everyone loves the word storytelling in business it's a huge buzzword they love to think of themselves as storytellers but when they come to me they don't really want to be storytellers because to be a Storyteller means you have to separate yourself from the herd and in their mind that risks them getting picked off right getting picked off by some Predator but the the alternative is you're in the herd which means you're forgettable I mean how many times have you gone to a conference listen to someone speak and by the time you're pulling into the driveway
you really can't remember anything that they said because that's what happens if we don't speak in story our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart or facts or or statistics or you know platitudes or ideas that are not attached to imagery so the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten 100% you will be forgotten today my guest is Matthew dicks Matthew is the author of my all-time favorite book on storytelling storyworthy which a previous guest of the podcast recommended to me and I couldn't put it down
so I reached out to Matthew and got him on the podcast Matthew is a 59 time moth story slam winner and nine time Grand Slam champ he's also the author of nine other books including fictions rock operas even a comic book in his day job he is an elementary school teacher and on the side teaches both individuals and teams at companies like slack Amazon Lego and Salesforce the skill of Storytelling and public speaking through his company speak up in our conversation we get very tactical about how to tell better stories both in life and in
work how to feel more comfortable speaking on stage how to come up with story ideas that you can deploy when the need arises why every good story is centered around one 5-second moment of transformation and so much more math is an incredible human being and I am excited to spread his message more widely if you're interested in this topic definitely pick up his book storyworthy it'll change your life with that I bring you Matthew dicks after a short word from our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by one schema the embeddable CSV importer for
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excited to be here I'm even more excited to have you on the way I found out about you is a previous guest mention your book as a book that really transformed the way they think about storytelling and even marketing and I completely agree it's the most tactical practical and also just entertaining book on just how to tell better stories and when I was reading I was just like hey what if I reach out to the author of this book and see if You' come on and uh here we are I'm thrilled to be here and
I appreciate what you had to say I I Tred to make my book as sort of actionable as possible you know I think the only reason I'm sort of successful in what I do is that I've been a teacher for 25 years and I'm a Storyteller so the two of those things come together pretty well for me okay so I thought it'd be fun to start with maybe the most mind expanding takeaway I got from this book is this idea that all good stories are rooted in this 5-second moment of someone's life can you just
talk about this insight and maybe share an example with you to make this real sure uh well that is true what you just said which is essentially every story is about a singular moment I call it 5 Seconds it can be one second honestly it's a moment of either transformation meaning sort of I'm telling you a story about how I once used to be one kind of person and now I'm a new kind of person or more common is realization which is I used to think something and then some stuff happened and now I think
a new thing and those changes they they take place sort of over time or really what happens is is it's an accumulation of events and feelings and thoughts that ultimately result in a singular moment where that flip actually happens and I think that's true for almost everyone it feels like it took a long time but there really was one second when you thought one thing and then the next second when you thought the new thing and the purpose of a story is essentially to bring that moment to the greatest Clarity possible to the audience so
that the audience can sort of in a way experience that flip that transformation or realization along with the Storyteller so 98% of the story is the context to bring that singular moment into fruition and that is true for stories that we tell out loud Stories We Tell on the page novels that I write movies that I watch television shows that I watch all of the stories of the world that are worth hearing and truly just about every story told that qualifies as a story has one of those moments that's a big statement is there is
there an example to you could share of either stories we know or just tell a short story whatever is easier to give people like oh wow you're totally right sure well I'll tell you one that happened actually today how about that amazing so I'm teaching math today I'm an elementary school teacher and I'm teaching math and I have a student in my class her name is Eileen and she's one of those kids that I worry about a little bit because she's got some anxiety so she's not the most confident person in the world and in
September I was aware of this so I've been working really hard building confidence with her and so today we're doing some math and I'm calling kids to the board and I'm sort of looking at eileene and wondering is today the day am I going to call eileene to the board because doing so there's a risk there's inherent risk that she could you know be upset she could embarrass herself in front of the the class in a way that means something to her and I just wasn't sure so I didn't call her to the board and
so at the end of the math lesson I wandered over to her desk and I said so eile I was I was thinking about calling you to the board today but I just wasn't sure if you're there yet what do you think and she said to me first of all I don't like that cheeky smile of yours and that is all I needed to hear that was my 5-second moment that was the moment of realization where I understood that eileene trusted me felt confident enough in my classroom that she could be herself that she could
fire off a quip at a teacher sort of like you know take a shot at me I knew at that point that now I can call her to the board that she's going to be okay so you know essentially it is a very brief story that I could actually expand into something much more meaningful I could make that into a five or six minute story about my journey with this student which would include in the longer version of it the steps that I took to discover who she was the steps I took to help her
reach the point she's at now I would probably pull in some backstory about students who I was not so successful with some of my failures before I learned how to be a better teacher future and then I'd bring it to the moment where she says first of all I don't like that cheeky smile and that's all I need to hear so that is essentially a 5-second moment for me that is the same though as any other 5-second moment you know if you think about a movie like Star Wars the first Star Wars that came out
right that is a movie essentially about religion which people sort of don't always see but it is true there's a boy on a planet and he wants to go to space someday and fly a spaceship and use blasters to defeat the Empire and along the way he meets a religious figure it's Obi-Wan Kenobi and he introduces him to a religion called the force and when the final moment comes for Luke Skywalker to defeat the Empire his his vision of using technology a spaceship and a blaster to destroy the Empire all of that goes away and
he turns off his technology in his spaceship instead he uses the force to guide his weapon to defeat the enemy and that is a story about a boy who once had no religion and and then some stuff happened and he had religion in the end and that's why a story like that resonates with us in a way that another story might not because we all understand what it's like to not believe in something and then find belief in something whether that is religious belief or I used to think cheeseburgers didn't taste good and now I
believe that they taste good either way we understand that process and we connect with Luke Skywalker in a meaningful way so every story essentially has those moments including I don't like that cheeky smile with this moment what's also interesting is you talk about how knowing that moment of change also tells you how the story will end so as a Storyteller you will know how it ends based on knowing what this moment is which then also tells you how it's going to start roughly can you just can you just talk about that realization because to me
every time I watch a movie now I'm like wow I know exactly how it's going to turn out just from the right so we start as storytellers at the end well we start at the end if we are telling true stories about ourselves elves or our companies or our products things that we know I'm also a fiction writer so when I start my novels that's much more self-discovery I really don't know the end of it but in the storytelling that we're talking about you have to know the end because you've lived the moment and the
end informs everything so you know what you're going to say you found a moment worth speaking to that 5-second moment and then whatever that moment is in my case I discover that Eileen has more confidence than I realized and is ready to take a big step forward what's the opposite of me realizing Eileen has confidence and is ready to step forward it is Eileen does not have confidence and I need to help her find that confidence so that's the Opposites that will work in a story essentially a story is about these two these two moments
in time a beginning and an end and they are operating in opposition to each other sometimes more so than others sometimes exactly an opposition but you're right if you watch a movie and you pay attention to the first 10 to 15 minutes of of a movie you will ultimately know how that movie is going to end you'll see a character you'll discover what that character needs or their flaw or their desire and you know that that's what's going to be at the end you know the easiest one is a romantic comedy two people are not
in love at the beginning of the movie you know they're going to be in love at the end of the movie right even knowing it doesn't mean the story's ruined we can get there in a very entertaining way When Harry Met Sally that movie when it begins Harry and Sally actually say they hate each other at the very beginning of the movie I hate you Harry right I hate that man so much we know they're going to end up together and the journey is well worth the fact that we know what's going to happen at
the end so you know it ruins a little bit of Storytelling for people who sort of think like me and go oh well I know where this is going but you have to do it in an entertaining way filled with all the other things we talk about in story timeing but yeah every story should be essentially a beginning in an end in opposition to each other and you should start at the end that guarantees that you have something important to say rather than what most people do which is they simply report on their lives they
just tell you stuff that happened over the course of time in some chronological way that ultimately doesn't lead to anything you want to always be saying something of import so we start at the end with that moment of import it's funny is I was thinking of When Harry Met Sally exactly as you were talking as an example my wife wants to watch that movie basically every night it's like the one movie she could just watching a billion times well that's the power of story I tell people this all the time you know why are we
telling stories you've never asked to see a PowerPoint presentation a second time you you've never gone to bed and dreamt about a PowerPoint presentation you've never heard someone give a keynote and thought I hope I get to watch that keynote again tomorrow but movies you'll watch a movie a hundred times because it's a story and our minds are wired to enjoy story over and over and over again you have a you have a small child right eventually you're going to be reading to that child when when your baby's old enough and you're going to discover
kids want to read the same book 50 times they're really no different than adults except Kid books are so small you can read them you know endlessly a movie takes two hours so you don't get to read it as often as you might want or watch it as often as you might want but Harry Met Sally comes on and you're halfway through you're probably in even though you know every scene you can probably do the dialogue we're wired for story that's why it's so important why changing so important why is that so critical to a
good story someone having a change or transforming well I think that actual a moment of transformation lends importance to the story and allows the audience to connect to it if I reported on my day to you my day at teaching in a classroom I am unlikely to connect with you unless you are also a teacher and you experienced things similar to me my wife is a kindergarten teacher I'm a fifth grade teacher if both of us report on our day oddly we will not really connect very often she is teaching them how to write the
letter c and I am teaching them how to use the standard algorithm in multiplication they could not be further apart so reporting on the moments that you have experienced in the day is not a way to connect to people but when we talk about change change has a great Universal appeal so you might not be a teacher who's trying to teach someone to find confidence in their life but you might be a person who wants lacked confidence and then found confidence in the way I leaned it or you might be a parent or uh the
boss of someone who is trying to bring confidence to your child your employee your salesperson whatever it is when we do change when we're focused in on that change we increase exponentially the universal appeal to the story and our ability to connect to an audience even though the content we're speaking about has nothing to do with them the actual emotional appeal will cause people to connect to us fascinating so building on that same uh thread of change you also have this kind of checklist for what makes a good story what is a good story and
one of the and I think it's only a three-point checklist one is there's a change that happens can you talk about the other two I think there's only other two well the dinner test is probably one that you're thinking of yeah that's right right so the dinner test is the idea that when you're telling a story in a formal way if you're performing on a stage or delivering a keynote out or even delivering sort of a pitch to entrepreneurs or a sales pitch essentially the story that you're telling should be very closely related to the
story you would tell someone if you were having dinner right so there should be no sort of performance art included within your story or within your within your talk so weird things that people do should not be done like opening a story with unattributed dialogue you know so you're standing on stage and you open your story with Jim it's time to come in for dinner my wife said like that's just weird we don't talk like that as regular people so you should not speak like that ever in the history of the world you should never
speak like that but people do it all the time it's it's this weird sort of appendage from childhood when bad writing teachers thought that this was a good idea or or you start with a sound which is very popular in like first grade you teach you teach kids to start with sound mostly because teachers are not writers so they don't understand what writing actually is and so they open with stories with things like bang the door opened but if you and I were having dinner and you said hey how was your day Matt and I
said well let me tell you Lenny bang the door opened you would not have dinner with me again so you have to be thinking that this is a slightly elevated version of the dinner story meaning you're probably not going to be interrupted in the middle of your story and you want to have a little more shape to it and you want to avoid some of the verbal detrius that tends to fill our lives you don't want to be saying you know and like I said you know all of that nonsense sort of should get pushed
to the side but essentially people should feel like you're kind of speaking in a very natural way so the dinner test is pretty important in that regard awesome yeah so the lesson there is when you're telling a story make it sure that it's something that you could potentially tell at a dinner party slightly elevated is the way you slightly elevated exactly I think the third point you make is that it has to be your story you can't be telling a story on behalf of someone else maybe chat about that briefly right so if you're telling
a story about someone else essentially you might as well be tell fiction because that person's not in the room and to the audience they don't really exist unless they're you know if they can't see them that person is just another human being who supposedly lives somewhere in the world or once lived in the world and because of that you are almost unable to express any vulnerability in your story you can't reveal anything about yourself and storytelling is one of the key parts of Storytelling is to be vulnerable with your audience meaning I'm going to say
stuff in a meaningful way I might say stuff that most people are unwilling to share in a public way but I'm at least going to like offer up a little bit of my heart and mind if I offer up the heart and mind of someone else that doesn't really require any vulnerability the only vulnerability is I have to stand in front of people and talk which I know is challenging for some people but that doesn't mean anything to the audience we kind of don't care if you're having a hard time presenting if it's making you
nervous that doesn't mean much to an audience what we really want is someone to open up their hearts and Minds So Stories have to be about you in some way this tricks where you can tell stories about other people by sort of taking that story and centering it on yourself you know one of the examples I I work with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors and in the past what they would do is they would just tell the story of the Holocaust Survivor who has often at this point passed away and it really does
feel like fiction you know a long time ago in a place that wasn't this a terrible thing happened and there's a certain level of empathy and sympathy that you might feel but what I teach them to do do is to tell stories about themselves and then at some point in the story about themselves they're going to talk about how the experience of their parent or grandparent during the Holocaust has informed or changed their own life too so they get to dip into some history but that history is relevant to the Storyteller so it's no longer
history it's now something changed in me because something terrible happened to my parent or grandparent just as a tangent you also have this funny useful checklist for how tell vacation stories well first try not to right I think that's step one do not tell vacation stories most vacation stories are just simply a recounting of your vacation at the expense of another person right so unless something happened on that vacation where you experienced one of these 5-second fundamental moments of change nobody cares about your vacation and if something did happen only be talking about the moment
when it happened so if I had a moment of change that took place on a Thurs Thurday night at dinner right that story is now going to take place on the Thursday night at dinner and it's irrelevant that I'm in Aruba right the fact that I am on vacation is almost completely irrelevant to the story other than I may want to offer my location but I'm not going to talk about the beach the day before or the scuba diving or the plane all of that goes away we're telling moments in our lives and it doesn't
matter where they happen if your location is Paramount to story because you want people to know you are in Aruba then you have to understand no one actually cares that you are in Aruba and you're just a terrible person for trying to like dump that on someone and use up their time so you can relive your vacation and perhaps humble brag about how much fun you had this will be a good segment for people to send their friends if they want to tell them their vacation stories and like here's a here's a tip for how
to do this better exactly and just understand why it needs to be on a Thursday in that dinner is it just is the advice there keep it very focused and small unless there's some really essential reason to share the context that around the dinner yeah exactly the shortest version of every story is the best version of every story starting as close to the end of a story is always the best place to begin so if I had a moment of realization during dessert you know in a restaurant in Aruba I may never tell them I'm
in Aruba I might start my story with the dessert hits the table and my wife says something that causes me to begin thinking right and that would be the beginning of the story the fact that I'm on an island in the Caribbean may never come up in the entire story because it doesn't turn out to be relevant to the story there's a lesson that another guest shared westcow about she calls it start when the bear starts eating your tent or something like that like jump to when the bear is eating your tent like don't do
this whole introduction to why or how you got to this tent it's just like the bear is eating our tent that's where the story should start yes Kurt vonet said that Kurt vonet said start as close to the the end is possible he was talking about short stories written on the page but it is a true story uh it's a true notion in oral storytelling too and it is of all the things I help people with their stories the most frequent suggestion that I make for revision is you've started your story in the wrong place
okay I want to shift to business context advice but before we do that there's another really important element of Storytelling which is having stakes and having important Stakes so could you just talk about what what is a stake and why is it important to have stakes and then just what are examples of adding Stakes to your story to make them more so Stakes are essentially sort of what your audience should be worried about what they should be wanting for you what they should be concerned about what they should be wondering about if your audience isn't
wondering what you're about to say they're no longer listening to you and if you you have to internalize that in a deep and fundamental way when I work with people in business they are constantly under this misconception that people want to hear what they have to say you know some vice president of marketing thinks that because they're a vice president of marketing and everyone is sitting in a chair and looking at them that they automatically have that audience's attention I assume all the time 100% of the time that no one wants to hear anything I
have to say and so I am Relentless in my attempt to get the audience to be constantly wondering what the next sentence is and Stakes are a big part of that Stakes are I wonder what's going to happen next I'm worried about this guy will he get what he wants will he get his comeuppence because he seems like kind of a jerk in the story all of those things are Stakes what is at stake for the Storyteller the company the product whatever it is and therefore what the audience is worried about as well that's why
it's why Star Wars opens with a big spaceship shooting at a small spaceship we don't even know who's on it yet but we're already on the small spaceship side we're already worried that a small spaceship is being shot at by a big spaceship right that's why Story start this way Alfred Hitchcock has a has a movie where it opens with a police officer is chasing a man across a roof we don't know who to root for but something is at stake here and now we're wondering what's going to happen next we have to do the
same thing with our ordinary true life everyday stories we have to put Stakes into stories there's something that you teach around surprise and the power of surprise as a part of stakes I forget exactly what that is but does that ring a bell well I'll separate them really so with Stakes there's lots of ways to insert Stakes I always say you should have what I call an elephant at the beginning of the story which is which is actually a big spaceship shooting at a little spaceship or a police officer chasing a a guy across a
roof we have to immediately know that something is at Stakes we have to be worried about something in my little e story that I told you I said I'm teaching math and I've got this student and I'm worried about her because I want to call her to the board but I know she might lack some confidence right away I have to make it clear what kind of story we're at in a movie you get a trailer you don't often go to a movie and not sort of not have any awareness about what's about to happen
but when you open your mouth to begin telling a story nobody knows what you're going to say you need to land something immediately that causes an audience to go oh okay what's going to happen here right so that's an elephant that's like plant some big thing in the beginning of a story it doesn't actually have to be what the story is about either sometimes it takes a little time to get to what the story is about but you plant something there to at least get the audience to be worried and then you can use some
other tricks you can you know I I call something called a backpack which is I you tell the audience what your plan is before you carry out your plan so that they sort of have your hopes and dreams packed up with them as well like if you watch an Oceans 11 movie right you know what the plan is before they go into the casino so as the plan goes arai you can go oh no because you know what the plan is if you didn't know what the plan was you would not be able to go
oh no right so that's sort of like loading your audience with your hopes and dreams so that they have they can feel those Stakes they can actually be hoping for you as well uh there's things like breadcrumbs where you offer a little little bit of a a little bit of what's going on but not the complete idea sort of like drop a hint you know the classic one is sort of the the gun you know there's a gun in the room and you know there's a gun in the room and it seems like it's not
going to be relevant but if you have a gun in the room you know it's going to eventually go off there's something going on there that's like a breadcrumb eventually we're going to get to that gun don't worry it's going to happen um there's there's hourglasses which is sort of when you get to the moment where everyone is about to discover what's going to happen that's the moment of slow time down you load your story with details because suddenly you know you have the audience on the edge of their seat and you want to leave
them on the edge of their seat as long as possible when I know my audience wants to hear the next sentence that is when I prolong the arrival of the next sentence by I say turning over an hourglass and letting the sand run for a while and making them wait for it uh there's crystal balls where you can predict a future you don't have to predict an accurate future you can just predict any future so you know I could have said something in the E story like if I get this wrong Eileen's going to begin
to cry she's going to cry in front of 22 kids 22 kids who for the rest of the year will continue to stare at this girl and remember the moment she cried that's a crystal ball that's me predicting a terrible future because I put that terrible future in the audience's mind now they're worried right so that is a stake I have planted a false steak a false future but they are going to be worried about it because it's also a realistic future so all of those things are used to continue to get the audience to
wonder what's going to happen next which is a little different than surprise surprise is just that beautiful delightful amazing moment where the audience didn't see something coming and then it was almost like it was inevitable a surprise happens and they understand why it happened and I think it's the best thing you can ever offer an audience as a moment of surprise and every story has a surprise at least one because whenever we suddenly realize something for the first time right I hate the word suddenly but what happens is we used to not think something and
then we think a new thing and that's often a surprise for us if we make it a surprise for the audience too that's a delightful thing so surprise is so powerful and wonderful and always ruined by storytellers I was just listening to an interview with I think his name is David Mammoth and he made this point that endings of books and movies is always has to be both inevitable and also complete surprise yes both of those things so inevitable means there has to be enough information placed earlier in the story so that when the surprise
happens the audience goes yes right but also you have to be clever enough to plant that information in such a way that the audience doesn't see the surprise coming you build information into the audience's mind that will allow the surprise to land in an inevitable and yet surprising way that is the best surprise you can offer someone e your said then done yes well there's lots of tricks to do that as well but uh it takes some time but essentially what you end up doing is you're hiding the information that they need to know in
a multitude of ways so that when it lands they go oh my gosh AB c d they don't connect it until the surprise hits and then they go of course ABC D so you place a b c and d in a story but you don't place it in such a way that they can connect the dots until you want them to connect the dots I feel like that's a whole other hour of podcast conversation to figure that out that's like Ninja level Next Level storytelling which is very teachable it's not such like everything I say
is very very teachable and and doable by anybody but yes it's a trickier thing to accomplish yeah okay that'll be for a second podcast episode uh just to summarize there you kind of shared I think five ways to add Stakes just to summarize one is crystal ball you basically predict the bad thing that'll happen if you don't do this thing uh hourglass which is when something you know is about to happen slow time down I think of Pulp Fiction and Tarantino in this often of just like you know some violence is about to happen and
they go next door and like let's just Eat A Cheeseburger instead for a while yeah um and then this backpack idea of like they know exactly what you're trying to do and it's on you the entire movie uh breadcrumbs where you kind of give them a little bit of information along the way I think maybe that's it maybe there's one more and then the Elephant at the beginning oh the elephant just like the big ho here's the steak I you got to have something uh I heard some advice in either your book a different book
about adding Stakes is just any just drop a dead body every new dead body is additional Stakes that are added to the story I don't I don't often people can do that in random stories right but what you can take from that is so often people load the front end of a story with all of the stakes because they're worried that the audience will not pay attention to them so they think I'm going to throw everything right in front and that'll hold an audience for the rest of the story and that's a mistake what we
want is Stakes Contin to build throughout a story so dropping a dead body really means drop a new stake don't load it all don't front load it give us something to wonder about and then gaug when we need the next thing to wonder about and spread out those Stakes we need most of the St Stakes to occur within the first half of a story ideally the second half of the story is now the roller coaster to the end so we might drop one in there at an appropriate time or just through plot sometimes they just
happen to need to be in a place but so often I hear people frontload Stakes because they're worried about audience attention just to give people something concrete to think about when they're thinking about this area is there a story of yours that's online that we can point people to see an example of really good stakes in action so the one that I reference in my book which you can go watch online is Charity thief and it needs a lot of stakes because two-thirds of the story nothing really happens two-thirds of the story is explaining how
I end up on a porch and so that's not super entertaining unless I build in lots of stakes along the way I'm not inventing anything I'm just presenting the actual events in a way that makes makes you wonder what's going to happen next and so there's an elephant at the beginning of that story which is actually not what the story is about because I say the elephant can change colors along the way but I give you something to wonder about and along the way I know I use a backpack and I use a breadcrumb and
an hourglass and a crystal ball I do it all in that story mostly because it's not super entertaining some stories you don't have to worry so much about I perform as a stripper in the break room of a McDonald's restaurant when I'm 19 years old for a bachelorette party there are stakes in that story but I don't need to put any of them in because everybody wants to know what's going to happen already sometimes you just have a story that the stakes are already pre-built because of the Ridiculousness of the moment but most of our
stories are not like that most of them are far more benign and we have to sort of jack up the stakes by using some tricks to get people to the point we want them to be in that's stripper story I've also watched and I love and we Bo to it and I love it's uh connected to another piece of advice you always share people just say yes to stuff had the power of yes I don't want to get into it yet I want to come back to that we'll leave that bread Chrome yeah but uh
but I love that point okay so let's let's transition to helping people in business learn all these skills and translate them to becoming better in their work and maybe actually to add some Stakes what benefits do people get slash what problems do they run into if they aren't cre at storytelling versus if they learn the skill and can implement it at work what what happens what good things come out of that well if you don't tell stories part of your business whether you're looking for investment or speaking to your people or speaking to customers or
clients anything if you're not telling stories the good news is you're just like everybody else the bad news is you're mediocre just like everybody else right you're you're in a lane that everyone else is in which means that you're going to be forgettable I often say most Communication in business is round white and flavorless right intentionally so because a lot of people are afraid to stand out you know when I try to get people to tell stories you know everyone loves the word storytelling in business it's a huge buzz word they love to think of
themselves as storytellers but when they come to me they don't really want to be storytellers because to be a Storyteller means you have to separate yourself from the herd and in their mind that risks them getting picked off right getting picked off by some Predator but the AL the alternative is you're in the herd which means you're forgettable I mean how many times have you gone to a conference listen to some speak and by the time you're pulling into the driveway you really can't remember anything that they said my wife and I actually attended an
educational conference recently she's a teacher I'm a teacher there was a bunch of speakers the first person came out with his childhood lunchbox put it on a table and told a story about how his parents had nothing while he was growing up and yet they somehow kept him in new shoes and a new backpack every year and sent him to school with a lunch every day and how much it meant to him and how is an educator today he thinks about about every single kid in his class like he was a kid who had nothing
except for all of his parents hopes and dreams and I'll never forget that story because it was a story it was a story of vulnerability and humor and meaning it was another person who spoke a sort of executive we'll say and he did a great job in terms of being fluent and presenting ideas and speaking well and speaking confidently and 15 minutes after the conference I said to my wife who is a teacher and understands storytelling because do it together I said what' you think and she said well I'm never going to forget that guy
with the lunchbox and I said I will not either and I said what' you think about the other guy and she goes he was great and I said so what did he say 15 minutes after and she went you know I actually can't tell you a single thing he said right this is a woman who's a teacher and invested in storytelling and communication her impression was he was fluent he was amusing you know he he said some numbers he said said some things that seem to mean something but it was all forgotten because that's what
happens if we don't speak in story our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart or facts or or statistics or you know platitudes or ideas that are not attached to imagery so the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten 100% you will be forgotten when people hear this they may think like oh man there's this guy at work and he's always like telling stories we're like shut up just tell me what you we need to do to me it a little more real of just like what
does storytelling look like where it's not annoying it's not like okay everyone gather around let me tell you the story of our vision what are some simpler ways and I guess may be non-annoying ways to think about what storytelling looks like in the workplace that's not just like a public speaking like hey everyone I'm going to give you let me give you a couple of examples I have a storytelling book coming out next year on business so there's a couple heroes in that story I one of them is named Boris his name is Boris Levan
he is a factory owner here in Connecticut he's the one who convinced me I could start working with businesses I thought it was just a Storyteller who spoke about himself on a stage and Boris one day saw me for some fundraiser and said listen I want you to come and help me and I said I can't do that I just tell amusing stories about myself and he said no no you can help me and it turns out he was totally right so Boris has done it the right way Boris has decided to become a Storyteller
who will then translate his stories into his business so a great example was one of boris's early stories he came to me and he said my son was at bat in the Little League championship game the bases were loaded if my son got a hit the team was going to win the championship and if my son struck out the team would lose the championship it's a three and two count it is like the ultimate baseball moment and his son strikes out and he watches his son drag that bat back to the Dugout and he's devastated
his son's devastated and Boris is devastated and so he's trying to collect himself so he configur figure out the right thing to say to a boy who's just lost the championship for his team and by the time he makes it onto the other side of the field to catch up with his son he sees his son running up a hill with his friends and they're already laughing they're heading to the cars so they can go to ice cream and they can enjoy themselves and so Boris is falling apart he is still devastated but his son
has already moved past the failure Boris takes that story and he crafts it as a beautiful story that he could tell on a stage and perform and make an audience laugh and cry once the story is done he says to me so what are we going to do with it how are we goingon to apply this to business and ultimately what happens is this he's got a sales team and quite often salese do not land the big account they're hoping to land and Boris knows that when his sales people fail to achieve what they want
to achieve they will often sulk for days they'll sort of wander around the office and be useless because they're still trying to get past the fact that they just lost the million-dollar contract so he tells the story about his son and he says listen there's nothing wrong with being sad being upset with failure but we cannot allow it to slow us down as much as we are right now we have to think about my son my son dragged his Bat back to the Dugout he sat down he sighed his buddies patted him on the back
he collected himself and he moved on that's what we need to do when we fail we're g to take a moment to collect ourselves to think about the mistakes we made to to decide what we're going to do differently and then we're going to move on and that becomes a really important moment in as company and it's much better than him standing up in front of his people and saying listen every time you guys fail to land the big sale you wander around this office like you're dead and you're wasting our time it ends today
today from now on when you fail you're gonna move on right the story becomes something meaningful to everyone because it reveals something about Boris he's a father he's a father who who cares about his son he's the kind of father that most of us are in life right he shares of himself with his people and he creates a tangible vision of what the sales team can do he does that all the time he comes to me and he's not looking to solve problems through story he's looking to develop stories that he can then deploy into
his business right so I compare it I say Band-Aids versus bricks if you're building bricks you're a Storyteller that's capturing stories and building bricks that you can eventually deploy into business if you're a Band-Aid person which is fine that happens I have a problem that and I need a story to solve it essentially what I'm doing there is I'm putting a Band-Aid over a problem but you're not becoming a better Storyteller you're just sort of using me as a consultant to help you generate a story that will solve a problem that's fine but you're G
to need me the next time too You're Gonna Keep meing Me because you're not really becoming a Storyteller Boris is building bricks He is building a vault of stories that he can then deploy into his business and he understands how to tell them and how to connect them to business so that's something that you can do very easily another example the other star of my book is a woman named Masha rovski she used to be the director of corporate Communications at slack and now she's sort of doing work on her own but when she was
with slack she and I were working closely together and she had to create the narrative that was going to compete against Microsoft teams essentially Microsoft came along and said hey we copied your product and it's free and everybody already has it so slack had to find way to combat that and Marsha was the one in charge of doing it that's why we connected she found me and said I need to tell a good story please help me tell a good story so she crafted a brilliant narrative that worked fantastically we worked really closely together and
it came out great the way she came up with that narrative was a Tuesday night she had broken up with her boyfriend she was alone she was feeling pretty lonely it was in the midst of the pandemic she had two glasses of wine in her sitting alone on a Tuesday night she suddenly had an inspiration she wrote three words down on a napkin and those three words become the story that we develop that allows slack to compete against Microsoft when it comes time to her present that that narrative I say what you're going to include
the Tuesday night and the two glasses of wine and all that right and she's like no I'm not like that's not what we do in the corporate world we do not insert ourselves into our narratives and to her credit she didn't put it in and it still worked brilliantly she was fine but you know about a month later she was presenting that narrative to a smaller group lower Stakes I said let's just just put it in just try it this time and to her Everlasting credit she did she put in a 30- second anecdote about
Tuesday night two glasses of wine feeling lonely in the middle of a pandemic she said to me later I can't believe the difference that that 30 second anecdote meant to the narrative because suddenly when I reached the end of The Narrative people wanted to talk to me people came up to me and the first thing they said was oh God I remember I was feeling the same way during the pandemic people connected to her because instead of being a corporate monolith sort of like slack spokesperson without personality which is what we tend to be in
business she was an actual human being who had an inspiration on a Tuesday night and then was bringing it forth in a meaningful way to an audience and from that point on she always has been doing those things and storytelling she's always looking for a way in her narratives to insert herself or if she's working with a client let's find a way that we can work the client into the story as well because people don't want to hear spokes people present information they want to hear human beings connect with you and then offer you something
that perhaps will have value that is a really interesting lesson so is your advice just when you're telling stories in business try to find a way to make it personal about you as the person telling the story yeah I I have this tool I use with corporate folks called a personal interest inventory it is a list of all the things that you should be saying about yourself in clever and strategic ways that I teach and each one of them has sort of an addressable market so how many people could this potentially hit and then the
intensity of the connection so for example if you're married you should always make it clear to people you're married especially if you're a man because if you're a man and you're married you're you're safer in the world because men are inherently just dangerous human beings we we just are right if you hear that the if you hear that there was a shoot right you never think oh I wonder if that was a 23y old blonde woman right you don't you know who did the shooting almost all the time so if you're married what you're essentially
saying to people is someone has agreed to spend theoretically their life with me it's sort of like a validation that I have at least hygiene and some decency right so you right and most people are in a committed relationship so that means that a total addressable Market is large right if I say I'm married you're either married off Al or you're in a committed relationship so the the connection is going to be large the total addressable Market is large the possible connection probably moderate I say it's like it's okay but weird ones are like Runners
I'm not a runner and there's not a lot of runners in the world but if you're a marathoner right your total total addressable Market is very small there's not that many marathoners but if you happen to find marathoner the intensity of that connection is enormous like marathoners are like almost automatically friends upon media what I've discovered like if you just oh you ran a marathon I ran a marathon they're best friends already and so if you've run a marathon and you're in a room and you discover someone else is running marathon you have to find
a way to bring that out because the possibility of that connection is incredibly intense so as a person in the corporate world you should not be seeking to be round white and flavorless you should be seeking to be like full of color and full of Edge and full of flavor you want to be an individual that people remember as opposed to what what most people are trying to be which is I am just operating this corporate or this business sphere and I'm not trying to stand out which is just a foolish thing to want to
do I could see why people wouldn't naturally do this like if I'm a head of comms for a company the last thing I want is to make it about me and what you're saying is you actually should because people find it a lot more interesting yeah now you don't want to make it all about you but there's just little tricks I mean the easiest trick is you know if someone asks you how are you doing today if you say I'm doing great you've just really screwed it up that's the stupidest answer you can offer right
if you ask me how am I doing today I'm immediately going to think to myself Elementary School teacher is probably my best personal interest inventory item because if I'm an elementary school teacher everyone loves me they think I'm doing God's work even though they don't want to pay me a dime to do it right so if you say how are you doing today I will say to you pretty good my fifth graders were actually decent human beings today they didn't try to kill me so in that way I'm going to slip in the fact that
I'm an elementary school teacher by answering your question I'm going to demonstrate a bit of amusing content in the process right and maybe a little self-deprecation but whenever I'm asked a question I am trying to include an item of my personality my life something that might be of interest to people while also answering the question you don't want to walk into a situation and say hi I'm a married element school teacher with two kids and two cats but that's sort of what I want to do because I know that that's going to make people feel
connected to me so I have to find strategic ways to work it in I teach people to do it all the time but it starts with understanding what about you might mean something to other people and how I can I get it in there without me sounding like I'm only talking about myself what else so we're basically talking about ways to become a better communicator and Storyteller in business you've shared a few tidbits here one is think of this personal invent about yourself that makes you relatable try to share it in stories you tell and
presentations and things like that what else what else can people do to become better storytellers in business I know this is a big question but let's see let's see where it goes let's go back to the idea that in business you have to accept the fact that nobody wants to hear anything you have to say that is not accepted by most people even after I say it so once you understand that and once you truly believe it there's essentially four ways to keep people listening to you in any story really but especially in business because
really no one wants to listen to you in business so the first is Stakes which we've really talked about already you have to have Stakes you know in every good product story and every good PowerPoint present to everything there are stakes and they're set out and exactly the way I've described all five of the stakes that I've described to you that I use in that story charity Thief can also be used in every business story every PowerPoint deck every entrepreneur pitch everything so Stakes is one of them another one we've talked about is surprise there
should absolutely be surprised in every talk that you give Steve Jobs was a master of it we could just we could look at one of his talks and I could show you how he planned it perfectly some others include suspense so keeping an audience in suspense and often suspense leads to surprise so mastering the ability to be suspenseful and then humor like daring to be funny which no one in Corporate America can do everyone wants to be funny every person I've ever met who I've worked with every business person in some way want wanted to
be funny but that's really not actually what they want they want to have been funny because being funny means you must take a risk you must say something that you believe is funny and you expect an audience to also feel as funny and if it doesn't happen that hurts and so people oftentimes tell me they want to be funny but when I tell them how they need to be funny they say well I can't say that right they say and then I say well that's the part that's funny so I was working with a guy
sort of a an executive at a company that you interact with every day and he was delivering a talk at the javet center and he was going to be funny he we built in a talk lots of jokes he was ready to go he went to the Javit Center and four hours later he called me and I said how'd it go and he said I pulled out all the jokes I said why did you pull out all the jokes and he said the first two speakers weren't funny at all I felt like if I went
on stage and I was funny I was going to stick out like a sore thumb I said no you were going to like Rise From the Ashes Like a Phoenix that everyone has been waiting to hear all day it's the best thing in the world to follow two terrible people and then go out there and land some jokes but again he thought I'd have to stay within the confines of the herd rather than doing something different but humor is a brilliant and beautiful and simple way to differenti yourself differentiate yourself from other people but you
have to be willing to try to do it and it's just it's a scary thing for people but I say it's it's Stakes it's surprise it's suspense and it's humor those are the ways that you're going to hold people and keep them listening and if you're not engaged in one of those four things while you're speaking people are not listening to you anymore this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth thousands of fast growing companies like Gusto Comm Kora and modern treasury trust V to help
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to v.com Lenny that's v.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts get started today to follow this thread on humor which I was going to ask what do you tell people to become more funny what are some tricks well there's you know I have currently 26 strategies to be funny uh some are better for business than others I will give you two that we can in business all the time the first one you can use is Nostalgia because Nostalgia is always funny the fact that the first VCR I had was 22 pounds and
had a remote control attached by a cord that was thick enough that I could trip my brother as he walked through the living room is funny you know the fact that I grew up and no one was allergic to anything and we all ate you know bread packed with gluten and baked in asbestos factories and no one ever wore a helmet while they rode their bike all of these things can be made to be funny and it's so easy in business because often times you are rolling out a new product or a new service or
you're updating a product or service in a way that allows you to speak nostalgically about the past I was working with this company and they failed me they did not listen to my advice which was a mistake they're sort of like an indeed company they're helping find employees you know for companies they're one of these people and I wanted to start their narrative with the idea of in 1983 the primary source of employment was a 16-year-old kid riding on the back of a Schwin throwing newspapers at doors and in that newspaper which was like a
paper version of the internet you would turn to the back page and on that page there was the help wanted ads and that was essentially all you had to find a job in 1983 everything was geographically based meaning you only could look into three or four towns around you to find a job and it had to be in the paper and you had to own a phone connected to a wall so you could call a company within business hours and hope to get an interview right all of the Power lived with the Employers in 1983
and a 16-year-old who was dropping a newspaper off at your porch every day that's funny like and I didn't even try to be funny with it I just sort of stated the facts we could have punched that up and made it really funny and then we flipped the script again the Opposites right in story in the beginning employers had all the power today employees have all the power because today you can work in Singapore or Chattanooga right while you're living in 10 while while you're living in Orlando right and today you don't have to wait
for a 16-year-old to deliver the paper with all of your job opportunities every single job opportunity on the planet is now accessible to you on the internet and you can work basically anywhere from anywhere right so that's why we need companies like indeed or the company I was working for because they have to actually gain gain some power for the employers so that was the narrative we were going to tell and the beginning would have been funny and the CEO of the company said I don't like it he said nobody cares about the 1980s which
was the dumbest thing he could have said because stranger things was the biggest television show on television at the time which was nothing but a 1980s and if he just looked around he would see that 1980s fashion is coming back 1980s music is being popularized again we're remaking 1980s music all the time Taylor Swift put out an album called 1989 like the whether or not the 1980s are relevant or not it's relevant to talk about the past as a company to demonstrate your expertise in your field to understand that we know the market backwards and
forwards for the last 50 years we have expertise and we can demonstrate it by telling a story right so that's the power of nostalgia and we can use that all the time in business to make people laugh the other one I'll give you again there's a whole bunch but a simple one is a game they used to play on Sesame Street which is one of these things is not like the other essentially it's it's three things two of them are expected and one is unexpected and the unexpected one will be funny right so you can
say like well my competitor they have this you know my hardwar competitor the guy down the street he does sell shovels just like I do that's true and he does offer a wide selection of nails just like I do right but there's a name less faceless machine at the front of the room at the front of the store that you have to swipe your own stuff through and your credit card does not actually a human being in the store and we can make that funny right by showing that the third one is unlike the other
two so it's essentially a simple game once I've told it to you you'll see every comic do it all the time they just say thing that's expected thing that's expected unexpected thing and you make it funny so it's a simple trick that we use in business all the time this is awesome this list you're talking about is this going to be in your new book that you're writing I have not all 26 of them because some are not like the best business ones in the world um but a large number of them I think I
maybe have like the top 12 that work best in business in terms of humor but you can just take a humor class I teach humor all the time I teach all 26 strategies you know it's something that can be practiced the beautiful thing is so often many of the strategies that I offer in business if it doesn't end up being funny you're still telling a story so nobody it's not sort of like a you know B bum bum Ching kind of joke we're not telling those jokes we're telling we're telling humor in the confines of
a story so that if this joke doesn't land we're still telling a story and oftentimes people don't even realize we were trying to be funny I want to come back to where story can help you in your work so obviously giving a public talk is the classic way to use this maybe giving a present like a PowerPoint deck in a meeting is there any other maybe non-obvious places that you think this skill can help you in that's not just like hey everyone welcome to my well I've worked with a lot of um scientists in biotech
and places like that um I worked with a biotech company five of their scientists were going to a conference and essentially it's a company that sells tubes all of their competitors sell a tube for experiments and you you have to sort of retrofit the tube to fit your needs the company I was working with they sell like 12 different versions of the tube better sized so you don't have to retrofit it much more expensive but the reliability of your experiments are improved by using their properly sized tubes so I prepare all the scientists and they
all do a good job they all tell stories of some sort and they go off to their conference one guy though doesn't present any data whatsoever he just tells a story he tells a story about going to the going to the grocery store and when he goes to the grocery store his family is really annoying when it comes to Apples because everyone likes a different Apple so he's got to go and he's going to buy three honey crisp for his wife and two Galla for his daughter and they're baking a pie this week so they
got to get some MacIntosh and he likes red delicious he said it's a nightmare you know buying these apples and so he tells that story about the nightmare of buying apples and then he says that's what my company does right there are companies that say we offer Macintosh make do with it you're going to make your pies you're G to you're going to eat it all of the things that you want to do with an apple all you get is Macintosh good luck we believe you should have access to all the apples we believe that
you have particular needs and specific requirements and we're going to make sure you have it just like my family gets all the apples they want it's all he said a longer version of it but that's it no data he got more leads at the conference than the other scientists combined all the other four scientists combined now the the vice president of marketing was not happy about this at all when when I met with her because she's a scientist she's 50 years old for her entire life she's been sending scientists to conferences and presenting data and
she said to me so what am I going to do send scientists to conferences now and not present data and I said well I mean maybe because it worked right and she said well what about the data I said now that he has the leads you don't think they're going to want the data like he's going to get on the phone and they're going to say tell us about the data but now they've established a connection and the best thing about that story the thing she didn't even understand was every single time someone at that
conference goes into a grocery store now and they're looking at Apples they're going to think about that company and it's a positive feeling that they're going to have about that company if they have forgotten to call but they meant to call when they're picking out a honey crisp at the grocery store they're going to make a note oh right I got to call that company and look into the tubes that they sell right we create positive connections with items in the world related to our company by telling stories and that means we've like built advertising
into people's lives without them even being aware that we've done it so there's a billion ways to add storytelling into business it's just another one you touched on this kind of two-way approach one is you have a problem let me think of a story to help me solve this problem versus I'm going to become a Storyteller come up with this whole bricked wall of stories and then I'll deploy them you said that the first approach is not something you'd recommend I imagine most people are probably going to be in that bucket like I don't want
to a Storyteller I just want to like solve my problems and stories can sometimes help me there so maybe in that bucket do you have any advice for how to find a story that somehow helps you with that problem on demand or is it just like that is not going to work you're not going to think of a story every time you have some problem I think sometimes you will like I have a company that calls me metaphor man they call me essentially and say I get that we've added a boring feature to our boring
platform and we need to make people understand what it does will you give us the metaphor we need they don't understand that I'm not really generating metaphors I am just taking stories from my life pulling myself out of the story and if you take yourself out of a story often what's left is a metaphor a simile an example and then I just offer that to them so they and I tell them if you just use some of my storytelling generating techniques you could do the same thing but they're a Band-Aid company they just want me
to fix fix things and I understand that if you're trying to do it the best way to the best way to sort of tell a story about something that you want people to understand is to Do What I Call speaking with adjacency which means we're not going to match content to content instead we're going to match theme meaning or message right so that scientist for example he wasn't talking about tubes right he was talking about how people deserve to get what they want in life right his family gets deserves to get the apples they want
and you as a business deserves to get the tubes that you want but so often in business what people think is content to content well I got to find a way to talk about these tubes to make people understand how important they are and I said well let's not talk about the tubes let's talk about something else instead and then we're going to move what we were talking about over two tubes you know we're going to snap it in place that snap when someone realizes you were telling me about apples but really you were telling
me about tubes that snap is so powerful I use it with students all the time right a student acts like a fool gets in trouble sitting in my desk I'm not talking about their behavior I'm telling a story that they have no idea like why I'm telling them the story they're like I'm in trouble why is he telling me about his dog right why is he telling me a St about a story about his dog when he was 12 because I'm going to snap it into place because I'm not talking about content theme meaning or
message so when they come to me and they say here's what we've got I'm not thinking about the thing I'm thinking about what is the theme they want to convey or the meaning that they want to convey or the message they want to convey and what story do I have that will match that or what story can I get out of them the scientist did not come to me with the Apple story The Scientist came to me with the tubes and I said well it sounds like you're you're a company that wants to give people
what they need let's find a story in your life about a time when you have to give people something that they need right and we brainstormed it and when we landed on apples I knew we had it because he was going to be able to talk about I'm a father I'm a husband I'm the kind of husband who takes Apple orders from his family before going to the grocery store I'm going to be able to be funny because like befuddled husbands and grocery stores are always funny right so it wasn't that he came to me
with the story I came to him with the idea of let's look at theme meeting and message and then snap it over to the to the tubes that's what we want to do when we're putting a Band-Aid on we don't want to think about what we're talking about we want to think about the feelings we want people to have about what we're talking about amazing okay so the advice here is you're trying to find a story to tell about something to help you convince someone of something you want to think about what is the theme
of this problem that I have what is the meaning behind it and what is the message yeah one of those usually one of those Y and then you also touch back on make something in the story relate to something personal about you so that people are like Oh I'm a runner too I got to pay attention to this guy or I'm I'm shopping I shop all the time for app yes you can drop see so we're we're sort of stacking strategies which is a really good thing to do right so we're pulling in all of
the things I've talked about and it really makes for a powerful moment for people and a memorable moment because the most important thing is that we're becoming memorable we're in a conference amongst other scientists and we're actually the one who's being remembered okay so we that was the Band-Aid approach then there's the way you recommend was just build a bank of stories I imagine this is where the homework for Life framework you recommend comes from so maybe let's transition and talk about that because I think that has a lot of benefits Beyond even just coming
up with a bunch of story ideas yeah the most important thing that I teach whether or not you're ever going to speak in your life if you plan on being a Hermit and going off into the woods and never speaking to someone again you should be doing homework for life regardless uh it's a process I came up with you know maybe 15 years ago now essentially when I began telling stories on stages I fell in love with it immediately and I got worried that I was going to run out of stories I saw a lot
of storytellers on stages performing and they would tell the same six seven eight stories every time and I didn't want to be that guy I wanted to have a brand new story every time I took the stage so sort of in a fit of panic I decided to assign myself homework being an elementary school teacher it's sort of natural for me to have that inclination and so I just decided every day before I go to bed I'm going to look back on the day and find one moment that would have been worth telling as a
story even if it wasn't really worth telling I was going to write it down now I don't write the whole thing down that's crazy it's not doable what I do is I took an Excel spreadsheet two columns the date and then I stretched the B column AC cross and in that b column essentially the length of a computer screen that's where I write my story my goal was I find one new moment per month 12 new stories per year that would be amazing instead something far more amazing happens I discover that my life is filled
with more stories than I will ever have time to tell and I'm not a unicorn thousands of people all over the world are doing the same thing right now and discovering that their lives are filled with stories moments like Eileen which 20 years ago I would have forgotten that moment within days and now I've held on to it because it's going to be a homework for Life moment right so I start writing those moments down and I discover that I've I'm developing a lens for storytelling I see the moments that I did not see before
in fact I just did some analysis analysis for my new book in the first year I did homework for life I found 1.8 moments per day so you can find more than one eventually I started recording more than once so 1.8 moments per day I now find 7.6 moments per day it's not because my life is more interesting it's because I have a better lens and I understand what to look for what to see and what is worth remembering and so I've become a person who has an endless number of stories like Boris Boris does
homework for life it's why whenever we meet he's got three new stories to tell me and then we work on the stories and then figure out the business applications for them right so it's so important because what we do is we throw our lives away you know people say that time flies and it doesn't what happens is goes by unaccounted if you can only remember 89 days of 365 in a year of course time flies because you had 365 and you only remember 89 it's going to feel like it went by quickly it's not going
by quickly you're just failing to account for each day and each day has something worth remembering homework for life is the acknowledgement that every single day should have something the The Prompt that I actually use for myself is this I say if someone kidnapped my family and said you can't have him back until you stand on a stage and tell a story about something that happened today what would you tell that was what I would think in my head every night and then I would write it down to be honest nowadays I'm not sort of
sitting down at the end of the day and writing them all down I'm recording them as the day goes on I'm my laptop is around me my phone is around me when I hear something my son says a bit of dialogue I can't believe he just said you know I see something for the first time or the last time or a stray thought enters my mind I have a new thought that I had not occurred before all of those become moments for homework for life not everyone becomes a story I did some analysis on this
too about 10% of the things that I write down ultimately either become a story or a part of a story but the other 90% is just as valuable because I'm holding on to my days and the other amazing thing that happens is once you start doing this you'll sort of crack open and all of the stories that you've left from the past the ones you've forgotten they'll start to rise up they'll Bubble Up and I include those in my homework for life too is memories because once you start looking through the lens of Storytelling you
see something like you see ien find confidence and suddenly your brain connects to other students or moments in your life or moments in your children's life where confidence was an issue and you think oh that's right it's just like that kid and now I have another moment that I've recovered from the past a day has returned to me it enters my homework for life and suddenly I have more stories than I ever have time to tell and it's not just me like I said thousands of people all world my own children and my students do
homework for life and all of them will tell you it's the most valuable thing that you can do and I think you touched on this it's not just to collect a bunch of stories there's like a therapeutic element to this too that you talk about yeah absolutely many therapeutic elements first is you're recovering your time and slowing time down which is beautiful right my kids are 14 and 11 thank goodness I started homework for life just about when Clara was first born because they feel 14 and 11 to me they don't feel like they were
just born yesterday which for for a lot of parents they do lots of parents say things like oh my God you're not going to believe what my kid said I got to write it down but nobody writes it down every you're not going to believe what my kid said is in homework for life for me so I'm holding on to the moments stretching out time you also start to do things like you start to see patterns in your life that you don't realize you know unless unless you really think about your life and I think
you should storytellers tend to be slightly self-centered in a positive way meaning we afford ourselves time to think about ourselves you start to see patterns if you start doing this so I think what I talk about in my book is uh I always tell people my wife and I never fight we've never raised our voices to each other we really don't ever argue but I noticed in my homework for Life a moment when she had asked me to put in the air conditioners before I had central air in the house and I hated it I
I hated it because we agreed to never buy a house without central air and every year the air conditioners somehow get heavier I don't understand the physics behind it but every year it's worse and so there's like and she always asks on the 98 degree day hey can you put the air conditioners in and there was a day when I was like no I'm not going to do it it's really hot and she was like okay no problem and then you know 10 minutes later I'm in the basement pulling them out complaining grumbling arguing you
know only to myself banging them on purpose so she can hear you know she's like what's going on I'm like I'm putting in the air conditioners right and so that becomes a homework for Life moment and then like you know a month later she asked me to mow the lawn on a 98 degree day and I said I'm not going to mow the lawn I'm busy and it's really hot and she goes okay no problem maybe tomorrow and then I said for while and I stew and then I'm mowing the lawn but I'm doing it
aggressively I'm like running and you know just angrily mowing the lawn and when I see these patterns I suddenly go oh I do fight with my wife on my own like I fight in a way that she's not aware I'm doing it I yell at her through chores and she's not aware of that it's even happening that becomes a story that couples love you know they they think it's hilarious you also start to see like stories that you would have never seen so it was a day last May when the neighbors to my left and
the neighbors to my right came over to the house and had a cookout the first one of the Year and that was a day when I didn't find anything in the day I had one moment which is very unusual for me and I I remember thinking really all you got is you had a cookout with the neighbors that's the best you got it's not even really a story but it was the best I had so I wrote it down and I moved on about four months later the neighbors to our left announced they were getting
divorced it devastated us because they have two kids we've got this big communal backyard with the three houses everywhere three boys to the right two kids to the left friends couldn't believe it that they were divor they getting divorced you know known each other since high school we just never saw it coming one day later neighbors to the right announced they're getting divorced left and right within a day of each other right and it becomes a story about how you never understand what's going on in a marriage unless you're like in that house right but
I don't have that moment in May when there were three couples on a porch one of them was happy I thought all three were happy right I don't get that moment unless I'm doing homework for life and I write it down and now I see a trajectory of a story I have the opposite now I actually have an opposite moment which is I'm serving hot dogs to people I think are happy but they're only pretending to be happy for our sake and then they're returning to their homes to Discord and eventually to disillusion of a
marriage right so homework for life gives you all of that that you don't normally have in life because we tend to live day by day and we leave that last day behind I got tingles listening to that story for someone that's now motivated to try this I know there's a template that will link you in the show notes where you give people it's very simple but I think seeing it will be helpful but what something someone could do tonight to start on this process and maybe set a habit to do how do you actually go
about doing this well they have to start homework for life and I have a TED talk about it that I go on for 17 minutes about so I suggest watching it because you'll just get more than what I just told you and I think that's important and you have to decide to do it every single day even on the day when the best you have is a click out right uh if that's all you got that's that's what you got and you're write it down you have to have some Faith too that it's going to
happen over time remember I started with 1.8 and now I'm up to 7.6 and that's over more than 12 years it takes for me to make that jump so in the beginning you're not going to be very good at it you know you're not going to see the right things and that's just the way it is if I go back to my original home for workk life I see myself looking for stories and you're not really looking for stories you're just looking for moments that touch your heart touch your mind that's all you're really hoping
for and some of those will become stories so you got to start homework for life right away and then if you can just find some people who were willing to listen and begin telling some stories that's really helpful because most people are unwilling to listen there's not a lot of good listeners in the world everyone says they're a great listener but active listening is a skill that uh most people do not possess in any way whatsoever but if you find people who are willing to listen you got to start telling stories you got to start
practicing in meaningful ways and and your first stories aren't going to be great but the good news is most people's stories are terrible most storytelling in the world is not very good so if you put a little thought into what you're about to say you're going to be better because storytelling is not about facility with the language or your vocabulary it's all about decision- making that's all it is storytellers are people who think before they speak they make strategical tactical decisions before they speak right and ultimately they make enough good decisions to entertain people ultimately
no matter what you're doing whether I am teaching a fifth grader how to behave better or presenting uh a new product for a large company or helping someone deliver an all hands the first and most important thing you have to be is entertaining you have to entertain or people will not listen to you so you got to practice you got to get reps I want to talk about public speaking skills but just to close the loop on that so if someone was trying to do this homework for Life exercise is the idea like would you
recommend at night before they go to sleep open up Google Sheets on their phone and just add something is there something else you'd recommend no yeah that's what I would do although ideally as you go through the day things get forgotten quickly you know your son says something hilarious and by the end of the night you can't remember what it was so if you can start sort of tracking it through the day a little bit maybe you make it a habit where at lunchtime you're going to ask yourself what happened that morning and when you
get home from work you're going to say what happened in the afternoon and then in the evening say what happened since then and then sort of take a whole view of the day and then be open to those memories allow them to come back you know I record them in my homework for life as memory sort of a capital m m o r y because what happens is you start to build up so many homework for Life memories that you get confused you're like what when did I see a deer and then I go oh
that's a story from when I was 14 but you get confused because it's sitting on you know when you're 38 years old so you mark them as memories you hold on to them you put them into spreadsheets because eventually you're going to want to move that data around and keep track of it in some meaningful way but yeah get started get started today because if you don't you will lose today every day that you don't do homework for life is a day that is going to be lost to you forever and just very practically you
recommend like Google Sheets I imagine is what use I actually use oldfashioned Excel but yes Google Sheets would work too because I started so long ago right Excel was the thing I used and Excel is the thing I still use I mean it's backed up in 19 places because the most precious thing I have other than my wife and children cats but yeah that's what I that's what I would suggest to you awesome okay just a couple more questions before our very exciting lightning round in your book you say that you've only been nervous twice
on stage giving a story most people I is that is I don't yeah that's true I'm like I can remember the two times it was yeah it was PTSD related and Seth Meyers cost of ticket related oh I remember that sir yeah okay so most people are not like you most people are nervous including me every single time I get on stage tell a story what advice do you give people to actually to help them get better with the nerves of getting on stage and telling a story you classically it's the thing people fear most
in life well the first thing you have to understand is that 98% of your nervousness is actually before you begin speaking once you begin speaking almost all of your nervousness Falls away and that is the experience of most people so what you're really suffering is from pre-talk nervousness and when you find that out that's kind of a relief because if you do it enough I just had someone someone just spoke in the Netherlands and today I'm waiting to find out how it went he spoke at for the Florida State Legislature same topic and uh he
was really nervous about going into today he was also really nervous speaking to a bunch of scientists in the Netherlands but I told him I said after you began speaking in the Netherlands once the talk began how nervous was were you and he said oh actually when I began speaking I was pretty okay I was incredibly nervous before the talk and I said well that makes sense so if you own the fact or you believe the fact that oh most most of my nervousness comes before the talk but once I start speaking I'm pretty good
that's really relieving for a lot of people because the what we imagine is that we're nervous while we're talking which is often not the case particularly if you're kind of prepared if you know what you're talking about so be aware that most of your nervousness happens before you speak and that's a normal thing and you're just going to have to accept that until someday when perhaps it starts to go away through repetition through continued performance on a stage for some people they're always nervous I was performing with I won't say her name but someone who
you have watched on television before and we were both backstage and I was chatting up the room and she finally said to me this very famous person would you stop talking because the rest of us are trying to keep information in our head and stay calm I'm a terrible person backstage because I'm always calm I never care uh so I have to sort of sequester myself from these people because I tortur them but once she began speaking all of her nerves fell away way so that's a good thing to know the other thing to know
that's really great is everyone's nervous except for me I'm the only monster in the world so if you're feeling nervous you're just like everyone else including a very famous person who you see on TV all the time that person was nervous you're nervous you're in the same camp right you're you're in the same boat and then preparation is going to reduce your level of nervousness one of the things that I tell people to do that is most helpful is it's good to practice your talk you know or practice your pitch whatever you're doing but one
of the best ways to prepare for it is to record it and listen to it listen to it passively listen to it while you're grocery shopping listen to it while you're folding laundry doing the dishes what happens is I really believe this as you start to listen to it over and over again it just sort of seeps into your soul and so it becomes part of you you know I have done this technique I've told a story a decade ago haven't told it sense someone hears it on YouTube and says hey can you tell that
story at our event I say yes I can listen to it once and it comes right out again because I allowed it to sort of sink into my memory in the same way that When Harry Met Sally has sunk into your wife's memory she can Replay that movie in her mind probably perfectly if you listen to your talk enough you will get to the point where you can you can retell it with ease the other thing you can do is some active listening with it most people don't forget their talk they forget the transitions in
their talk so I'm talking about this but then I got to transition to this then I got to transition to this so when I'm listening to my stories or a talk that I'm going to give I'm playing a game with myself so I'm listening I go oh okay this is closing out and the next thing I have to talk about is this and then the next thing I have to talk about is this and if I don't know what I'm gonna if I'm like oh what am I going to next that's where I go oh
I got to create a new monic there I got to create a bit of memorization there to tra train myself for that transition once you're in a new section of a talk even if you're following it up a little you're going to be okay because you're like oh I got to talk about the data related to the this or the that and if it doesn't come out perfectly you still know what you're talking about but what happens when you're done with the data related to this or that you go ah damn what am I supposed
to do next right so we're working on building those transitions before a talk or before a story let's say I will do something like I'm going to start in the car and I'm going to get out into the store and then I'm going to head out to the parking lot and then I'm going to be in the park and then it's three weeks later I don't tell myself the story I'm just bouncing between the scenes because once I know the scenes and I know okay there's seven scenes in here they are and here's the transitions
again if I fou up each scene that's okay because I'm going to get the information out it might not come out as perfectly as I hoped you also if you can avoid memorizing that'll save you a ton of suffering because memorizers they're the most tortured souls in the world so avoid that if all possible remember your talk without memorizing your talk reminds me a friend of mine gave a TED Talk and he shared that they give you this advice that people are different kind of Learners some are audio Learners some are visual so if you're
like an audio learner listening to it is the most helpful some it's seeing the script yes at it and I'm very much an auditory learner the other thing though about listening to it is you just get sick of practicing it gets so frustrating to practice so at some point you don't want to say it anymore so rather than saying it you start to listen to it you listen to yourself tell a story about yourself to yourself which is the most narcissistic thing you could probably do in the world but even if you're a visual learner
because it's so annoying to practice eventually I think listening to it can be really helpful okay last question is I want to talk about I mentioned I'd bring this up is this the power of saying yes something that you you recommend people say yes to stuff versus no it reminds me David sederis in a I don't know Dave Master Class video or something said the same thing he's just like I just say yes to everything because it creates great stories really yeah it's in a and I just finished sedaris's happy gol lucky which is a
great book I love him yeah yeah so uh I'd love to hear your advice here for people just to give them a little bit of a final takeaway sure so I'm gonna disagree with Sedaris a little bit not I won't disagree with him by saying yes you do end up with some great stories but that's not the purpose of the yes there's actually a book a storytelling book in the world that I'm not going to mention and it talks about how to find great stories and it says go do crazy things and you'll have great
stories I disagree fundamentally for us that's a foolish way to live your life and also some of the best stories I tell I think the best stories I tell are about tiny moments in our lives when nothing extraordinary happens except everything in our head right most stories that I tell if you had actually witnessed the moment of transformation or realization you would have never known it was happening because most things that happen to us happen in our heads it's not while we're hanging from a cliff right for our dear life that we suddenly have a
revelation it's usually like we're walking across a parking lot and suddenly something hits us that's been building up for three weeks but now it's hit us walking across parking lot so the reason we say yes to everything is if you don't say yes what you're essentially saying is I am so presumptuous that I understand what's on the other side of that door already even though I've never set foot beyond that door right I just know so much about the world that I know that what's behind that door is not for me and I think that's
foolish and arrogant and full of hubis that is not helping anyone in any way so I say when someone offers you an opportunity as crazy as it is as ridiculous as much as you don't want to do it which many times in my life the the yeses that I have said about something I did not want to do but forced myself to do it because of my belief system have resulted in the best and most extraordinary opportunities of my life a yes can always become a no right yes I will try that I step through
the door I give it a try I spend some time with it I look around and I say you know what not for me I step back back through and I close the door but so often in life people don't step through the door they're too afraid they've already prejudged the opportunity in some way they fail to see the benefits of it or the value because they can't see that because they haven't gone through the door and then there's this ridiculous belief in the world that we are supposed to learn to say no so that
we can sort of sequester our time and make it as meaningful as possible which sounds really terrible to me the problem is you're going to be a 100 someday and when you're a 100 no one is going to be asking you to step through any more doors and at that point you're going to look into the past and you're going to say there were a lot of doors I didn't step through right and you're not going to be thinking I'm so glad I didn't because I allowed myself to stay on the One path that I
knew was going to be good for me I just think there there is no one good path that's good for you I think there's a multitude of paths and they're all great and a few of them are terrible but you find out which ones are terrible by stepping through the door deciding this is not for me and coming back so I think most of the time people say no because they're afraid and when someone asks me to do something that scares me that is when I run to that thing as quickly as possible with all
of my might as terrified as I am because I know that it's the things that frighten me are often the things that are the best for me so we say yes with the acknowledgement that we can say no eventually but a yes can lead to extraordinary things and if you watch my Ted Talk on saying yes you'll see that yeses just lead to these extraordinary chains where you said yes to something you didn't want to say yes to and suddenly it forced you to meet someone who you never would have met who opened a different
door for you and I mean the causal chain that you can sort of create by saying an odd yes is extraordinary there's a quote I often come back to rless which is the cave you fear contains the treasure you seek yeah yeah that's really good I mean someone I'm I do stand up now quite frequently I was just in the New York City Comedy Festival and I do stand up because six years ago one of my buddies sent me an email saying hey we should do standup and I replied to him and said no I'm
not interested and that hit reply and then I said to myself whoa why did you just do that and I said to myself I'm terrified of it I can tell funny stories and if it's not funny still telling a story but if I'm doing standup and I'm funny I'm failing and that's a terrifying thing so I immediately sent a second email that said okay I'm in when are we doing it I have now done standup many many many times that guy who initially asked me to do standup with him has never done it not once
in his life he wanted to do it but he's afraid to step through the door he's too afraid to to do the thing that he challenged me to do that I now do on a regular basis because he challenged me and it's still the thing that probably scares me the most and therefore it's the thing that I am relentlessly trying to do at all times because I know the things that scare me are the things that are the best for me amazing Matt is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with before
we get to a very exciting lightning round no I've said enough they've heard enough from me let's go to the lightning a lot let's do it well Welcome to our very exciting lightning round are you ready yes what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people oh so Nathaniel philbrook's heart of the sea which is a non-fiction account of the whal ship Essex which is the uh the origin of the idea for Mobi dick the sinking of the Essex is what gave Melville the idea for Mob dick it's an extraordinary non-fiction
account of the whaleship Essex so that book for sure if you have children but even if you don't because this is one of those children's books that reads well for um adults as Kate D Camilo's uh the tale of Des perau it's a young adult novel it'll take you two hours to read I've read it 20 times it is beautiful and extraordinary and fantastic and then anything by Jesse kleene just she has two books the only thing I don't like about her is she only has two books actually Sedaris to Jesse Klein and David Sedaris
go read those two people too I'm actually right now reading banford book The Comedian what's her first name banford I have Amy stuck in my head for Amy sederis Maria bamford's Memoir right now I'm reading also extraordin so there there's four that I that I am now recommending amazing what's a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed well for TV shows I enjoyed the last of us which is based on a video game I've never played in my life uh pretty extraordinary as a TV show both because filled with Stakes it's one
of those yeah it's one of those shows they'll kill anyone at any time and so you're on your edge of your See No One Is Safe which is fantastic and then it has this beautiful bottle episode in the middle of the Season which is one of those things where you're in a zombie TV show which oddly is unlike any zombie TV show I've ever seen and then there's a beautiful fantastic episode there's another one later on that's sort of very similar it's just great storytelling in a multitude of ways it's a great it's great and
and for a movie the Barbie movie is better than I ever expected it to be quite frankly and is proof positive that you can make stories about just about anything and if they mean something it's going to do extraordinarily well my next question I don't know if it makes sense to ask you it's usually for product people and Founders in but the question is you have a favorite interview question you like to ask people when you're hiring is there anything that comes up when I ask that I guess I'll say it's the question I like
to ask people most often maybe when I'm playing golf and things I don't like to ask people what they do I like to ask how did you get into the job you currently have it's a dangerous question because occasionally I ask people it and they realize they're in their job for like weird happen stances that don't relate to what they dreamed of doing so I've had like two people in my life cry while they answer the question because they suddenly understand I'm doing this because my sister got me into the company 16 years ago and
I go oh well that's great is that what you always wanted to do and they say no it's actually still not what I want to do but I do think that most of the time how you get a job is more interesting than the actual job you're doing that the answer to that question is more interesting your have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like whether it's an app or something you bot well if you celebrate Christmas for years I have had an idea on how to design the best Christmas tree stand
and I finally said someone must have done it and they did so the I wrote it down for you it's the krer tree stand the the krer tree Genie is extraordinary it's exactly what I would have designed if I had any ability to design it it holds up the tree like none other it takes two seconds it is everything that the research told me it would do it's fantastic if you don't celebrate Christmas I will tell you that uh a power pod which is a small it attaches to your keychain and it will charge your
phone twice and it just lives on your keychain so I am never a person who's going oh no I don't have any charge left I have two charges on a power pod which lives on my keychain you forget about it's even there and then one day you need it and it's fantastic it's the best one the power there's lots of versions of it the powerp pod's the one you want and then I just bought a hot dog toaster that toasts the hot dogs and the buns at the same time it's a It's called The Nostalgia
hot dog toaster it looks like it's from the 1950s it's really beautiful actually it's kind the kind of thing you want to put on your counter because it looks fantastic my son and I love it because we like hot dogs and it'll put two buns and two hot dogs into the toaster you pull it down three minutes later you have a hot dog ready too you didn't dirty anything it's so it's not the best hot dog in the world but hot dogs are pretty great no matter how they're cooked so I fully support the Nostalgia
hot dog toaster these are amazing selections there's also call back to a Nostalgia trick for getting to be funny right that's true yes unintended but I'll take credit for it do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself share with friends either in work or in life yeah it changed my life really when I was in fourth grade a teacher who and I don't remember which teacher it was which kills me I was having a bad day and I was being the way that most people are frankly and the teacher said
to me listen a positive mental attitude will be your key to success and I don't know why it stuck in my head but it did I have said that to myself 100,000 times and today there's one human being in the world who I think is more positive than me one human being who I've met who has more positivity than me I am a relentlessly positive almost my wife says offensively positive person like she's like you know what some days you can have a bad day and I said I just don't because a positive mental attitude
is my key to success and it's really the way I frame so much of my life is looking to the positive looking to the good and I do it for people whenever I can and sometimes it frustrates people but I really believe that most of life is the mindset that you bring to it and for me in fourth grade a positive mental attitude will be your key to success for some reason hit me at the right moment in the right way and it stayed with me ever since what's interesting about that is it's not even
like that well cleverly put it sounds like a fortune cookie yeah you get and you're like yeah sure but I love that that really had so much impact on you and it stuck with you yeah I think it was probably timing really I think I was really like having a hard time and I know at the time like two of my friends were like not being my friend anymore and they were my only two friends sort of at the time and I think I was just open and ready to hear something that I could do
to make my life better and that was the one and I'm probably dis predisposed to being an optimist anyway so it probably landed just right for me a positive mental attitude will be your key to success amazing final question maybe just to leave listeners with one tactical thing they can do to become better storytellers what would that so two things should start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life so you start with location where are you location activates imagination right if I say I'm standing in the kitchen you've already automatically applied
a thousand adjectives to my story you see the kitchen with great clarity you probably put me in your own kitchen or your parents kitchen or a kitchen you see on TV but if the particularities of the kitchen are relevant to the story that's what I want you to do I'm not interested in reproducing locations with some kind of visual accuracy in your brain I want you to see a fully realized location so I love location because it's one word that comes imbued with a thousand adjectives so you start with location and you start with action
meaning something needs to be happening right away like literally I am in a place and I'm doing a thing it indicates to the audience that you're actually going to tell something that's moving forward it's why there's a big spaceship shooting of little spaceship in the opening of Star Wars it's why it's why there's a police officer chasing a guy across a roof something is already happening we didn't start with you know we didn't start with nonsense we started with something happening that grabbed us right away that's what people want from story also if you're a
person unlike me which is to say anyone who isn't sort of a white straight American man with no physical or mental disabilities who thinks I've always thought every room I walk into I have the right to speak but if you are unlike me in in those regards you often find and I know this is true that it's harder to make space to get people to hear you if you're from any marginalized or discriminated against group in any way but what I've been told by women and people of color and members of the lgbtq community they've
discovered that when I start a story by going I'm in a place doing a thing it's a signal to people that I am now telling a story and when you can signal to people I'm now telling a story they will get quiet for you and they will afford you the opportunity to speak I didn't know this was going to be the case but I have had many many people who I teach this skill to come back to me and say my God people listen to me and they've said I they think they listen to me
because I tell a good story but they they've told me because I start with that location in action it just tells people like the movies on nobody talks during the movie like you can eat popcorn but you're not allowed to talk and that's what it silences the room for you and affords you some space to then start doing the work that a good Storyteller does to hold those people's attention so start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life with those two things and you're already going to be like 50% better than
you were before you heard this wow well the hits just keep on coming Matt you're much more of a philosopher than I imagined you were when we started this conversation I learned a ton I'm really excited for people to learn from you working folks find you online if they want to learn more or continue learning from you and work with you potentially especially companies and then finally how can listeners be useful to you sure so you can find me at Matthew dick.com or if you're a business-oriented person or someone who wants to learn I also
have storyworthy md.com my initials MD and that's where I sort of have courses and online training and things like that so either place uh you'll be able to find me and contact me you know in a non-self serving sort of version of your second part of the question I think if you just tell stories but more importantly if you ask people to tell you stories again creating that space listen for people who say things like oh something like that happened to me once what they're really saying is I wish someone would want to hear what
happened to me once and so I am always someone who's willing to say oh tell me that story offer someone five minutes of your time so they can finally speak the thing that they've been waiting to speak to someone so if you just do that there's going to be more opportunities for storytelling in the world and ultimately perhaps that will funnel down to me where they will want to buy my book or visit my website or take some training with me but just create space for storytelling I think that'd be a beautiful thing I love
it what a beautiful way to end it Matt thank you so much for being here thanks so much Lenny I really appreciate it by everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode
