by the structure of the story.

Parts of this post are based on my new book, Power Cues, published by Harvard in May, 2014.  You can find it here.