What makes an inspiring story?

I went to a resilience workshop yesterday and think I was supposed to come away feeling all inspired.  To the same end, I watch TED talks and go to quite a few workshops and goodness knows, I've even run workshops that are focused on creating social change.


However, the more I listen or watch, the more I'm starting to get get depressed and feel pretty inadequate, hearing all these inspiring stories of resilience and community and super human people doing amazing things with no difficulty at all!  I find myself wondering if I'm the only person to have found building social change so hard.

My experiences working to build up a greater sense of community in my part of the world seem to involve a lot of work and need a great deal of patience.  Not only that, they very often involve personal risk, frustration, negotiation, disappointment and grind - things that really are difficult and that wear me down.  Given that so many others find it easy (apparently) should I give up now and go and do something that would be a bit more rewarding?  What am I doing wrong, I find myself asking.

I've been watching a few videos on storytelling and I"m starting to realise that these sweetness and light stories aren't really even good stories!  The structure of a good story involves having a hook, a hold and a payoff.  The hook in my world is the desire to see things changing/ happening/ building.  The hold is the bit that shows some struggle and that mean the outcome is uncertain - situations that help the story recipient feel how the main character really wanted to give up but they kept going through thick and thin in the face of all that and finally achieved what they set out to do or not (the payoff (which might also be a loss).

So now I'm really starting to want some stories that don't just tell me about the finished, shiny new result - I want to them to show the difficulties that people faced and how they got through them. If it was all easy then frankly it is quite a boring story and I guess the inspiration is in the idea of what has been done or the idea rather than in the process of doing it.

It would make for a much more engaging story if it has some of the hard stuff in it too - so I guess that might be my mission - composing a story that does involve struggle and does inspire through the achievement of the vision even though it was hard.  I still wonder though - are I and the people I talk with day to day the only ones who finds making change difficult?