The Storytelling Expert: How to Speak so That Everyone Listens (Matthew Dicks #202)

0:00:06 You’ve probably been telling not so good stories all your life and you’ve probably heard people
0:00:12 who tell amazing stories all the time. It turns out that’s not actually something that people are
0:00:18 born with. It’s just strategic. And if you become a little more strategic, you can be one of those
0:00:23 people, right? Now we want to know. Now we’re curious. We’re not giving anything away. We’re
0:00:29 not indicating the end, but we’re finding something that’s going to like appeal to people
0:00:33 in a real emotional way. We’re going to identify a need they have. And if we identify an appropriate
0:00:44 need, then we’re going to grab our audience and they’re going to pay attention.
0:00:58 Welcome to the Knowledge Project, the bi-weekly podcast exploring the powerful ideas,
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0:01:49 for more. My guest today is Matthew Dix, who is perhaps the world’s best storyteller. I’m not
0:01:54 kidding. He’s won nearly every major storytelling competition. If anyone has a recipe for telling
0:02:00 better stories, it’s him, and I want it to learn from the master. In this episode, you will discover
0:02:05 lessons on finding, crafting, and telling stories that connect you to other people, stories that
0:02:10 will make them believe in you and trust you and compel them to want to know more about you and
0:02:15 the things that you care about. Steve Jobs said the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller,
0:02:20 but most of us make common mistakes that are easily correctable. At the end of listening to
0:02:25 this episode, I guarantee you’ll be more effective, entertaining, and thoughtful about the stories you
0:02:41 tell. It’s time to listen and learn. There are too many podcasts and not enough time. What if you
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0:04:21 What’s the difference between a good story and a bad story?
0:04:25 I think we can start by thinking about what is a story and what isn’t a story because most people
0:04:32 don’t tell stories. Most people think of a story as some stuff happened over the course of time,
0:04:36 and now I’m going to tell you about that, usually chronologically, and that will amount to a story.
0:04:41 And that really is just reporting on your life, and no one actually wants you to report on your
0:04:46 life other than maybe your mother and your spouse might be required to listen. It’s just a simple
0:04:51 accounting of your day or your week or your month, and that’s not interesting and it’s not a story.
0:04:57 So a story is about change over time. Usually it’s sort of a realization, like I used to think
0:05:01 one thing and now I think another thing. That’s most stories, sometimes they’re transformational,
0:05:05 meaning I once was one kind of person, then some stuff happened and now I’m actually an
0:05:09 authentically different kind of person. But if you’re just doing that, you’re better than most
0:05:13 people. That sort of is the difference between a bad story and a good story is what is a story
0:05:18 and what is not a story. Once we get to the difference between sort of a well-told story or
0:05:23 well-crafted story and a one that is not as well-crafted, we get into things like the acknowledgement
0:05:29 that no one wants to hear anything you ever have to say unless you give them a reason to listen.
0:05:34 And there are people who tell stories that don’t sort of have that fundamental belief as part of
0:05:39 their bone marrow. And the more you believe that, the more you believe that I must entertain
0:05:45 while speaking, delivering content, showing data, delivering a keynote, the more you believe that
0:05:51 no one wants to hear anything I have to say unless I’m relentlessly giving them a reason to listen,
0:05:56 that’s really the difference between someone who is going to be appreciated and remembered and
0:06:01 impactful and someone who will sort of get lost in the crowd. How much of the difference boils
0:06:04 down into thinking about the story you’re going to tell beforehand. And then there’s like this
0:06:08 game where you’re pretending to sort of like ad-lib it on the spot. And the listener is like
0:06:12 pretending that you’re ad-libbing it on the spot because they want that too. They want to believe
0:06:16 that versus I haven’t thought about this before and I’m just going to spew the first thing out of
0:06:21 my mouth. Right. You’re the first person other than me I’ve ever heard refer to it as a game.
0:06:26 I say we play a game with our audience. They pretend that we’re making it up and we pretend
0:06:30 that we’re making it up. When the truth, I think for the best storytellers lies somewhere in the
0:06:35 middle, which is to say you probably should never memorize anything that you say. I’ve never memorized
0:06:40 the story or speech that I’m going to deliver, but what I say is we remember them. Meaning we
0:06:44 understand the beats, we understand what’s going to happen, but if I was to tell you a story now
0:06:48 and then tell you a story five minutes later, the sentences are absolutely going to be different,
0:06:52 even though the events, the dialogue, the descriptions will all be there in some way.
0:06:58 But I think that’s sort of the game we play. The best game players stand in the middle and say,
0:07:01 I know what I’m going to say, but I don’t know exactly how I’m going to say it. And that allows
0:07:06 you to read the audience and figure out is this landing? Do I need to pivot right now? Do I need
0:07:10 to pull an anecdote out of my pocket? You know, I always walk around with what I say is five
0:07:15 anecdotes that if I feel like I’m losing the audience, I can throw that out and grab them back
0:07:20 and hold them for a while. If you’re overly prepared, you’re sort of trapped in your content
0:07:23 and you’re just going to be delivering it. I often call them word callers. If you’ve memorized
0:07:27 your story, really, you’re just a word caller. You’ve just memorized a series of words and hopefully
0:07:32 they’ll come out properly. And maybe you can artfully do it in a pretend acting way, but the
0:07:36 best performers sort of know what they’re going to say, but not exactly how. And that’s, you can
0:07:41 always tell that you can tell it because their talk feels like it’s just for you because you can
0:07:47 look at someone and you can sort of riff on what is happening in the room. I was recently speaking
0:07:50 somewhere and someone picked up their phone and started looking at their phone. And in the middle
0:07:56 of my speech, I stopped and I said, “I really hope your kid is on the way to the hospital right now.”
0:08:01 And he was like, “Didn’t get to school? I’m just making sure that.” And it was a big laugh,
0:08:05 but I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was a word caller. You don’t want to be overly prepared.
0:08:08 What’s the difference between a story and an anecdote then?
0:08:12 So an anecdote doesn’t have to have change over time. It’s essentially one of those,
0:08:17 “Hey, this funny thing happened to me. Isn’t this crazy?” But it tends not to linger.
0:08:21 You know, a story ideally is the kind of thing that when I tell it to you,
0:08:25 you’re thinking about it for days, weeks, months, or maybe for the rest of your life. Whereas an
0:08:30 anecdote is you sit down and you have beers with your buddies and something crazy happened on the
0:08:35 golf course. You know, something happened in the airport and you tell them it and they all laugh,
0:08:39 but it’s not the kind of thing they want to go and repeat to someone. They’re not going to
0:08:43 remember it. I often think of anecdotes as cotton candy. It’s like delicious in the moment and
0:08:49 lovely, but you don’t really remember your cotton candies, but you remember the best meals of your
0:08:52 life. Stories are the best meals of your life, the ones you reflect back and go, “I remember the
0:08:56 restaurant. I remember who I was with. I remember what I ordered.” That’s the story.
0:08:57 Because you’re connecting to an emotion?
0:09:01 Ideally touching their hearts and their minds. If I tell you an anecdote about my son,
0:09:07 we’re going to laugh. We’re going to understand his humanity even a little bit. You might even
0:09:11 reflect on my humanity, but you’re not going to be sort of thinking about it later on because
0:09:16 I’m not looking to land something in your heart and mind. I’m not looking to connect to your
0:09:22 life experiences. When I tell a story, I’m not hoping that you are thinking that once happened
0:09:28 to me. What I’m hoping is you’re thinking, “I once felt that way. I once thought that way,
0:09:31 or maybe someday I could feel or think that way.” That’s the goal. That’s sort of that
0:09:36 understory that we’re always looking to tell. Before we get into more of a crafting a story,
0:09:38 maybe it would help to have an example of a story.
0:09:41 Oh, sure. Should I tell you a story?
0:09:48 Yeah. Well, the one I like to tell, I mean, for business people, I’m standing behind my school
0:09:52 where I teach. I’m a fifth grade teacher. I’m standing in front of this enormous pile of fall
0:09:57 leaves and they’re quivering. There’s a little boy inside the leaves and his hand emerges and he’s
0:10:01 got a metal object in his hand. He looks at me. His head pops out. His name is Jamie. He says,
0:10:05 “Look what I found.” He’s shaking this metal object. I say, “Wow, look at it.” He says, “Yeah,
0:10:11 it’s a spoon.” It’s just a kitchen spoon. It fell out of a lunchbox yesterday or 10 years ago.
0:10:15 It’s migrated to the bottom of this pile. Now, Jamie, this little red-headed boy, has it in
0:10:20 his hand. I tell Jamie, “That’s not just a spoon, Jamie. That’s the spoon of power.” The moment
0:10:25 that I declare it to be the spoon of power, Jamie knows I must have it. I know Jamie knows this
0:10:30 because he just starts running. He doesn’t say a word. He just sprints because he knows his crazy
0:10:34 teacher. We’ll now chase him down for the spoon and he’s not wrong. I’m responsible for like 100
0:10:39 kids. I have to keep them safe, keep them secure. I don’t care about any of them anymore. It’s a
0:10:44 red-headed boy and a spoon that I must now have. And for 18 minutes over the course of this recess,
0:10:50 I hunt this boy down. I chase him across a field, up a slide, down the other slide, through the woods.
0:10:55 18 minutes later, he still has the spoon in his hand. I can’t believe it. I legitimately tried to
0:10:59 catch a 10-year-old and I could not. But he’s in my class, so it’s fine. I’ll get him eventually.
0:11:03 He’s a 10-year-old boy. He’s focused now on the spoon, but he has the attention span of like a
0:11:07 mulberry bush. He’s going to forget it in a minute and I’m going to grab it. So I’m teaching math.
0:11:11 I’m writing equations on the board. This kid, he’s put the spoon on the corner of his desk,
0:11:16 like to dare me to get it. You know, it’s just out of my reach. So I’ve got one eye on the board,
0:11:21 one eye on him in the spoon. He’s got one eye on his journal, one eye on the spoon. We’re in this
0:11:24 like standoff. And then I’m reading. I’m sitting on a stool. I’m reading a book. He’s still got
0:11:28 the spoon right there. I’ve got one eye on the book, one eye on the spoon. He’s got one on me,
0:11:31 one eye on the spoon. If he’d ever been this focused in his life, he’d like cure cancer.
0:11:36 I’ve never seen him so focused. But he’s like me. He’s a writer. He loves to write. So at the end
0:11:40 of the day, when we write, his head always falls onto his arm. You know, the strokes of his pen
0:11:44 get long. He’s going to get lost in his story and that’s the moment I’ll strike. I watch it happen.
0:11:49 I just wait. See the little red head go down, lands on his arm. I sneak up the front aisle.
0:11:53 I reach over to grab the spoon and it’s not there. And he turns to me and he says,
0:11:57 “Did you really think I was just going to leave it there for you?” And I lose my mind.
0:12:01 Like I start threatening the class. I turn to the right. Like, where’s the spoon? The girl says,
0:12:05 leave us alone. We’re trying to get our work done. Turn to the left. Where’s the spoon? The boy says,
0:12:08 why are you bothering me? I’m trying to be a good student. They all know where it is. They’re all
0:12:13 conspiring against me. Then the bell rings. Jamie’s out of his seat. He runs to get his coat and he
0:12:18 swings by and he pulls the box of books out in the library marked S. He reaches inside and he says,
0:12:24 “I filed it under S for spoon.” And he’s out the door. I can’t believe that I legitimately tried
0:12:28 to get a spoon from a 10-year-old kid and I could not do it. So the next day he comes in,
0:12:32 he has the spoon on a chain around his neck. And he’s swinging it around and I say,
0:12:36 “How did you?” And he said, “My dad drilled the hole. My mom gave me the chain.” And he’s walking
0:12:41 around going, “Oh, it’s a spoon of power, Mr. Dix. The spoon of power.” And as bad as I am,
0:12:47 I’m a terrible person sometimes. Even I can’t tear it from the neck of a 10-year-old. So
0:12:52 all week he tortures me with this. And then Thursday comes. It’s time for our weekly math test.
0:12:57 It’s time for Mackenzie to lose her mind because someday Mackenzie might get a problem wrong and
0:13:00 that will be the end of the world for Mackenzie. So every Thursday I have to like build her up.
0:13:04 Mistakes are valuable. It’s okay, Mackenzie. You might get one wrong. And she’s sort of
0:13:09 falling apart as she does. And then Jamie’s there and he takes the spoon off and he says,
0:13:15 “Maybe this will help.” And he puts it around Mackenzie’s neck and it’s the best math test
0:13:21 Mackenzie has ever taken in her life. Somehow this spoon on her neck calms her down. Three days later,
0:13:25 David’s grandfather passes away. When David comes back to school, Jamie’s by the door waiting for
0:13:30 David. When he walks in, puts the spoon on David’s neck and says, “I think you need this today.” And
0:13:36 he did. For the rest of the year, every single time a kid is in trouble, in any way whatsoever,
0:13:40 that spoon finds their way on their neck. They forget their homework. They have to walk over to me,
0:13:44 face the music we call it. They walk over with that damn spoon on their neck. They get in trouble
0:13:48 with the principal. They gotta make the long walk down the linoleum hallway. They make the long walk
0:13:53 with the spoon. They get bullied on the bus on the way to school. When they go home that day,
0:13:57 they go home with the spoon. Every single time it makes the kids’ days better. So the last day
0:14:00 of school, I gather all my kids on the floor in front of me. It’s the last time we’re going to be
0:14:04 together as a family. And they really are a family. We get to know each other in really
0:14:09 meaningful ways. And so I tell them, “Say whatever you want. Tell us what you’re feeling. We’re
0:14:14 going to have to say goodbye now.” So Jamie stands up and he walks over to me. He takes the spoon off
0:14:18 and he tries to give it to me. And I say to Jamie, “No.” I say, “There was a day back in October
0:14:23 when I wanted that spoon badly. And had I caught you, I would have fried it from your little fingers.
0:14:29 But you managed to keep it and do this amazing thing with it. I just can’t believe what you’ve
0:14:35 done. It’s your spoon.” And Jamie says, “No.” Jamie says, “The magic of the spoon only works in my
0:14:38 classroom. He tells me I need to take it so that next year when kids are in trouble,
0:14:44 I can give them the spoon like he has this year.” And then he pulls this little orange chair up
0:14:49 alongside me so he can get up to eye level. And he takes the spoon off. And for the first time,
0:14:55 I get to wear the spoon of power. The 2020-2021 school year was the hardest I’ve ever taught in
0:15:00 my 26 years of teaching. The pandemic. We went right back to school in September in masks and
0:15:04 social distancing. And everyone was afraid. And lots and lots of people got sick.
0:15:11 Kids got sick. Parents got sick. We lost grandparents. My wife, who’s a kindergarten teacher, got very
0:15:16 sick. My own children got sick. And I used that spoon more often that year than I’ve ever used
0:15:20 it in my life. Every day, people were wearing that spoon. And for the first time in my life,
0:15:25 my colleagues were wearing a spoon of power to get through the day. And as hard as it was,
0:15:28 there’s the best year of teaching I’ve ever had, the most important year I will ever teach.
0:15:34 But I’ve always felt like I was the luckiest teacher in America. Because I have that spoon.
0:15:39 I’ve had it for 16 years. It’s literally in that bag right there. I carry with it.
0:15:46 I carry it with me everywhere I go. It’s weirdly the most powerful teaching tool I have had and
0:15:52 will ever have. It is this thing that I put on a kid’s neck or an adult’s neck. And suddenly,
0:15:59 they feel better. It’s magic. It really is the spoon of power. And so I like to tell that story to
0:16:04 especially business people. Because essentially, what I do is I take something that they have at
0:16:09 least eight to 12 of in their kitchen, a simple spoon that they don’t see is very valuable. And
0:16:14 suddenly, it becomes something incredibly meaningful. The first time I gave that talk,
0:16:20 that story, I did it as a series of stories during the pandemic, actually, at a college in
0:16:25 Western Massachusetts. And it was still during the pandemic, everyone’s masked, except for me,
0:16:30 and everyone’s social distanced. And at the end of the event, I’m a novelist and I write books.
0:16:33 So I often have a table and there’s books and there’s a bookstore and I sign the books and
0:16:37 things like that. But we weren’t going to do it because of the pandemic. So after I finished
0:16:41 speaking that line formed in the aisle and I had to get back on the microphone and say,
0:16:46 “I’m sorry. We’re not going to sign books tonight. Go home.” And most of the people
0:16:50 in the line, they weren’t there to buy a book. They wanted to touch the spoon.
0:16:57 Grown-ass adults who had Doritos and Netflix and pillows at home in the middle of a pandemic,
0:17:02 wearing a mask, chose to line up and touch a spoon that they definitely have 8 to 12 of
0:17:07 in their kitchen. And that’s what we have to do. When we tell a story about something like a spoon,
0:17:12 something as simple as that, it suddenly becomes not a spoon anymore. And the better we are at
0:17:19 telling stories about ourselves, the people we love, the products we make, the services we offer,
0:17:24 all of those things, the more we are able to tell excellent stories about those things,
0:17:30 the more we’re able to infuse those things with whatever we want them to be infused with.
0:17:32 That’s a great story. I like that story.
0:17:36 And I feel the emotional roller coaster as you’re telling it and I remember reading it in your book
0:17:42 too. And I feel the ups and downs and I’m running there with you. And one of the words that you
0:17:47 used earlier was beat. So I’m wondering, walk me through the architecture of that story and what
0:17:52 makes it so effective. Sure. I mean, the first thing before I sort of talk about the structure
0:17:58 is the idea that it doesn’t contain very many adjectives. People often think of stories as
0:18:02 an attempt to describe something when actually nobody ever wants to know what anything looked like,
0:18:08 unless it’s relevant to a story. What people really want is to know what you felt, what you said,
0:18:12 and what you did. And so if you’re going to describe something, you better make sure that
0:18:18 there’s a reason for it to be described. What I believe is leveraging the imagination of audiences.
0:18:23 So I said to you, I’m standing behind my school, the school where I teach, but that’s all I said.
0:18:26 I know that you know what that looks like. You don’t know what my version of it looks like,
0:18:30 but that doesn’t matter to me. Weirdly, some people get interested in that,
0:18:36 but you should not. Nobody cares about what anything looks like. Very similitude is not
0:18:41 relevant in storytelling. When I say we go into my classroom to teach, I say classroom and I know
0:18:44 you have a classroom in your mind. Now, my classroom definitely doesn’t look like yours,
0:18:49 because my classroom has a stage with lighting and sets, because I built a theater into my
0:18:53 classroom, because I’ve been there for 23 years. It doesn’t look like any classroom we’ve ever seen,
0:18:58 but I don’t want you to see that classroom. I want you to see the one that you can already
0:19:03 see in your mind. So when people say to me, how do you make the stories seem so real to me,
0:19:08 I tell them I don’t describe anything. Instead, I choose words that I know already exist in your
0:19:13 mind. I choose those images, and I just extract them and make use of them. So that’s important
0:19:17 always, because I think people over-describe. And the tricky thing is we don’t have a lot of bandwidth
0:19:22 to work with. If you say in the beginning of a story, this beautiful woman walks in the room,
0:19:28 and her eyes are a piercing blue, those blue eyes had better be relevant in the story at some point,
0:19:34 because you’ve just stolen some of my bandwidth, so that I have to track those blue eyes and remember
0:19:38 them throughout the story. And I’ve never heard of a story where eye color is relevant, except for
0:19:44 Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. And yet we describe eye color all the damn time, which really is just
0:19:49 sort of degrading the audience’s ability to hear the rest of the story, because we’re giving them
0:19:54 a job to do. Remember this, remember this, remember this, I’m leveraging imagination throughout that
0:19:59 entire story. But in terms of what I’m thinking about for the architecture, I’m always thinking about
0:20:05 the scenes that I’m going to tell. So scenes are predicated on location. So if I think about that
0:20:09 story, if I’m going to remember it, rather than memorize it, I’m going to know I’m going to be
0:20:13 on the playground, and I’m going to chase Jamie, and I’m going to wrap him down the playscape and
0:20:16 through the woods, but he’s going to keep the spoon. That’s the first scene. And that’s what I have
0:20:20 to get out. And it might come out better one time than the other, but that’s essentially the goal.
0:20:24 And then my second scene is I’m in the classroom, and I know I’m going to teach math, and then I’m
0:20:28 going to teach reading, and then I’m going to teach writing, because that’s what I do. And I know
0:20:33 each time he’s going to be daring me to grab the spoon, but I’m not going to get it. So that’s
0:20:37 sort of scene two. Scene three is the next day. He comes in with a spoon of power on his neck,
0:20:43 makes me crazy, right? Scene four is Thursday, Mackenzie, the math test. Scene five is David,
0:20:48 his grandfather passed away. Scene six is a montage of three things. I know I’m going to say,
0:20:52 kids who forget their homework, kids who go to the principal and kids who ride the bus, that’s
0:20:56 specifically structured to give you three different locations and three different kinds of problems
0:21:00 that kids have. All were real, but I could have chosen from a thousand different times that Jamie
0:21:06 gave that spoon out. I strategically chose for that reason. The next scene is the last day of school.
0:21:10 Jamie tries to give me the spoon. Actually, what I tell you, because I’m preserving surprise,
0:21:14 Jamie tries to give me the spoon. I used the word tries really specifically,
0:21:17 because I don’t want you to think I’m going to get the spoon. I don’t think I’m going to get
0:21:21 the spoon either. I’m rejecting the spoon thinking there’s no way I’m taking this spoon from your
0:21:26 kid. And then he forces it upon me because I want you to be as surprised as I am. And then the last
0:21:31 scene is sort of that pandemic explanation about what that year was like. But that’s what I’m thinking
0:21:36 about in terms of remembering the story. And then to maintain entertainment throughout it,
0:21:42 I’m always thinking stakes, suspense, surprise and humor. Those are sort of the four Mount Rushmore
0:21:47 ways to maintain interest regardless of what you’re doing. Whether you’re telling a story like what
0:21:53 I’ve just done or I’m working with a marketing team on a deck that they’re building and it is
0:21:57 completely absent of stakes, suspense, surprise and humor, which is why nobody ever pays attention
0:22:02 to anything anyone ever does. Because instead of being entertaining, we’re trying to be informative.
0:22:07 When informative is important, but only if people are actually listening. And that first part,
0:22:10 how we’re going to get people to listen is the one nobody ever pays any attention to. They somehow
0:22:15 think that their information is going to be interesting to people. The world is filled with
0:22:20 information. The internet exists. You’re competing against every bit of information that has ever
0:22:25 existed on the planet. So you’d better give me a reason to listen. So I’m always thinking of that
0:22:31 throughout that story. Constantly asking myself, do I have stakes? Is there suspense? Am I preparing
0:22:36 for a surprise? And is there a place where I can drop in some humor? So you mentioned keeping a
0:22:40 storytelling compelling is sort of like there’s elephants, backpacks, breadcrumbs, hourglasses,
0:22:45 crystal balls and humor. You’re well versed. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Let’s go through each of those
0:22:49 individually and sort of like what are they and why are they important for the architecture of a
0:22:54 story in terms of keeping people listening. Like almost on the edge of their seat. What you’ve
0:22:59 identified is sort of what I call the different versions of stakes in a story. The elephant is
0:23:04 sort of the most important one. It’s essentially what has grabbed the audience’s attention initially.
0:23:08 It doesn’t actually have to be what the story’s about. But oftentimes people begin a story without
0:23:12 anything interesting that’s going to grab the audience. A stake is essentially what are we worried
0:23:17 about? What are we wondering about? Why are we rooting for the protagonist? Why are we not rooting
0:23:21 for the protagonist? It’s the thing that makes us want to hear the next sentence. An elephant is the
0:23:27 idea of here’s a thing that you should care about. And the story I just told you that here’s a thing
0:23:32 is there’s a boy with a spoon and Matt wants it. The stake is will he get the spoon? We know that’s
0:23:37 not what the story is actually about, but it gives the audience an initial thing to be thinking about.
0:23:43 In movies, we often get a trailer. So if you see the movie trailer, the stakes are already laid out.
0:23:46 And oftentimes they’re laid out. Anyway, if I say let’s go to a romantic comedy, we know what the
0:23:50 stake is. Two people are not in love and eventually they will be in love. So we know what those
0:23:55 stakes are. But when I open my mouth and I start telling a story in any context, nobody really
0:24:01 knows what I’m there for. No one knows what’s about to be said. No one knows why I’m speaking.
0:24:04 So we have to give them a reason. Something interesting that grabs them. And it doesn’t
0:24:11 have to be much. When Jobs introduces the iPhone in 2007, his first sentence on stage is,
0:24:16 “I’ve been waiting two and a half years to share this with you today.” That’s a stake.
0:24:20 That’s the CEO of Apple has been sitting on something for two and a half years.
0:24:25 And today’s the day we get to see it. That makes you wonder what he’s going to say next. So the
0:24:30 elephant is that constant need that there has to be something big. I call it an elephant because
0:24:34 we should all know what it is. It shouldn’t be a mystery. It should be large and present. And it
0:24:38 can change over time. So eventually I don’t get the spoon, but the new elephant becomes,
0:24:42 “What’s Jamie going to do with this spoon?” It seems to be changing the lives of kids. And then
0:24:46 the elephant becomes, “Is Matt really going to get this spoon? Or is Jamie going to keep the spoon?”
0:24:51 And then the stake becomes the pandemic, which is just a, you know, that enormous elephant of the
0:24:57 pandemic is enough. So that’s an elephant. Backpacks are the idea that oftentimes we’re
0:25:01 telling an audience what our plan is, and then we’re going to tell them the results of the plan.
0:25:06 But we want them to sort of be loaded up with our hopes and dreams along the way. So when I tell
0:25:11 you in that story and I, when I say, “It’s okay because eventually we’re going to be writing.”
0:25:16 And Jamie always gets lost in his writing. He’s like me. His little head falls on his arm,
0:25:20 starts writing away. And that’s the moment I’m going to strike. I just put a backpack on you.
0:25:25 I told you what my plan is. I told you what my hope is. My goal is when I reach for that spoon and
0:25:30 it’s not there, you’re surprised because I’ve loaded you with my hopes and dreams. And then
0:25:34 I’ve shown you that they failed. When I tell that story to a live audience, they often gasp or laugh
0:25:39 when I tell you the spoon is not there. Because in their mind, I have mentally placed the spoon on
0:25:44 the corner. I’ve really reinforced it too specifically. So that when I say I reach for it,
0:25:48 they see it there. And when I say it’s not there, it’s like I pop it away like magic. And they gasp.
0:25:53 They go, “Because it really is in their mind’s eye.” Like it suddenly disappeared. So a backpack
0:25:57 works especially well when a plan is not going to go well. You know, the Ocean’s Eleven movies,
0:26:01 they tell you how they’re going to rob the casino before they start robbing the casino.
0:26:05 Because things are going to go wrong and you have to know what’s going wrong in order to feel
0:26:09 the pressure and the tension of the moment. And that goes for whether we’re doing business or
0:26:14 telling personal stories. As oftentimes, I was working with a scientist. He put a backpack on
0:26:18 this audience. He was trying to cure a disease. The backpack he gave to the audience was,
0:26:24 “We’re going to cure the disease. Here was my plan. We went forward. You know, I did the experiment.
0:26:30 I looked at the results and the results weren’t there.” And your heart drops because it’s a great
0:26:35 story about a man trying to do something great. And the result of it is when they look back on
0:26:39 the results, they discover they’ve actually found something even more interesting. It didn’t cure
0:26:45 the disease they were hoping to cure, but it created some molecule that changed the nature
0:26:50 of the company and ended up curing like 12 diseases instead. But it’s so much better for that scientist
0:26:57 to say, “Here’s what I wanted to do. Here was my plan. I invested all of my life in it. I didn’t
0:27:01 spend time with my children on the weekends. Really built up our emotion in the same way
0:27:06 that spoon. It’s exactly the same as the spoon not there. The cure wasn’t there, right? But
0:27:10 something else instead happened. That was fantastic. Oftentimes, when something isn’t going to work or
0:27:15 it might work in a surprising way, we want to put backpacks on people. The next one is breadcrumbs.
0:27:22 So breadcrumbs are just sort of clues along the way, a little hint to something. The reason why we
0:27:27 might wonder about something, I don’t know if I use a breadcrumb in the spoon story. It’s almost
0:27:33 like poor shadowing, right? Yeah, it is. It’s sort of like you say some of the thing, but not all
0:27:37 of the thing. It’s a little bit like suspense, actually. It’s sort of suspense in the same way.
0:27:44 If I tell you that McKenzie is falling apart during her math test, right? A certain portion
0:27:48 of the audience will see that as a breadcrumb thinking, “Well, this has to do with the spoon,
0:27:51 doesn’t it?” A lot of the audience actually doesn’t even think that. They sort of forget
0:27:55 about the spoon for a minute because they get so invested in McKenzie. You can tell people who are
0:28:00 empathetic in an audience just by how much they forget about the spoon, and they start caring
0:28:04 about a little girl who’s struggling with math. But that idea that there’s a girl here and she’s
0:28:09 falling apart, but this is a story about a spoon, right? That is sort of a breadcrumb hoping the
0:28:14 audience will be thinking, “How are these two things going to connect? What is going on here?”
0:28:21 But oftentimes in a story, we just say we mentioned an object. We mentioned a thought.
0:28:26 We mentioned something that someone says to us, but we don’t allow the audience to understand why
0:28:30 it was said. That’s a breadcrumb meaning it leads them to be wondering about something later on.
0:28:36 The next one is hourglasses. In hourglasses, the idea that once you know you have the audience’s
0:28:41 attention and they’re dying for the next sentence, you make them wait as long as possible. You flip
0:28:46 the hourglass over and let the sand run. A great example of that is the matrix. Bullet time in
0:28:52 the matrix is an hourglass, meaning we’re going to change the way a gunfight happens in this movie,
0:28:57 meaning we’re going to watch the bullet move through space and time so that you will wonder
0:29:03 more if someone is going to be hit by the bullet. Because before bullet time, gunfights were a lot
0:29:08 less entertaining because it was just a matter of whether the person got hit or not. Now we get to
0:29:14 wonder what the course of this bullet is. Any moment where I know the audience wants to hear
0:29:19 the next thing, I will slow things down. That’s the one time I will start describing stuff. For
0:29:25 no reason whatsoever. That orange chair, I simply use the word orange as a means of making you wait
0:29:30 one more second to find out what’s going to happen. If you pay attention to the way I tell that story,
0:29:35 I start speaking slower the closer we get to the moment where Jamie’s going to hand me the spoon.
0:29:42 I just know that if I say these words with a reduced pace, your anticipation increases.
0:29:47 And therefore, when I get the spoon, it’s more likely that you will have an emotional reaction
0:29:53 to it. And that’s just a matter of judging. Now I have them. Let’s make them wait as long as possible
0:29:57 to hear it. Crystal balls. And crystal balls are something we use in life all the time. It’s
0:30:01 essentially just a prediction. It’s an out loud prediction about something that’s going to happen
0:30:04 because human beings are prediction machines. That’s why gambling is so difficult for people.
0:30:10 It’s not really the money as much as it is. I think the cowboys are going to win this week.
0:30:14 And I’m going to put money down on it to prove that I’m right. Those people don’t like wait
0:30:19 till Monday and open the newspaper to see if they won, right? They’re watching it at the moment the
0:30:25 game’s playing because we’re prediction machines. So when I say to you, it’s okay because I’m going
0:30:29 to get that spoon in a little while, right? I’m making a prediction about the future. And now
0:30:32 you’re going to want to hear as an audience whether that prediction is going to come true.
0:30:37 Earnings calls are just like that when they give guidance, right? Their attempt to give guidance
0:30:41 is both to make sure shareholders sort of know the direction of the company. But when they give
0:30:46 guidance, you know those people are going to come back at the next earnings call to see if that
0:30:50 guidance played out or they’re going to pay attention over the course of the quarter to see
0:30:55 what the results are. So guidance is nothing but a crystal ball saying, here’s what we think is going
0:30:59 to happen. And then you wait three months to find out if it actually happened. The more we can do
0:31:04 that, the more we get our audience to want us to continue to talk. I always say, I want my audience
0:31:08 happy that I’m talking. If you just think back on how many times you’ve heard people speak,
0:31:13 how often have you thought, I’m so happy they’re still speaking? If I can get that,
0:31:18 no, that’s the Platonic ideal. That’s the sort of really difficult to achieve. But when the audience
0:31:22 is happy that I’m talking because they can’t wait to hear the next thing that I’m saying,
0:31:27 that I’m waiting every time. And humor. The tricky thing about humor is I do stand-up comedy.
0:31:31 And there are certain people that can just make lots of things funny. And in that spoon of power
0:31:34 story, I could have had you laugh in the whole way through. That’s not useful to me in terms of a
0:31:40 storyteller. Now, if I do stand-up, it’s very useful for me. But humor is a really powerful
0:31:45 tool that gets underused completely in business all the time. Humor changes brain chemistry in
0:31:52 really meaningful ways, causes you to feel closer to me, causes you to perceive me as intelligent,
0:31:55 even if I’m not intelligent, makes you feel better about the world, actually improves your
0:32:00 cognition. All of those chemicals get released due to humor, which primes your brain and gets you
0:32:06 ready to hear me better. But it also does things like if I make you laugh in the first 30 to 60
0:32:12 seconds of a story, you now feel at ease. Because an audience always has that concern,
0:32:17 this concern that this is going to get awkward for us because you’re not going to do a good job.
0:32:22 Many, many times, I have sat in an audience and thought, buckle up, this guy’s going to fall
0:32:26 apart. And I don’t want anyone to think that. So if you make someone laugh in the first 30 seconds
0:32:30 of a story or a talk or a keynote, whatever you’re doing, they relax. They go, okay,
0:32:35 she knows what she’s doing. She made me laugh. Continue. It’s also useful in the boring parts
0:32:41 of stories or actually in the boring parts of data. If you have to speak for 12 minutes about
0:32:45 your data, you’d better be funny. I’m always helping tech companies when they’re doing the
0:32:52 demo of their newly added feature to their platform. And they’re just going to run through it and show
0:32:57 you what it is. And I’m always saying, why would you do it that way? That’s awful. Let’s create
0:33:02 two characters. Why don’t you pretend to be somebody? Let’s make the data amusing. Let’s
0:33:07 make a fake company. And let’s make the fake company that’s going to access your new platform.
0:33:12 Let’s let that be amusing so that people are smiling while you’re showing them what your new
0:33:18 product does. So it takes the boring parts and makes them a lot less boring. You can also manipulate
0:33:22 emotions with humor. Right before I’m going to tell you something terrible in a story, I like to
0:33:26 make you laugh so that the terrible thing hurts more. It increases the contrast. If you’re dating
0:33:30 someone for three months and you discover you’re dating a monster and you need to dump that person
0:33:35 and you really want to like make them hurt because they’ve hurt you, the best thing you can do is to
0:33:40 take them on the best date of their life. And at the very end of that date, that’s the moment you
0:33:44 dump them. And that’s what I try to do in storytelling. I try to take my audience on the best date
0:33:49 possible. And then I hit them with the thing that stabs them in the heart. You know, my wife says her
0:33:53 favorite stories are mine are the laugh, laugh, laugh, cry, which is to say you think we’re having
0:33:59 a good time, but actually the understory is I’m providing you a story that’s going to devastate
0:34:04 you in about three minutes. You just don’t see it coming yet. If you have to tell a part of a story
0:34:10 that’s really difficult for people to hear, a laugh after that can afford a breath. It can allow
0:34:16 people to go, okay, I just heard that bad thing, but he made me laugh. He must be okay. Now we can
0:34:22 move on. So it’s very, very powerful. It can be overused, you know, by certain people and it’s
0:34:27 underused by most people. Two things about the Jamie story that I thought were really fascinating.
0:34:33 One was the way you describe the scene. So like, I feel like I’m there with you and it was vague
0:34:37 enough that you get pulled into it. And I don’t think a lot of storytellers do a really good
0:34:42 job of that in terms of use location a lot to pull us in. It’s almost like you’re watching
0:34:45 a movie in your head, like you’re watching it play. Exactly what I’m looking for. Well,
0:34:50 locations are great because almost all of them are imbued with a thousand adjectives.
0:34:54 I don’t have to say anything. If I tell you, I dropped a bowl of blueberries on the kitchen
0:34:59 floor. You see that perfectly. You know, in your mind’s eye, you can tell me if the floor is wood,
0:35:04 linoleum, or tile. You know, you can tell me if the bowl was plastic, wooden, or glass. You can
0:35:08 tell me if the blueberries are happy summer blueberries or sad winter blueberries. And
0:35:12 if I asked you to look around the kitchen, you could identify exactly what that kitchen looks
0:35:16 like because I’m probably in your kitchen or your parents kitchen or a kitchen you’ve seen
0:35:20 on television a million times. But either way, I don’t want you to see my kitchen because that
0:35:25 would mean I’d have to describe it. And the power of your imagination is always more powerful than
0:35:30 any collection of words that I can assemble. I’m always leaning into location, especially if you
0:35:34 think about films, there’s always a location in every scene. You never are wondering where
0:35:38 someone is unless they’re sort of locked in a trunk of a car, you know, and that creates
0:35:42 lots of wonder and you want to know what’s going on. We open with location because you’re right,
0:35:47 it activates imagination. It forces the movie to continue to play in the minds of the audience.
0:35:52 And it’s almost like my brain starts doing the work for you. You don’t have to describe sort of
0:35:56 like what the floor is like or what the lighting is like or where the windows are, you know,
0:36:01 you just instantly go there. And the other thing I really that stuck out to me about Jamie was
0:36:06 we basically time traveled 15 years in that story. So we started like at recess and then
0:36:11 we went to a day and then we went to a week and then all of a sudden we’re in COVID and it’s,
0:36:17 you know, 10 years later and you’re still talking about how powerful this spoon is and how it’s
0:36:22 helped people. And it’s funny because I wouldn’t normally advance a story so far ahead. I often
0:36:27 tell people that that’s sort of a mistake, try to keep a story in the moment. And had COVID not
0:36:32 happened, the story probably would have ended with Jamie giving me the spoon and me feeling the
0:36:37 power of it for the first time and understanding that it’s going to be something I use forever.
0:36:41 It’s only because of the weirdness and extraordinary nature of a pandemic that allows
0:36:48 that story to jump ahead. But the other thing is you don’t know in that story that Jamie was my
0:36:54 student 16 years ago now. You don’t know that until the very end. And that works well for me
0:36:59 because that story could be happening last year or two years ago. It’s sort of a surprise to you
0:37:04 that I’ve had the spoon for 16 years. And I know it’s a surprise because when I’ve told it to audiences
0:37:09 and I say I’ve had that spoon for 16 years, I see the look on their faces because they suddenly
0:37:14 understand that happened so long ago and you still have that spoon, you know, and I’m often wearing
0:37:18 the spoon. I have it under my shirt and I take it out at the end of the story to surprise people,
0:37:22 you know, I’ve had people say, is that really the spoon? And I say like, do you really think I’m
0:37:26 such a monster that I would lose Jamie Calvert’s spoon that I couldn’t keep track of a single spoon
0:37:32 over the course of time? But yeah, that time game I play with the audience allows that story to play
0:37:37 out well. I would say that most of the time, maintaining stories within the moment is probably
0:37:40 the better way to go. But that one is that one operates a little differently.
0:37:44 So what are the most common mistakes that people make when they’re telling stories?
0:37:47 Well, they describe too much for sure. Actually, there’s some really interesting research on comic
0:37:54 books. They found that when you compare comic book characters, the comic book characters that have
0:38:00 less visual detail are the ones people feel more connected to. So if I draw a circle with two dots
0:38:06 for eyes and a little mouth, you’re going to feel more emotionally connected to that than if I
0:38:11 created a photorealistic version of a comic book character. Because if I give you the circle with
0:38:16 the two dots and the smile, you fill in the rest with what you want it to be. And now you’re connected
0:38:21 to it. If I say here’s what Joe looks like in his photorealistic, there’s nothing you can do with
0:38:27 that other than to accept it in your mind as Joe. Whereas you have a version of Joe in your head,
0:38:36 the platonic version of Joe. And if I allow you to place all of your background and need and
0:38:42 understanding of the concept of Joe into my unrealized picture, you’re more attached to it.
0:38:47 So people make the mistake of overly describing either because they think an audience wants it,
0:38:52 they’ve been taught to do it in school by people who don’t write but teach people how to write,
0:38:56 or there are just people that get obsessed. I’ve met lots of people who say like,
0:39:00 I want them to see my mother the way I saw her. And I say, I hear what you’re saying,
0:39:05 but there’s a difference between what you want and what the audience wants. And the storyteller
0:39:09 that’s doing what they want to do is making a mistake. It’s the storyteller who says,
0:39:14 what does the audience actually want from me? That’s the one who’s going to succeed. You can
0:39:20 share what your mother looks like with your spouse, with your closest friend who’s willing to put up
0:39:23 with you. But the audience doesn’t want to see your mother. They want to know what was said,
0:39:27 what was felt, and what was done. Everything else let us fill in with our brains. So that’s
0:39:31 a mistake they make. The other problem people have is I just believe the beginnings of stories are
0:39:35 essential to grabbing people’s attention. And people waste the beginnings of stories
0:39:41 explaining and teaching us things rather than launching stories in the proper place.
0:39:46 In the hands of a lesser storyteller, let’s say the spoon of power story begins with,
0:39:52 I’m a fifth grade teacher. I’m working at a school in Connecticut. It’s called Walk at School.
0:39:58 I teach about 23 kids per year. We have recess in the middle of the school day. And so I’m teaching
0:40:03 social studies one day when the bell rings and I tell all my kids it’s time to go out to recess.
0:40:07 One of my students is named Jamie, Jamie Calvert. He’s this little redheaded boy. He’s very
0:40:12 precocious. That’s how most people start the story, which is I need to teach you a whole bunch of stuff
0:40:16 so that the story will make sense. That’s the worst way to begin a story because no one has ever sat
0:40:20 down and said, boy, I hope he teaches me a lot of stuff before he says something good. So that
0:40:25 story starts in the right place, which is the actual moment the spoon makes an appearance.
0:40:29 I’m going to teach you all the rest of the stuff along the way, but I’m not going to open my story
0:40:35 by boring you. I’m going to open it with location, action, a little bit of wonder. There’s a reason
0:40:40 why I say it’s a metal object. You never think spoon. Most people think knife. Some people think
0:40:44 gun. And if you’re not thinking those two things, you’re wondering what the hell is in his hand.
0:40:48 And either way, I’m winning because if you made a prediction that it’s a knife or a gun,
0:40:52 now you want to know if your prediction is going to come true. That’s the crystal wall.
0:40:56 Or you’re just wondering, what is in his hand? What is in his hand? And I want you to be thinking
0:40:59 that because that means you want me to keep speaking. You’re happy that I’m talking because
0:41:03 you want me to solve that little mystery that I’ve created for you. The beginnings are where
0:41:08 people follow everything up because a story is like a plane ride to a beautiful place. You can
0:41:13 land in a beautiful place, but no one’s on your plane. Then you’ve failed, right? So the beginning
0:41:16 of the story is the attempt to get everyone on your plane to make the journey with you. And I
0:41:20 think that’s where most stories fail because people disengage immediately. I just think there’s too
0:41:24 many opportunities for people to listen to 30 seconds and go, she has nothing to say. And they
0:41:29 look at their phone, they think of their grocery list, they start looking around the room and saying,
0:41:32 who’s that bust of? They start doing that kind of thing and you’re never going to get them back.
0:41:38 So I would say most of the mistakes are made in the beginnings of stories where they fail to
0:41:42 engage the audience. And at the ends of stories where they fail to actually say anything.
0:41:48 So the end being sort of the five second moment of change or things that are different for you
0:41:54 and that the audience can relate to. Let’s go deeper on that. How do we find those
0:41:59 five second moments? How do we determine the beginning of the story? And those seem to be
0:42:03 the two most critical points, right? Where am I taking you? What’s the destination that we’re
0:42:07 getting on? And like, how do we get on that plane together? Right. So we start at the end
0:42:11 because we want to know what we’re going to say. And I do this regardless of what speaking
0:42:15 engagement you might be doing. If I’m helping someone with a keynote, I say, what’s the thing
0:42:19 you’re trying to say? And oftentimes they say, well, we’re trying to say a bunch of things. And I
0:42:21 say, well, if you say a bunch of things, you’re not saying anything. You have to have something
0:42:25 that you’re aiming at at the end. Even with a marketing deck, I always say, what are the
0:42:28 last three slides? And they say, well, we don’t know, we haven’t gotten to those. And I said,
0:42:31 that’s where we start though, we want to land somewhere. Otherwise, we’re just collecting
0:42:35 slides and changing the order three days before the event, and then two days before the event,
0:42:39 and then two hours before the event, we’re going to say something or we’re not going to say something.
0:42:44 So in storytelling, regardless of what the story is, it’s always, what am I trying to say at the
0:42:49 end? Meaning how did I change transformation or realization? How did my perception of the world,
0:42:55 my perception of myself, my perception of a spoon, or how I live as a human being,
0:43:01 how has that changed over time? And if it’s not a genuine change, it’s just a thing that happened.
0:43:06 It might be an amusing anecdote. I had a amusing moment in the airport yesterday. I got
0:43:10 diverted by the customs agent. I sort of did a bad job with the first customs agent,
0:43:17 and he put a red X on my form. And I thought, I’ve never seen that before. And so he said,
0:43:21 move on. And I went to that place where they sort of release you. And I went right with everybody
0:43:26 else. And the guy said, no, you go left. And I went into customs agent layer two, which I’d never
0:43:30 been in before. And there was a harder questioning. They were essentially trying to figure out why I
0:43:35 was here. Are you doing business here? And I’m like, no, I’m not getting paid. I’m just going
0:43:39 to talk to a guy. I said it in a way that made them very suspicious of me. And in the end,
0:43:43 the way they stopped being suspicious of me is they found my Wikipedia page. And they said,
0:43:46 oh, look, you’re an American novelist and storyteller. And suddenly they all relaxed
0:43:50 that everyone was like, okay, we understand why you’re here. That was an amusing anecdote.
0:43:56 It’s not a story. Because when I left customs, I was not thinking, oh, I see the world in a
0:44:00 different way. I see myself in a different way. I see customs in a different way. None of those
0:44:03 things happened. It was the kind of thing I’ll tell my wife and she’ll go, huh, that’s funny.
0:44:07 And three months from now, neither one of us will remember it because it’s cotton candy.
0:44:11 That’s what so many people do though. They think, oh, I have a story. Let me tell you about customs.
0:44:15 I would never say I have a story. I said something strange happened to me in customs
0:44:21 the other day, right? But it’s not a story. I might probe it and say, is there a story there?
0:44:25 Is there something about me having a Wikipedia page? That’s kind of weird, right? But I don’t
0:44:30 think there is because I didn’t feel, you know, that feeling you get. It’s a feeling of
0:44:36 something just happened. You know, and sometimes you don’t know what it is. I have taken 25 years
0:44:41 to figure out some of the things that have happened to me in my life. But I knew 25 years ago that
0:44:45 it was something. And I knew it was something because I kept coming back to it in my life.
0:44:49 You’re like, that moment really sticks with me. You know, sometimes it sticks with you because
0:44:53 it was crazy. Sometimes it sticks with you because like in the heart, in the mind,
0:44:59 it really hung with you. So you have to have something to say. You have to have a point.
0:45:04 And we start at the end because we want to land in a place where people go, oh, my time was well
0:45:10 spent. He’s presented me with a new way to look at the world. He’s made me reflect upon my position
0:45:14 on this planet, that kind of a thing. That’s what we’re looking for. And that can be as simple as
0:45:19 I want you to see my product in a new and interesting way. So when you leave, you go, wow, that really
0:45:24 is kind of an interesting broom. I’ve got a broom in my house, but I actually think they’ve upgraded
0:45:30 the broom. Like I’m feeling I got to go get that broom now because I don’t have the right broom.
0:45:34 That’s actually a feeling. And that would be the end of a story too. We got to ask ourselves,
0:45:39 what actually generates change over time? That’s the end of the story.
0:45:44 And then how does the end inform the beginning? Well, they’re almost always in perfect contrast
0:45:48 to each other. They have to be opposite of some way. If you want change over time, for the end of
0:45:54 my story, you know, I’ve learned a thing. At the beginning of the story, I must not have that thing
0:46:00 learned. If at the end of the story, I say this is a spoon of power, and it’s really going to become
0:46:05 the most powerful teaching tool I’ll ever have. The beginning of the story is it’s just a spoon.
0:46:09 And those are words I actually use in that story, just an ordinary kitchen spoon. I tell you in the
0:46:15 beginning, this is a meaningless kitchen spoon that because Lord of the Rings was on the popular,
0:46:20 I declared it the spoon of power for reasons that make no sense, except that’s who I am, right?
0:46:25 But essentially, it was a nothing and I made it a something. So we ask ourselves at the end,
0:46:29 what’s the change? What’s the meaning? And then the beginning is always going to be the opposite
0:46:33 of that. And now we have change over time. Now we create what I call an arc, right? It’s going to
0:46:39 go from one place to another. The customs agent story, you can feel it’s flat. Like, there’s no
0:46:44 opening where Matt is nervous about going through customs. I’ve done it a million times. Even when
0:46:48 I saw the red ax, I’m in Canada. What are they going to do? You know, I guess if I was in another
0:46:52 country, if I had just entered North Korea, and I got a red ax, maybe I have a story now, right?
0:46:56 But in Canada, I was thinking the worst they’re going to do is like, make me wait a little bit
0:47:02 longer before I enter Canada, right? So that’s not a story, because I didn’t feel that thing.
0:47:05 And therefore, I can’t have the opposite of that thing.
0:47:07 It’s hilarious to me that story, because I mean,
0:47:10 everybody can get into Canada and yet we stop you.
0:47:14 Right. Well, again, it was probably because I was communicating poorly, like,
0:47:17 what’s the purpose of your visit? I’m here to see a guy. What does that mean? I’m going to
0:47:20 talk to him. What are you going to talk to him about? Well, it’s on a podcast.
0:47:25 What do you mean on a podcast? You know, I was like, I’m just not doing a good job here.
0:47:29 And that’s like, I got myself into trouble because I didn’t tell a good story.
0:47:32 So if the ending is the opposite, the beginning is the opposite. So like,
0:47:37 you have these two transformations, walk me through some common movies and how you see them.
0:47:41 And this might wreck movies for everybody listening going forward. But talk to me about
0:47:45 how the opening scene of a movie often predicts the end and maybe use some examples.
0:47:50 All of the openings of movies or almost all of them will predict the end of the movie for sure.
0:47:54 Romantic comedies are the easiest to play within the beginning. If you see a movie like when Harry
0:47:57 met Sally, they actually say they hate each other at the beginning. I hate you, Harry.
0:48:01 They do not get along. They travel across country and they can’t stand each other the whole road
0:48:06 trip. We know what the end they’re going to end up together, right? There’s no way you can’t know
0:48:11 that. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to enjoy the film. It just tells you this is how this movie
0:48:18 is going to end, right? If we think about the first Star Wars, you know, a new hope, we meet a boy on
0:48:24 a planet who’s dreaming with his friends about flying in space someday and using blasters and
0:48:29 spaceships to defeat an empire. That’s the beginning of it, right? So we have to know
0:48:33 that that’s not what’s going to happen over the course of this movie. What happens is
0:48:38 he meets Jesus in the form of Obi-Wan Kenobi because it’s really a religion story. It’s about
0:48:44 a boy who thinks he’s going to fly in a spaceship and defeat the empire. And instead he finds religion,
0:48:48 something called the Force. And at the end of the movie, when he’s ready to use that spaceship
0:48:53 to defeat the empire, he turns off his targeting computer and he says, “I don’t need technology.
0:48:58 I have religion and religion will save the day.” That’s why when you leave that movie, you feel
0:49:03 good. There’s lots of space movies and some of them you leave and you go, “Oh, that was a something.”
0:49:06 And then there are other movies you leave and go, “That was great.” And you forget all about it
0:49:12 because there’s something about watching a character find a religion and then use that
0:49:18 belief in the thing to defeat evil that means something to us. My favorite example is like,
0:49:24 not a great movie, but Independence Day, the alien invasion movie. I love that movie because that
0:49:29 is so perfectly constructed. That is a movie about people. There’s multiple protagonists in that
0:49:37 movie. People who are all failing to get the respect of the people they value most. So like,
0:49:42 Will Smith’s character at the beginning of the movie is rejected by NASA. You don’t get to be
0:49:46 an astronaut. If you don’t think Will Smith isn’t going to space at some point in that movie,
0:49:53 you’re crazy. The president is being accused of being weak. He’s soft on crime. He’s a weakling.
0:49:58 He’s not the strongman he once was. If you don’t think at the end of that movie, he’s going to
0:50:04 somehow be fighting an alien actually in his plane. You’re crazy. It tells you exactly what’s
0:50:08 going to happen. Jeff Goldblum’s character at the beginning of the movie, you’re doing something
0:50:14 with satellites and television. His father thinks he’s wasting his time. His wife who’s sort of
0:50:20 estranged from him is doing big work and he’s doing nothing. He’s like just sending cable
0:50:25 television up to space. That’s what you’re doing. All of those characters are essentially characters
0:50:29 who are being disrespected by the people they value the most. And at the end of the movie,
0:50:35 all of them will gain the respect of the people they value the most. Now, if Roland Emmerich,
0:50:40 who made that film, said, “Hey, Shane, want to come to my movie?” It’s about a bunch of people who
0:50:44 are not really feeling the respect they deserve. And over the course of time, they’re going to
0:50:48 find that respect. And it’s actually going to come from the sources that they value the most.
0:50:53 You’re probably not very excited about it. But if you place those actual stories
0:50:59 amongst an alien invasion, suddenly we have something that people want to go to. And when
0:51:05 they leave, they go, “It’s kind of not a great movie. And yet for some reason, it sort of stays
0:51:10 with us in a way that other movies don’t. And I really believe that’s why. Even if we don’t
0:51:16 know it on the surface level, I believe that somewhere inside, we recognize we watched people
0:51:23 do a thing that we hope to do someday, which is to say, get the people who don’t notice us
0:51:27 to notice us. That’s what that movie is about. Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, when I hear that,
0:51:31 and I’m like, why is it memorable? I haven’t watched the movie. So I’m going to watch it
0:51:36 tonight, maybe. I think, oh, we’ve all been in a situation where we’re feeling underappreciated,
0:51:40 undervalued, and we all want to be the person, the hero in the end.
0:51:43 Right. Yeah. And that’s exactly what that’s about.
0:51:47 What makes the difference between a memorable movie and one you walk out of and you’re like,
0:51:49 “Oh, that was entertaining,” but you forget like two days later?
0:51:54 Oftentimes, the problem with those films is that whatever is sort of being expressed,
0:51:59 hopefully that five-second moment at the end, because most movies actually have that.
0:52:05 Regardless of what you’re watching, most screenwriters and filmmakers are taking us on an arc
0:52:12 in a certain way. The more relatable that ending moment is, the more deep,
0:52:16 the more resonant it is through the movie, as opposed to what happens in a lot of movies,
0:52:20 which is it just sort of lands at the end because they know they have to wrap it up at the end.
0:52:26 Some movies carry it all the way through. If you think of Die Hard, Die Hard’s a movie about a man
0:52:33 who’s trying to get back his wife. And his wife has decided that her career is going to take precedent
0:52:38 at this moment. And he’s decided his career is going to take precedent. And so they’re apart.
0:52:43 And essentially, he’s just trying to get back to his wife. The whole movie is he’s just trying
0:52:47 to get back to his wife, and they have placed terrorists in front of him. Rather than what we
0:52:53 face typically, which is like a bad phone call, the job isn’t working out, our kids are making us
0:52:57 crazy, that’s not entertaining, but terrorists are. John McClain, the character in that movie,
0:53:02 throughout the entire movie, we’re always thinking about his wife. We’re always going back to his
0:53:07 wife. His wife is always in peril, and he’s just trying to get back to his wife. In a lesser version
0:53:11 of that movie, that idea is introduced at the beginning of the movie, but we don’t really see
0:53:16 the wife again until the end. And so we will feel like, oh yeah, he did go on a journey, but it didn’t
0:53:23 sort of have the time to sink into us in the way that it sinks into us in Die Hard. We understand,
0:53:28 it’s also really important that in that movie, he’s not sort of a jacked up Arnold Schwarzenegger.
0:53:33 We’re like, I’m kind of like that guy. It hurts to run through glass. Like, I understand that I
0:53:37 might be able to do it to save my life, but the fact that in the next scene, he’s sort of screaming
0:53:42 and pulling glass out of his foot in a way I would, as opposed to the way Arnold Schwarzenegger
0:53:46 in a movie would, which he’d just pull it out and crack a joke, you know, and toss it away. That’s
0:53:50 why that movie stays with us, because we’re like, that’s us. And I understand what it’s like to try
0:53:55 to get back to a loved one. And I understand how things are placed in front of us, not those things,
0:54:00 but things. How do we make a good trailer then for a podcast or for a movie? Like, what goes into
0:54:05 that in your mind that pulls people in and like, I have to watch this. I have to listen to this.
0:54:11 We want to make sure that people understand sort of what the problem the character is facing,
0:54:15 what that problem is, and make sure that it’s something that we all can go, yeah, I get that.
0:54:20 But not solve the problem or even let us know if the problem will be solved. John McClain
0:54:25 desperately wants to get back to his wife. And unfortunately, terrorists now stand between
0:54:30 him and his wife. What do you do when there are terrorists standing between you and your wife,
0:54:35 multiple terrorists, and you have nothing except your wits? What do you do? And we go,
0:54:40 I’ve wanted to get back to the love of my life. You know, how is he going to do that? And suddenly
0:54:45 you want it to happen. If they present it as something we want, then absolutely we’re going
0:54:49 to watch it because we want to see how to do it. You know, I think there is a part of our brain
0:54:54 that says, I need to see how John McClain gets back to his wife because I want to get back to,
0:54:59 maybe it’s the love of my life, or maybe it’s like I used to love playing poker and I haven’t
0:55:03 been playing it for a long time. And I want to get back to that love of my life. But we want to
0:55:08 present sort of the stakes in the story without revealing too much of the story. So we want to
0:55:14 see the yearning, the want, the desire. If it’s a podcast, it’s essentially you’re going to present
0:55:20 a question at the top, you know, something like you’ve probably been telling not so good stories
0:55:27 all your life. And you’ve probably heard people who tell amazing stories all the time. It turns out
0:55:32 that’s not actually something that people are born with. It’s just strategic. And if you become a
0:55:38 little more strategic, you can be one of those people, right? Now we want to know. Now we’re
0:55:43 curious. We’re not giving anything away. We’re not indicating the end, but we’re finding something
0:55:48 that’s going to like appeal to people in a real emotional way. We’re going to identify a need
0:55:53 they have. And if we identify an appropriate need, then we’re going to grab our audience and they’re
0:55:58 going to pay attention. I love that. That’s really cool. How do we learn to tell better stories then?
0:56:04 Like walk me through sort of you teach a class on this, like what’s that process for if you had to
0:56:09 give a high level overview of that? Like how do you learn to do that? Start by becoming what I
0:56:14 call strategic listeners. There’s listening, which everyone thinks they’re good at and many people
0:56:18 are not. And then there’s active listening, which is as far as I can tell you look at the person in
0:56:23 a nod while they speak, but I’m not sure if that actually yields anything. So what I say is strategic
0:56:27 listening, which is what I’m relentlessly doing all the time, which is to say, if I’m watching a
0:56:32 movie and it makes me laugh, I say to myself, what did they just do to make me laugh? Like what
0:56:37 combination of words or situations did they assemble? Or how were the words spoken in a way
0:56:41 that produced the laugh? If you hear someone tell a great story and you think, wow, that was a great
0:56:47 story or a great movie, strategically, you should be thinking, what was it about that story about
0:56:52 that movie about the book I just read that made it great? I think a lot of times what happens is
0:56:58 people allow that content to wash through them, which is great if you want to be a consumer of
0:57:03 other people’s greatness. But if you want to be a reproducer of that greatness, then we have to be
0:57:09 strategic. My wife, when we leave movies, I don’t know, somehow she knows when I know a movie is
0:57:15 terrible, even if she thinks it’s good. Like we left the first Wonder Woman movie and she was feeling
0:57:20 great because it was feminist superhero icon. And as we left the movie theater, she goes,
0:57:27 I know something’s wrong with that movie. I can tell by the way you’re walking. And I said,
0:57:32 that movie is a disaster. And she said, can you not tell me for 15 minutes so I can keep
0:57:37 enjoying it? What she was saying is, there’s something fundamentally flawed with that movie,
0:57:42 and you as a strategic listener have pinpointed it. I have not pinpointed it. Right now,
0:57:46 I’m just a consumer of this content. Eventually you’re going to tell me and it’s going to ruin
0:57:50 the movie for me, but just let me enjoy it for a little bit. I told her, I said, I never have to
0:57:54 tell you. And she said, no, you’ll eventually tell me. So, you know, 15 minutes down the road,
0:57:58 I told her what was wrong with Wonder Woman. As soon as I told her, she said, oh, what a terrible
0:58:02 movie. And I said, yeah, I know, but most people won’t notice because they’re going to be consumers
0:58:06 of the content and not the strategic pulling apart at the threads kind of person. I’m the pulling
0:58:09 apart at the threads kind of person. And if you can become that, then you’re going to be a much
0:58:12 more effective storyteller because you’re going to pick up on the things that people are doing.
0:58:16 If I don’t ask, I’m going to get a viscerator for this. So what was wrong with Wonder Woman?
0:58:20 So at the end of Wonder Woman, did you see the movie? I did like a long time ago. I forget it.
0:58:27 At the end of the movie, Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, she’s battling the bad guy. He’s some sort of God
0:58:34 or something. Hades. Hades. And they’re fighting. And while that’s going on, Wonder Woman’s boyfriend,
0:58:41 for lack of a better word, is in a plane and he’s flying some poisonous bomb into the sky.
0:58:47 And she’s losing to Hades. She’s about to be killed by Hades. And then off in the sky,
0:58:53 she sees her boyfriend and he dies. The plane blows up. He’s risked his life to save her
0:58:59 and all the people in the area. And it’s at that moment that she finds the strength
0:59:05 to rise up and defeat Hades, which means there’s a story about a woman who is incapable of winning
0:59:11 her own battles unless a man sacrifices his life and therefore inspires her to defeat the bad guy.
0:59:14 Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought of it that way.
0:59:18 But that’s exactly what happens. But how often in movies does that happen? When Luke Skywalker
0:59:25 defeats the Empire, it’s not because he’s thinking about Princess Leia. He doesn’t need Princess Leia
0:59:32 to inspire him to take the shot, right? In movies, quite often, many times, almost always,
0:59:39 the man manages to defeat the bad guy without any inspiration, right? When Iron Man defeats Thanos,
0:59:44 he’s literally looking at Dr. Strange. He’s not looking at his wife who is on the battlefield
0:59:51 with him. He’s looking at Dr. Strange. And Dr. Strange says this is the one in a million
0:59:57 circumstances where we might win, right? He’s not relying on a woman and the support of his wife
1:00:01 to do it. He’s doing it on his own with a little information from a guy. And that’s how most male
1:00:08 heroes win the day. Female heroes in so many movies can only win the day if a man does something
1:00:13 first. Actually, the Mary Poppins movie, the new update of Mary Poppins, is even more egregious
1:00:18 because Mary Poppins is this woman who’s trying to save this family. There’s a father who could be
1:00:21 the hero of the day, and he’s not. And there’s two kids, they could be the hero of the day,
1:00:25 they could save the home, but they don’t. Mary Poppins could be the hero of the day. She doesn’t.
1:00:30 Instead, quite literally, the door opens and a man walks in, the guy who played Bert in the original
1:00:35 movie. He’s an old actor that we’re all happy, suddenly made a last appearance. The door opens,
1:00:39 and he basically says, I have all the money you need. Here you go. Everyone fails to save the day,
1:00:43 and then the door opens, and a white guy with a bunch of money walks in and says,
1:00:47 here you go. Here’s what you need. And we’re all happy because we see an old actor that we didn’t
1:00:49 know was going to be in the movie, and he suddenly appears and we’re happy. And hooray,
1:00:53 the day’s been saved. And I sit there and go, really? None of the people in the movie are going
1:00:57 to save the day. We’re going to have the random white guy we haven’t seen for all except the last
1:01:02 two minutes of the movie pop in. But that’s the difference between being a strategic listener
1:01:07 and saying what’s happening in the story and someone who just is enjoying it. And there’s
1:01:11 nothing wrong with enjoying it. Although I do think in both of those movies, I think that what is
1:01:19 being said, which is women can’t win the day, I think that does sort of work its way into our
1:01:25 unconscious. I actually think both of those films are pretty bad if you’re a little girl and you’re
1:01:29 watching that movie because you don’t get to see kids win in Mary Poppins. You don’t get to see
1:01:34 Mary Poppins win. You don’t get to watch Wonder Woman win on her own merit. I do think that
1:01:38 they’re sort of insidious in that way. Not intentionally. I can’t even comprehend why
1:01:43 these filmmakers did not see these problems as they were putting their films together or they
1:01:46 decided they were problems about who cares because we have to kill them somehow and why would we
1:01:51 kill them for no reason. So we’ll do it for that reason. But I do think they’re pretty detrimental
1:01:56 to girls in general. So if you’re a parent, you have a young daughter, what’s a good movie to watch
1:02:02 with her that is not like that, that’ll see the unconscious properly about the woman sort of
1:02:06 not needing anybody else and saving the day. Thelma and Louise. What happens in that movie?
1:02:11 They both die. Well, actually, they don’t die. That’s an interesting, I use this one in storytelling
1:02:18 all the time. Thelma and Louise, it’s from the 1980s, two women sort of get mistaken for having
1:02:22 committed a crime that they did not commit and they essentially get chased by the police and
1:02:26 it’s looking really bad for them. And it’s a story about two women coming together, a female
1:02:32 friendship. And at the end, they have a choice of looking back and ending up in prison or
1:02:36 driving off a cliff together holding hands and they drive off the cliff holding hands. Now,
1:02:40 the interesting thing about that movie is it ends with the car mid-flight. We don’t actually see it
1:02:47 hit the ground, which allows the audience to think maybe they survived. It’s improbable and it’s not
1:02:51 meant to be thought that way. But there’s a reason why we don’t see the car disappear off screen.
1:02:54 And it’s because we’re going to hang it right here. We’re going to stop the movie right here and you
1:02:58 get to sort of determine what you feel about it. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the same
1:03:03 thing. Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, they run out of the rocks to go face, you know, a hundred
1:03:08 federales. And we know they’re going to die, but we don’t see them die. So in our hearts and our
1:03:12 minds, they’re still alive. Maybe Butch and Sundance get out of it. And that’s the idea that our story
1:03:17 should always sort of have a little bit of a tail on them. When a story is not complete, when there
1:03:21 are still unanswered questions at the end of a story, when the audience can sort of play it out
1:03:26 a little bit on their own, those stories tend to hang with an audience much more. So we want our
1:03:30 stories to not be wrapped up in a bow because when we wrap it up in a bow, we get to shove it away
1:03:34 and stop thinking about it. You know, I think of it as a rope. I don’t want to not at the end of the
1:03:38 rope. I want a frayed ending that allows people to sort of wonder what the hell happened the next
1:03:42 day. That’s great. When they’re wondering the next day, I’m thrilled. Is it okay to lie when we tell
1:03:47 stories? I don’t think so. I’m a novelist, you know, I’ve published six novels now. I believe in
1:03:52 making stuff up all the time. The phrase, “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.”
1:03:56 I hate that. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say. When we lie in our stories,
1:04:01 we can no longer be trusted. You know, when I’m telling stories to people, there’s a reason why
1:04:08 people share more secrets with me than you could ever imagine. Everyone from an audience member
1:04:14 all the way up to the CEOs of tech companies that you interact with on a daily basis,
1:04:20 they end up sharing like really private things with me. My wife will sometimes like, you know,
1:04:24 she’ll be in the other room and she’ll hear me talking to someone about storytelling in a coaching
1:04:28 session. And when I come out, she goes, “That didn’t sound like storytelling.” Like the whole
1:04:32 hour wasn’t spent on storytelling. It’s because I’ve spent so much time with this person and
1:04:38 shared stories and expressed empathy and done all the things that I do that people are willing to
1:04:41 trust me, connect with me. You know, there’s a reason why I tell you the spoon of power story.
1:04:46 And you know, when entrepreneur once told me, “You should sell spoons. You should drill holes
1:04:50 and spoons and sell them on chains,” he’s not wrong. I could totally make a bundle. I’m not
1:04:54 going to do it. It’s a really cynical and awful way to be. But it’s because they know the story is
1:04:58 true. If you think it’s fiction, suddenly you don’t want to touch the spoon of power.
1:05:03 It’s just the thing he made up and somehow he got a spoon on a chain and that’s all that’s
1:05:09 going on. So no, I think the extent of lying in a story amounts to I’m allowed to take things out
1:05:14 of stories that are inconvenient for the story. Not inconvenient for me, but because they make
1:05:20 the story not run as well. I tell a story about a bunch of guys in a car, you know, we’ll go into
1:05:24 a place. And I don’t mention one of my friends. And here’s the story. He says, “I was in the car
1:05:27 that night too.” And I said, “I know, but you didn’t do anything. You know, you’re just cluttering
1:05:33 the field. Like you’re just stealing bandwidth from the audience, mentioning that Martin was also
1:05:36 in the car. Like if you don’t do anything, you’re out of the car. You’re irrelevant to me at that
1:05:40 point because you’re irrelevant to the audience. So I’ll take Martin out of the car. I’ll condense
1:05:45 time. So a story that takes place over the course of two days, I’ll push it into one day because
1:05:49 an audience doesn’t want to have to hear that I went to bed, woke up, hit a bowl of cereal. And
1:05:53 then the story continued, right? I don’t want to have that clunkiness of a story. I’ll shorten
1:05:58 locations, push things a little physically closer together, and I’ll eliminate things. All of that
1:06:03 is done in the service of the story, though. If I did something stupid over the course of the story,
1:06:08 I’m not going to remove the stupid thing I did in an effort to make myself look better. In fact,
1:06:12 I will enhance the stupid thing I did because I know that’s what audiences really want. You know,
1:06:17 that vulnerability is what they crave. So whenever I do something stupid, I am thrilled
1:06:20 because it often means I’m going to have a story to tell. A lot of people tell
1:06:27 end stories. This happened, and then this, and then this, and then this. Right. And it’s not super
1:06:32 engaging. Right. And I remember listening to a clip, the South Park guys, they use the terms
1:06:37 but and therefore, and then I remember reading this in your book. So talk to me about this and like,
1:06:42 how we take an end story and make it a but therefore story. It was devastating from when I saw
1:06:46 that clip too. Because I thought I had stumbled upon something that was mine, like, Hey, look what
1:06:50 I found. And then someone said, That’s great. Did you know the South Park guys believe that too?
1:06:55 And I was like, Oh, really? And it’s going to be like Matthew Dicks only. But they’re right. And
1:07:00 I’m right too. And the story is essentially a story that is a series of events, one after the other,
1:07:04 that are not connected in any meaningful way. First graders tell those stories all the time. I got
1:07:08 up and then I got my cereal and then I went to school. Right. But adults still tell those stories
1:07:13 too. Actually, most decks that I’m working on with marketing and sales people are and stories.
1:07:16 You know, it’s an end story, because if you can just throw a slide
1:07:21 into a deck, you don’t have a story, because I couldn’t just throw a random scene into the spoon
1:07:26 of power and still have that story work, right? But people feel they can do that. I’m like, well,
1:07:29 that’s fine, but you’re not telling a story. Now you’re just, you’re just a slide monkey. You’re
1:07:34 just throwing in slides. So an end story is the kind of story that if we take something out,
1:07:39 the story still plays. Nothing really changes in the story. We still can get to the end,
1:07:43 which means it’s probably not a story. You’re probably just reporting on your day. But our
1:07:49 therefore stories rely on connection. Scenes are connected to other scenes connected to other scenes.
1:07:56 So I’m doing this, but that happened. Therefore, this happened, but then that happened. And when
1:08:00 we connect it in that way, we can’t actually remove anything from the story, because the story
1:08:07 will fall apart. I also think it creates motion in a story, sort of an angular, exciting nature to
1:08:11 the story. The spoon of power appears, but it’s not the spoon of power. It’s not just a spoon,
1:08:17 it’s the spoon of power. Therefore, I must have it. So, which is because, which is therefore,
1:08:23 so I chased Jamie, but I don’t get it. But that’s okay, because he’s my student and I’m still going
1:08:29 to have time to teach him. So I’m in math, right? But he’s put the spoon right here. So we’re in
1:08:36 the standoff. Then we’re, I’m doing reading, but the spoon is still here. But that’s okay, because
1:08:41 eventually I’m going to teach writing. I walk up the aisle, but the spoon isn’t here. The bell
1:08:47 rings. Therefore, Jamie gets out of the seat, runs over to his coat, but also goes to the library
1:08:52 and pulls out the spoon. So if you’re budding and thereforeing all the way through, you know that
1:08:56 every scene is required. You know, you don’t have any fluff along the way. There’s no extra scene,
1:09:01 sort of hanging out. And people are going to be so invested in the story. I always tell people
1:09:06 the but is the most powerful word in all of storytelling. If I say to you, I got in the Uber
1:09:11 today to come over here, but that just makes you want to hear the next part of that sentence. If I
1:09:16 said I got in the Uber to come over here today and like the power could go out and you’d be like,
1:09:22 whatever. But if I say but, you know, something happened. It’s an indication that the world did
1:09:28 not continue on in the way you wanted it to. It’s the same thing when we oftentimes the not is more
1:09:33 powerful in storytelling. What something is not is more powerful than what it is. If I say Shane is
1:09:39 smart, that’s fine. But if I say Shane is not stupid, can you feel that that is a better way
1:09:44 to say that? And what it does is when I say Shane is not stupid, it presents the dichotomy. It says
1:09:49 there’s a stupid and there’s a smart and I’m going to tell you which one he is. If I say Shane is
1:09:54 smart, it’s flat. I’ve only given you one option. That one option exists and it’s the one I’ve chosen.
1:09:59 So I’m often describing things by what they are not rather than what they are because that creates
1:10:06 that binary dichotomy in language that causes people to feel energy in our sentences as opposed to
1:10:12 sort of that flatness. Does that only work when it’s complete opposites? Like Shane is not lazy or
1:10:17 does it only work when there’s like a really corresponding strong opposite to that? No,
1:10:20 because I could say something like, and sometimes I do this, it’s really weird. I actually teach
1:10:26 people to practice this in a way that’s weird. Like when I play golf, my coach will say,
1:10:31 do this. And he goes, we’re over exaggerating it right now. Eventually, we’ll get it back to normal.
1:10:36 I have people over exaggerate it. So if I wanted to say the apple was red, you know, if I want to
1:10:40 over exaggerate that and get really good at this, I’d say the apple wasn’t yellow and it wasn’t green,
1:10:45 it was red. So red, yellow and green are not opposites of each other. They’re just different
1:10:49 colors, but you can still do it that way. I might not do it in that instance. That would
1:10:53 start to make me sound weird. But actually, my people, I coach, I have them do that for a week.
1:10:58 I say, I want you to never say what it is. I want you to say what it isn’t, just in an effort to
1:11:03 get used to it so that when you speak, there’s people who just speak dynamically and there’s
1:11:08 people who speak flatly. And I think the dynamic speakers are the ones who are always trying to
1:11:13 energize their sentences by doing things like that. What else goes into teaching people how to
1:11:18 tell effective stories? Knowing what a story is is really important. So understanding as you move
1:11:23 through your life, that there’s moments happening to you. And those are the things that are worth
1:11:28 sharing. I just spoke to a guy two days ago, he’s going to be leading a conference, a whole bunch
1:11:32 of people. He’s a guy who does this all the time. And he met with me because he said, I’m out of
1:11:36 stories. He said, I used all my stories in the last conference. So I need new stories. And I said,
1:11:41 how long was the last conference? And he said two days that you ran out of all the stories of your
1:11:45 life in two days? He did. Right? That’s the problem often is we just don’t have enough stories to
1:11:50 tell. If we start to recognize that our lives are filled with stories, that they’re everywhere,
1:11:55 that we don’t need enormous moments in order to carry the day. And instead, small moments are
1:12:00 actually some of the most powerful moments we can ever share. I would much rather share with you a
1:12:05 tiny, seemingly insignificant moment that’s filled with meaning rather than one of my crazy stories
1:12:09 about the times I’ve died and been brought back to life. Those are fine stories, but they’re not
1:12:13 actually my go-to stories because they’re a lot harder to relate to. I’d much rather tell you
1:12:18 some tiny, seemingly insignificant moment that meant the world to me because that is more likely
1:12:22 to relate to you. So paying attention to that is going to be really important. And then just
1:12:29 establishing that mindset of, what can I say next in order to keep the person listening to me?
1:12:34 You know, it’s those stakes we’ve described. It’s the idea of suspense, which is really powerful.
1:12:40 And once you understand it, it’s simple to use. It’s simply the strategic exclusion of information
1:12:44 alongside the strategic inclusion of information. That’s what suspense is. It’s, I’m going to tell
1:12:48 you some of it, but not all of it. It’s a metal object rather than saying spoon, right? Crossword
1:12:54 puzzles are just suspense devices. They just say, there’s a five-letter word for the color blue.
1:13:00 What is it? And now you have to know. And if you don’t know what it is, it’s suspenseful and almost
1:13:05 frustrating that you don’t know. And the beauty of suspense is the more information you provide,
1:13:09 the greater the suspense increases. So if you don’t know the five-letter word for blue,
1:13:12 and I say, oh, we figured out the first letter, it’s an A, your suspense increases. You’ve either
1:13:17 solved it and now you feel good because the solving of suspense makes an audience feel good,
1:13:21 but also the perpetuation of suspense makes an audience feel good because they want you to
1:13:25 keep talking, right? So eventually we discover the word is Azure, but some people figured it out
1:13:29 and feel good about themselves. And some people heard the word Azure and suddenly felt relief.
1:13:34 But either way, I’m winning. So when we’re speaking, we just have to ask ourselves all the time,
1:13:39 if the power goes out now, will people care? Twice in my life, I’ve been in a movie where the
1:13:42 power’s gone out. Has that ever happened to you? No. Maybe because I live in New England and we have
1:13:46 a lot of weather. It’s like thunder and lightning. So I’m like super worried the power’s gonna go
1:13:50 out right now. Well, twice in my life, it’s happened with a movie. The first time I was alone
1:13:55 watching a movie, power goes out, manager comes in and says, you can come back tomorrow or later
1:13:59 today, see the movie. I never went back because I didn’t care about the characters. The power
1:14:02 went out and I literally was happy that the story was over. The second time I was with my
1:14:06 daughter, the power went out, we lost our minds. I was like, maybe we should go to another movie
1:14:10 theater. Let’s just go find another movie theater that has power so we can find out the end of this
1:14:16 movie. That filmmaker had me on the edge of my seat. That filmmaker made me want them to continue
1:14:22 talking. If we place that as our mindset, if the power goes out, will anyone care? I’m thinking
1:14:27 that all the time. If the power goes out, I want everyone to stay right where they are and be waiting
1:14:31 for me to get the microphone back on so I can finish my story. That’s fascinating. When they
1:14:36 test movies with focus groups, they should almost test halfway through sort of like a fake power
1:14:41 outage and like, do people want to come back tomorrow and see the resolution of the conflict?
1:14:45 Yeah. Well, they do these registers where like, how much you were liking the movie and how much
1:14:50 you’re not liking the movie. And depending on what kind of movie you’re in, if they’re not liking the
1:14:54 movie, if I was paying attention, I would say, well, listen, you’re missing one of the four things.
1:14:59 There’s either no stakes at this moment. We’re not worried about anything. There’s no suspense,
1:15:05 right? We’re not feeling a surprise coming or we’re not laughing. And it’s one of those four
1:15:09 things. I tell stories where sometimes I know there’s a boring part. I hate it. But I’ll get
1:15:14 to a point in the story and I’ll say, for 45 seconds, I have to explain this thing to them. And I
1:15:19 don’t want to explain this thing to them, but I have to. So I’m either going to make it suspenseful
1:15:23 or I’m going to make it funny. Those are probably the two go-to strategies that I use. One of the
1:15:28 two is going to work and get me through the boring part. I still register it as a storyteller
1:15:34 as the boring part because I know that suspense and humor are not really storytelling. They’re
1:15:39 sort of like, I’m painting over the problem so I can get back into the story the way I want to.
1:15:43 But it’s when we don’t paint over the problem. It’s when we’re speaking and we suddenly know we
1:15:47 have to say something that’s not going to be terribly engaging those demos, right? Now I’m
1:15:53 going to demo my platform for you and we’re all going to see how it works, right? That’s boring.
1:15:58 It’s always boring unless we paint over that problem with humor or suspense,
1:16:03 even things like novelty. Just do it in a different way. Do it in a way no one’s done before. That
1:16:10 works too. There’s a reason why Andy Kaufman took the stage with a record player, opened it up and
1:16:15 played Mighty Mouse and just stood there and people were captivated. Eventually they got irritated,
1:16:20 but that was supremely entertaining for people for quite a while because they had never seen it
1:16:24 before. So sometimes it’s just, I’ll find a way to do it that’s never been done before and that’ll
1:16:28 be interesting too. But as storytellers, we have to be thinking that. Structure is everything.
1:16:32 It’s as long as you’ve structured your story properly, meaning you’ve started at the right
1:16:37 spot in the beginning and landed in a place of meaning and you haven’t filled it with unnecessary
1:16:41 nonsense, it almost doesn’t matter what the sentences are that you’re choosing. There’s a
1:16:46 woman in New York, a storyteller named Denusha. English is her third language. It was Polish,
1:16:51 Russian, and then English. And her English isn’t great. It’s fine, but her nouns and verbs don’t
1:16:55 always agree. Her vocabulary is limited compared to mine. She still kicks my ass sometimes because
1:17:00 she’s making good decisions. Once we have a good structure in place and we can perform at an
1:17:06 adequate level, the sentences we apply to that structure mean a lot less because we’re actually
1:17:11 saying something of meaning and we’re starting in a place of engagement and we’re not filling our
1:17:15 stories with unnecessary content. You do those three things. There’s still a million things I
1:17:19 could teach you about storytelling, but those things are really going to level you up quickly.
1:17:24 So you advocate homework for life, which is sort of keeping track of the little moments every day
1:17:28 that happen to you that might be stories, might be anecdotes. In an Excel spreadsheet,
1:17:32 that’s what you use. Walk me through one you haven’t made a story recently that you think
1:17:37 is a story and how do you think about structuring it? Just walk me through your internal monologue
1:17:42 about one of those moments. I knew this was a moment. I felt it. My son is getting ready to go
1:17:47 to scout camp and part of scout camp, which I went to all my life, saved my life. The Boy Scouts
1:17:50 were more instrumental to me than anything. I knew that he was going to have to take a swim
1:17:54 test on the first day. You’re going to swim 100 yards. He’s not the strongest swimmer. He actually
1:18:00 had a little swimming kerfuffle a couple of weeks ago. He swam out to the dock for the first time
1:18:04 at the lake where we go and then he couldn’t get back. He got nervous because he had gotten so tired
1:18:09 swimming out to the dock, which was only like 40 yards out. I knew that going into this scouting
1:18:14 swim test, he might not pass. If you don’t pass, it doesn’t mean you can’t swim, but you have
1:18:18 limitations placed on you. When I was a kid, when I first went to scout camp, they had us do our
1:18:23 swim test at 8.30 in the morning right after breakfast on a Monday and I was annoyed. I was
1:18:28 just that kid that I always wanted to do things on my own terms to this day. I’m sort of that way.
1:18:33 My wife says that’s a double-edged sword. I’ve got like nine pancakes in my belly and I go down
1:18:38 in the cold of the morning and I have to jump in the lake and I swim about 50 yards and I’m done.
1:18:43 I’m like, “This is stupid.” I get out and they go, “Okay, you can swim, but you didn’t swim far enough
1:18:46 you’re a beginner swimmer.” I said, “Okay, whatever.” They said, “That means you can only swim in this
1:18:51 little area here.” I was like, “Oh.” They said, “You can only take a rowboat.” I was like, “Oh,
1:18:55 forget it. I’ll do it again. I’ll take the test.” They go, “Great, Wednesday. That’s when the next
1:19:00 test is happening.” For two days, I was a beginner swimmer, which also meant on Tuesday when we went
1:19:04 across the lake to camp on the other side, all my friends glided across in a canoe and I was in a
1:19:09 stupid rowboat. It took me 45 minutes longer to get across the lake. Everyone made fun of me.
1:19:14 I hated it. I remember that moment. It sears in my brain. So as my son’s getting ready to go to
1:19:17 scout camp, I’m not sure if he’s going to pass the swim test, but I tell him that story. I say,
1:19:21 “This is what happened to me.” I say, “It’s okay if you don’t pass, but what I want you to make sure
1:19:26 you do is not the stupid thing I did, which is just get out because you’re annoyed.” I said,
1:19:32 “Just try.” I said, “And don’t stop swimming because you get tired. Stop swimming because
1:19:35 you physically can’t swim anymore.” And then it doesn’t matter what the results are because you’ll
1:19:40 feel good about yourself. So I pick them up a week later. I don’t make it the first question I ask,
1:19:44 but it is the first question I want to ask. I sort of try to play it cool. I wait a while and I go,
1:19:48 “Oh, hey, what about the swim test? How’d that go?” He goes, “Oh, I passed them the first try.” And
1:19:52 I was like, “Oh, thank goodness. My heart is with him.” And I said, “How did it go?” And he said,
1:19:57 “Actually, on the second lap, I was going to quit because I was so tired, but then I heard you in
1:20:02 my head and I remember you said, “Don’t quit just because you’re tired. Quit if you can’t swim anymore.”
1:20:07 And I heard you say it, Dad, and I swim the other two laps. I’m oddly emotional, not oddly emotional.
1:20:12 I’m appropriately emotional right now because I sent my son off for seven days and there was a moment
1:20:18 when I was in his head. It was like I went on that swim test with him and it was because I told him
1:20:24 a story and I was vulnerable and I tried to make it as relatable to him as possible and as accessible
1:20:29 to him as possible and it carried the day. It’s probably going to be a story I tell someday.
1:20:33 It’s a little trickier to tell because I don’t like to tell stories where I’m the hero necessarily.
1:20:38 That is definitely a Matthew Dix as the greatest father in the world story. I’m going to have to
1:20:44 therefore temper it with some of the terrible things I’ve done as a father so that I can indicate
1:20:49 to people that I am not here to place myself on the top of the mountain as the greatest parent,
1:20:55 but as a parent who screws up quite often but isn’t it beautiful in those moments of parenthood
1:21:01 when you do the right thing and it actually works out and your kid is wise enough to tell you that
1:21:05 it worked out. It was just a perfect moment for me. That’s probably something I’ll tell. I knew
1:21:09 right away that it was going to be a story. So you had this little memory and then you just did
1:21:14 this all in real time. Walk me through how you structured it, how you thought about the beginning.
1:21:17 You know what the ending is because you know that moment. That was the moment you’re sort of
1:21:24 recording almost. That’s your note. So why did we start where we started? Why did we go on that
1:21:28 journey? And obviously you did this in real time so you would refine this, but walk me through your
1:21:32 decisions when you made that story. The most important decision to make in that story is the
1:21:40 structure, meaning what’s the chronological structure of that story. I used a B-A-B-C model,
1:21:45 which is a model that I started in the middle actually of the story. I started with my son
1:21:51 is going to camp and I know he has to take a swim test and I know it might not be easy for him.
1:21:57 The real beginning of the story happens in 1983. I’m going down to the waterfront to take a swim
1:22:02 test with nine pancakes in my belly. I jump on the pond and think it’s stupid and get out
1:22:07 and I end up a beginner swimmer. 30 years later, I’m with my son. That’s a terrible way to tell
1:22:12 that story. You can feel that already, but that’s how most people tell it, right? Most people
1:22:18 tell it chronologically, meaning A-B-C. I started in the middle because for a bunch of reasons. One
1:22:21 is if I tell you that beginning of the story, it already gives away the end. You know what’s
1:22:26 going to happen, right? So I don’t want that. Also stories that take place over the course of 30
1:22:30 years, actually that story takes place over 40 years. Nobody wants to hear a 40-year story.
1:22:37 A 40-year story sucks, right? So what we do is we turn the 40-year story into a week-long story,
1:22:43 which is my son is getting ready to go to camp and I don’t want him to make the same mistake
1:22:48 I made. So I’m going to tell him a story. So I start in the middle at the B. The next part of
1:22:53 the story, the next scene is the A, which is 40 years earlier, I’m at camp and I do this thing,
1:22:57 right? So that’s, I’m bringing us back in time, but I’ve started us in sort of the present. So
1:23:03 it’s a story that takes place in the present, but I yank the past into the present for a moment.
1:23:06 And that way the story doesn’t feel like it’s taken 40 years. It feels like it takes a week.
1:23:11 A guy tells a boy a story and then he waits to see how the story plays out. That’s the most
1:23:16 important thing to figure out in a story like that is where should I start? And it is absolutely not
1:23:22 in 1983. It’s absolutely in 2024. Now, things I already know I did poorly when I was telling you
1:23:27 that story. I didn’t start with a scene, right? I started by teaching you. I said my son’s getting
1:23:32 ready to go to Boy Scout camp. That’s a terrible beginning. What I should have said was my son’s
1:23:38 trunk is laid out in the bedroom and he’s throwing stuff into it in a way that will never work out
1:23:42 for him. I’ll let him make this mistake for a while and then eventually my wife will come in
1:23:46 with packing cubes and she will solve all these problems, right? But while he’s throwing stuff
1:23:51 into this trunk for scout camp, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and I decide this is the right
1:23:55 moment to tell him what he needs to hear. And that sentence is important, right? In the new version
1:23:58 of the story, because that makes you want to know what it’s going to be, right? So I’m constantly
1:24:03 trying to create a sentence that causes you want to hear the next sentence or I open story by making
1:24:08 laugh, right? You actually laughed when I said throw in stuff in a way that’s never going to work out
1:24:13 and then packing cubes is a funny thing. So all of that is designed to, I’m going to make you laugh
1:24:16 and then I’m going to get you to wonder what the story is and then I’m going to tell the story
1:24:21 and then I’m going to go ahead and have him come back. And I really liked the thing I did with
1:24:26 you where I said it was the first thing I wanted to ask him, but I tried to play it cool. You laughed
1:24:29 when I said that and I knew it. I knew you were going to laugh because I thought that was the
1:24:33 truth and I said it and I knew you were going to laugh because that is the truth of our lives,
1:24:38 which is there’s so many times in our lives when we want to just ask the question right away,
1:24:44 but we know we’re not supposed to. So we order the coffee and we ask how your day was and we
1:24:48 ask how your wife is and we ask how your kids are doing and then eventually when we feel the
1:24:53 moment’s right, we get to the question. That sameness, that reality, that makes you laugh
1:24:58 because you think, “Oh, I’ve done that.” That is a real thing in life that we do all the time.
1:25:03 All of that is how I sort of thought about that story. The structure was good. The opening was
1:25:07 not, but fixing the opening you can see is pretty easy. That’s amazing. Thank you for going into
1:25:13 detail on that. Talk to me about metaphors and finding metaphors and how they can be used for
1:25:18 business people, specifically telling stories or even individuals telling stories about greater
1:25:22 meaning. I remember the story that stood out and I forget the guy’s name in the book that you just
1:25:28 wrote about the Little League and how he turned that into a story for his company. I thought
1:25:33 that was really interesting, but how do we find those metaphors? What we want to ask ourselves,
1:25:38 when we’re trying to do business, when we’re trying to send a message, we’re trying to look for a
1:25:43 theme, meaning or message. People content match. That’s the problem rather than thinking about
1:25:48 what they’re really trying to say. This is a good example. I’m working with a guy who’s getting ready
1:25:53 to do some speaking. He’s going to be speaking to entrepreneurs about getting through bottlenecks
1:25:57 so they can accelerate their companies. The lesson he wants to teach them is sometimes
1:26:04 you just have to find the one right thing that’s holding your company back. He has a great example
1:26:09 of it. He says to me that at Facebook early on, when they were failing to gain traction,
1:26:18 they looked at their data and they realized that if a user accumulated seven friends, made
1:26:22 seven friends or seven connections on Facebook in 10 days, they were likely to stay on the
1:26:27 platform. If they didn’t do that, they were likely to leave the platform. Facebook, recognizing
1:26:33 that data point, focused all of their energies on how can we get a user to find seven friends
1:26:38 in 10 days. That’s when they added features like load your email contacts into Facebook so that we
1:26:43 can show you who they are. We’ll recommend friends to you, things like that. We’ll start telling you
1:26:47 who your friends are that you have in common. All of those features were designed. Facebook
1:26:52 figures out that’s the one bottleneck we have. That’s what he wants to tell the audience,
1:26:57 but he doesn’t want to just use that story. He wants other things. When I’m talking to him,
1:27:01 I say, “Well, what are other examples of singular solutions that you can think of?” He gives me
1:27:06 a business solution, which is just content matching. You already have your business example,
1:27:11 the Facebook one, and it works really well. I think it’s great. Right away, I went, “Uh-huh,
1:27:16 yeah, okay, great.” I said, “What about your personal life? Do you have a personal life,
1:27:20 a simple solution that really changed things for you?” He says, “Well,
1:27:25 there was a point years ago when I was struggling with my marriage. My wife and I were just not
1:27:30 getting along and we had gone to couples therapy and it wasn’t seeming to work.” One day, he sat
1:27:36 down with his buddy and his buddy said, “Are you kissing your wife every morning?” He said,
1:27:41 “No.” His buddy said, “Kiss your wife every morning.” He said, “What’s that going to do?” He said,
1:27:46 “Just do it.” It changed everything for him. Somehow, there was a lack of physical closeness
1:27:51 and intimacy that was missing in the relationship and a kiss in the morning started to change
1:27:55 everything for them. I said, “That’s the story you should use.” He goes, “I’m not using that story.”
1:28:01 He said, “That’s not what the purpose of this business is.” I said, “No one’s going to remember
1:28:05 your other business story. In fact, a lot of people aren’t even going to remember the Facebook
1:28:11 story. But if you want to land the idea that sometimes a singular solution can solve a big
1:28:16 problem, you tell the story about kissing your wife in the morning and they’ll never forget it.
1:28:22 They’ll start kissing their wives in the morning and they will start telling other people to do so
1:28:26 as well. You will have an echo through their lives.” Now, that’s a metaphor, right? That’s a
1:28:31 metaphor for his Facebook example, which is what I said to him was the Facebook example
1:28:35 matching theme, meaning, or message essentially is what’s the theme, meaning, or message of the
1:28:40 Facebook story. A singular solution can sometimes solve a really complex problem. Let’s find that
1:28:45 in our personal life. Now, I’m always fighting with business people on this because they never
1:28:49 want to bring their personal life into the business world, which is why they’re round,
1:28:53 white, and flavorless, why they’re all forgettable, why everything they say is ultimately forgotten.
1:28:58 Because we don’t remember business stories. We don’t remember most of them and there’s so many
1:29:02 of them. But a guy who gets on stage and is vulnerable, it loves to say a few years ago,
1:29:05 I was having a problem with my wife and she was having a problem with me and we were not getting
1:29:11 along and things were looking bad. And then I told my buddy and I end up kissing her and somehow
1:29:15 today we’re the happiest couple and that’s unforgettable. Now, I think he’s going to do it,
1:29:18 but part of me thinks he just told me he’s going to do it and he’s not going to do it.
1:29:22 Because that happens all the damn time. I don’t understand why people don’t
1:29:28 see it because I know you see it. Like you made a sound. I listen to audiences when I said,
1:29:35 “Do you kiss your wife every morning?” You made a sound. You went, “Mmm.” Which said to me,
1:29:39 “That’s all I need to know. The story is perfect.” When you hear that sound from an audience,
1:29:45 you know you have found the perfect story for this example. And if he was you and I was telling him
1:29:49 the story, he would make that sound. He’d go, “Mmm.” But for some reason, because he has to tell it
1:29:55 now, he can’t do it. Because I can’t tell a personal story. I’m there to teach them about
1:30:00 solving business problems and bottlenecks. And I’m like, “You are.” But we don’t teach lessons
1:30:06 always by sticking to the content. We have to expand beyond it to get people to understand it.
1:30:11 Particularly when things get complex, when your business is different than mine,
1:30:17 you have a platform and I have a broom company. How are we going to talk to someone who’s working
1:30:21 for Slack and someone who’s working for a broom company? If both of those people are in front
1:30:24 of us and we’re trying to improve their businesses, how are we going to do that? We’re going to use
1:30:29 metaphors. We’re going to find ways to send lessons and messages to people in ways that resonate in
1:30:33 their lives. Now, the beauty of that story too, and all the stories I teach, like the story of
1:30:37 Boris, the one you mentioned about the baseball game, when we do that, when we’re daring enough,
1:30:43 courageous enough to do it, we create these markers in people’s lives as well. The next time one
1:30:48 spouse kisses another spouse in the morning, they’re thinking about him and they’re thinking
1:30:54 about simple solutions to solve bottlenecks. It’s going to continue to reverberate. Whenever we can
1:30:59 take the content from our business world and bring it into the personal world and allow people to
1:31:05 feel it in a way that is really human and not profit-driven, then suddenly we have stories
1:31:09 that people want to hear and we become unforgettable because everyone is forgettable, unless they’re
1:31:14 doing something that is touching the heart and the mind, slightly different than everybody else,
1:31:17 changing brain chemistry, being entertaining, all of those things. Is there a difference between
1:31:21 telling our own stories and telling other people’s stories? Yeah, there is. Unfortunately, when you
1:31:25 tell other people stories, they’re never nearly as good. If I had told you that my brother went
1:31:31 through customs and got the X on his form and had to get through that second layer, that story doesn’t
1:31:34 mean very much to you. My brother in your mind is a fictional character. You don’t even know,
1:31:38 maybe I don’t actually have a brother. It doesn’t mean they can’t be told. There is a way to tell
1:31:44 them it’s tricky and it’s not as effective. People want to hear the story of the person sitting
1:31:49 across from them. They want to know that you’re the one speaking because that requires vulnerability.
1:31:57 If I tell you a story and it’s not about me, the only vulnerability required is public speaking
1:32:01 and I’ve overcome that and presumably anyone who’s standing in front of other people can at least
1:32:08 publicly speak in an effective, somewhat unnervous way. So me telling you stories about other people
1:32:14 is just me reporting on events for people that you may or may not know. The vulnerability comes
1:32:19 from I’m having difficulties with my wife and we can’t figure out how to solve it. And then one
1:32:25 day I decided to start kissing my wife in the morning and everything changes. That vulnerability
1:32:30 is so powerful. Other people’s stories, you just don’t have that. How do we teach confidence to get
1:32:35 on stage, to tell a story, to have the ability and not only to get on stage and tell a story,
1:32:40 but to be vulnerable. It requires a certain degree of confidence in the audience and yourself.
1:32:45 I get asked inevitably if I work with someone long enough by every client, if I can help them
1:32:51 learn how to be confident. I have more confidence than I need my wife will tell you. And if I could
1:32:55 teach people how to be confident, like a magic pill, I would be the richest person on the planet
1:32:59 because it is the most powerful thing you can have. When you genuinely don’t care what other people
1:33:04 think most of the time, my wife will tell you, “It’s extraordinary and terrible,” depending on
1:33:10 the day. And that’s very true. Sometimes when I genuinely don’t care about most of what people think,
1:33:17 it allows such freedom in life, but also, as my wife will say, sometimes is disastrous.
1:33:21 Are you born that way or is that something you learn? How do you teach people not to care about
1:33:28 what other people think? Well, I used to think and I still kind of think. Most of it happened for
1:33:35 me when I was around the age of 21. I was in an armed robbery. I was managing a McDonald’s restaurant
1:33:40 after closing. Three men broke through the glass and came into the restaurant. And I knew I was
1:33:44 in a lot of trouble because the police had told me about these guys. They had already killed two
1:33:48 people. So when I heard the glass break, I knew what was going on. I was sort of managing the
1:33:53 safe at the time, collecting all the money, and for reasons I will never understand. I had a deposit
1:33:58 of about $7,000 in my hand in a bag. When I heard the glass break, I took it and I reached to the
1:34:02 back of the safe and I dropped it down the chute into the box that I did not have a key for.
1:34:06 In order to a little placard on the box, the manager does not have a key. They got to me,
1:34:09 they put me on the floor, they told me to open the box because they figured out there’s not
1:34:15 enough money in the safe. I told them I can’t and they began beating me. And eventually, one of them
1:34:18 put a gun into my head and said, “I’m going to count back from three and then I’m going to pull
1:34:23 the trigger and I’m going to shoot you if you don’t open the box.” And then they counted back from
1:34:29 three and he pulled the trigger on an empty gun. And I kind of fell apart at that moment. And I
1:34:35 tried to crawl away and they pulled me back and then the guy I was afraid of, the guy, I was afraid
1:34:39 of all of them. There’s one, you know, there’s just one. I’m like, “That’s the one that you don’t,
1:34:44 that’s the one I don’t want to deal with.” And that was the one who put a gun to my head and said,
1:34:48 “This one’s loaded and now I’m really going to blow your head off if you don’t open the safe.”
1:34:55 And when he counted back from three again, I remember being so astounded because all the
1:35:03 sudden I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t angry. The only thing I felt was regret for what I had not
1:35:08 accomplished yet. That I was 20 years old. I was on a greasy tile floor at the back of a McDonald’s
1:35:14 restaurant. I had just been homeless like six weeks before. I was actually awaiting trial for a
1:35:21 crime I did not commit. My life was a disaster. I had all these dreams and I knew with absolute
1:35:26 certainty that I was going to die in that moment. And I just felt I haven’t done anything. And then
1:35:33 he pulled the trigger on an empty gun again, which resulted in a lifetime of PTSD. But it’s a trigger
1:35:38 in my life that suddenly made everything else seem unimportant. Like nothing seems to matter very
1:35:43 much. I get yelled at by my fellow teachers. Some of my teacher friends say, “Matt doesn’t care about
1:35:46 anything. There’s an A schedule, B schedule, and C schedule. You guys have to figure out who’s going
1:35:50 to get which schedule.” And I’ll say, “I don’t care what schedule I get.” And they get mad at me for
1:35:57 not caring. But I’m like, “That’s not a relevant thing.” And so what I tell people is that sort of
1:36:05 a moment where other people’s concern over what I looked like or thought or did all just washed away.
1:36:09 But oftentimes I’m saying, “Listen, there’s not a gun to my head. I’m not about to die. So this is
1:36:14 nothing.” And sometimes it’s not true. Sometimes it is something. And my wife will say, “That can’t
1:36:18 be the level for everything.” And she’s right. And sometimes it is something and I have to acknowledge
1:36:25 that. With all of that said, my brother and sister would tell you that when Matt was a kid,
1:36:30 she just didn’t care what other people thought either. And maybe that is in me a little bit.
1:36:34 I was the oldest of three and then later five growing up in a home that sort of
1:36:40 didn’t have very much parental support. I was sort of taking care of myself at a very early age.
1:36:47 And I suspect that when you’re nine and you’re trying to find food and take care of your siblings and
1:36:52 going to your sister’s parent-teacher conference because you know that the parents aren’t going
1:36:57 to go to the conference. So maybe you can figure out what’s going on. I think maybe that helps a
1:37:02 little bit too. So the problem with all of that is to say, I don’t know how teachable it is.
1:37:07 Public speaking is very difficult and storytelling is even more difficult because you have to be
1:37:13 vulnerable. It’s kind of like going off a high dive. When I was growing up, there was a 14 foot
1:37:17 high dive at the town pool, which would absolutely not be allowed today. It was very dangerous when
1:37:20 you went off it. Like you always had to hold your hands out or you’d smash your head into the bottom
1:37:25 of the pool. But I remember standing there and watching kid after kid after kid go off that
1:37:29 high dive and everyone was fine. They also went to the surface, jumped out of the water,
1:37:34 did it again. And finally, I decided to do it. And even when I was up there and I knew everything
1:37:38 was going to be fine and I’d seen a million kids do it before me, it was still terrifying.
1:37:44 And eventually, I just had to go off and hit the water. And the second time, it was still terrifying.
1:37:48 Even though I had just done it and it didn’t kill me, I had to do it a whole bunch of times before I
1:37:52 finally was able to just go off and not care. And I often think that’s what I’m trying to get people
1:37:58 to do. I can’t make the fear go away the first time. Right. You just have to go off the diving
1:38:04 board and see that it worked out okay. And the beauty of it is if you stand on a stage and you
1:38:08 share something vulnerable, and I have lots of people who have experienced this, you share something
1:38:14 vulnerable, the response you get is extraordinary. Oftentimes when people share something like that,
1:38:19 they’re worried they’re going to be judged for the stupidity, the shame, the ridiculousness.
1:38:24 But we just will all walk around with that. We’re all walking around with something that we are,
1:38:28 we think we’re the only one who does. And it’s never true. But the problem is so few people
1:38:32 are willing to speak about their stupidities and their shames and their foolishnesses,
1:38:35 that the people who are willing to do it are really valued in this world because they make
1:38:41 the world easier for everyone else. And I’ve never had, never in my life have I ever said something
1:38:45 on stage and had someone come to me and say, “I think less of you because of it.” You know,
1:38:50 I tell a story about pretending to be a charity worker for Ronald McDonald’s children’s charities
1:38:54 when I get stuck in New Hampshire one day without any gas. I actually go collecting door-to-door
1:38:58 as a charity worker to get gas money to get home. It’s a pretty terrible thing. Now, I’m able to
1:39:03 tell that story because I was 19 at the time, so a long time ago, that’s okay. But I tell that story
1:39:08 a lot. It’s actually in my first book. And one of the first times I told that story when I stepped
1:39:12 off the stage was sort of intermission. A woman came up to me and she said, “Aren’t you worried
1:39:15 about what people are going to think of you for that?” And I said, “Well, what do you think about
1:39:19 me?” She said, “I actually love you for it.” And I said, “Do you think you’re some kind of unicorn?
1:39:22 Do you think you’re the only nice person in the room?” They all liked me better for it. Just some
1:39:26 of them want to be at the bar, some of them are using the bathroom, and you came to talk to me.”
1:39:31 I said, “But no one in the room is thinking he’s a scoundrel because at 19 with absolutely no money
1:39:36 and destitute, the best solution he found was pretend to collect money for charity.” Now,
1:39:40 if I’d done it the day before, maybe then I don’t tell the story, and maybe you’re right to think
1:39:45 I’m an awful person. I’ve never had a situation where I say something like that on stage and have
1:39:50 anyone say anything but something kind to me. Is there a difference between writing a story
1:39:54 and telling a story? And what are those differences? Yeah, I had that conversation with someone today,
1:40:01 a client who said, “Can you write my keynote for me?” And I said, “No, I don’t do that. That’s also
1:40:05 boring. I don’t want to do it.” I’ve never written anything down that I actually speak on a stage
1:40:10 other than maybe an outline. But even then, it often is just I’m going to tell this story to make
1:40:16 this point and this story like almost nothing because I know that what I put on a page is always
1:40:21 going to be more grammatically correct than what I’m saying. And so when I help someone with a keynote,
1:40:26 I don’t ever want to see the page. They always want to send me the document. I said,
1:40:30 “I don’t want to see the document because a speech does not live on the page. It lives in life. It
1:40:36 lives in the air. It lives in your voice.” I want to hear what you say because what I say and what
1:40:40 you say are going to be very different things. I’m going to say them in different ways. So when
1:40:46 I’m writing, which I do, I mean, I have nine books I believe in writing, I know that if I was to take
1:40:51 something out of my book and read it out loud, it would sound wooden, inauthentic. It would sound
1:40:58 written. If you’ve ever seen David Sedaris perform, he reads from his books and his notes. He stands
1:41:03 behind a lectern and he reads it. And you can tell it’s read. And that’s the goal of that. And
1:41:09 there’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s not performing. And it’s written more to make you laugh
1:41:13 than it is to connect with you because it is a little harder to connect to someone
1:41:20 as they read. It’s why even politicians who use teleprompters, you can’t see the teleprompters.
1:41:24 They’re designed in such a way that you often don’t even know they’re there when a politician’s
1:41:28 using one because you want to believe someone’s speaking from their heart and their mind, which
1:41:32 is why I don’t memorize anything. Everything is remembered but not memorized. If I was to
1:41:37 look at a page or even memorize a page, you would know it right away. My wife and I,
1:41:40 when we attend storytelling shows, will hear a storyteller and I’ll be like,
1:41:43 “That was a great story and it was fully memorized that I’m sure was off the page.” And she’ll go,
1:41:50 “Yes, it was.” And it just does not make us love the person as much as the imperfect, stumbling
1:41:57 storyteller who also told us a story and did it in that authentic, imperfect way. The former director
1:42:02 of the moth, Katherine Burns, once told me I was getting ready to speak in front of 2,500 people.
1:42:07 I told the story and I made a mistake in it and no one knew about me and Katherine because she knew
1:42:12 the story. There was just a place where I forgot something and I had to double back and slide it
1:42:16 back in because I knew I had to have this thing to have the end play out. And I sat down and the
1:42:20 first thing I said was, “Oh, I screwed that up.” And she’s like, “Don’t be ridiculous. You and I
1:42:23 are the only two people who knew you had to double back.” She said, “You did a great job.” I said,
1:42:29 “Fine.” And she said to me, “It’s in the imperfection that the beauty lies because the
1:42:36 imperfection tells us you had not memorized that thing. You remembered it and then you realized
1:42:39 in the midst of the story that you had forgotten something and you went back and caught it and
1:42:45 then moved on and that made everyone feel like you were speaking to them and not at them.”
1:42:48 And I always think about that. The imperfection is the beauty.
1:42:51 Go deeper on the speaking to people and not at them.
1:42:54 Speaking at them is the idea that it’s almost irrelevant who’s in front of me.
1:43:00 90 entrepreneurs at a conference or 2000 people at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or
1:43:07 six people in a library, when all of those are audiences I speak to, someone who has a
1:43:12 sort of memorized speech. I know authors who have them, authors who have their speech that
1:43:16 they take wherever they go and it never changes because they’ve crafted it, memorized it,
1:43:20 and they deliver it. That’s speaking at an audience, meaning nothing’s going to change.
1:43:24 I’m here to say words. I’m going to basically say them to the middle distance
1:43:27 and when I’m done, I will take a few questions and I will go home. That’s at.
1:43:33 If you’re speaking to an audience, people know right away that what I’m hearing tonight
1:43:39 will not be the same thing he says tomorrow night and it’s in those imperfections that
1:43:44 people will detect that. Stopping a sentence to correct what you just said or circling around
1:43:47 or even repeating yourself accidentally and then saying, “Oh, I already told you that I’m sorry.”
1:43:53 That’s a beautiful thing because then they know it’s for them. People want to know that when
1:44:00 you’re speaking, it’s specifically for them. I’ve brought this part of me to you and it’s
1:44:06 never going to be this way again. It’s going to be the same stuff but it’s going to be done in
1:44:10 a very different way tomorrow and I might leave something out, put something new in,
1:44:14 which I often do, but that’s the difference between speaking to the middle distance,
1:44:19 regardless of who’s in front of you or looking at people and saying, “Who are they?” I once did
1:44:25 a show at the Brooklyn Historical Society. I went there with a story to tell for a moth story slam
1:44:29 and I’d never been there before. It was like a one-time deal and when I got in and looked at
1:44:34 the audience, they were basically all blue-haired old ladies and I thought the story I have is not
1:44:39 going to be appreciated by these ladies. It was a sort of raunchier story. It just wasn’t going to
1:44:45 work but because I don’t memorize my stories, I spent 15 minutes pulling out all the humor that
1:44:51 I knew wouldn’t land and leaning into the heart instead and I won that slam and it was absolutely
1:44:57 not the story I would ever tell the next night. No one laughed at the story that night and yet
1:45:00 they loved it. The next night, if I tell it, everyone’s going to be roaring with laughter
1:45:04 and they’re going to love it and that’s the difference between speaking to an audience
1:45:09 versus having a night. If I come to you and I’m an author and I say, “Listen, I don’t talk. I don’t
1:45:15 do talks but I need to write really compelling stories. What are the key points that you would
1:45:20 get me to learn or understand?” The first thing I would do is especially for an author, I’d say,
1:45:24 “Let’s tell stories.” We’re not going to read from our book because no one has ever wanted that
1:45:29 in the history of the world. Let’s tell stories and let’s find interesting stories about how your
1:45:34 book got written, moments along the way. People are really interested in the work that other people
1:45:38 do. They want to know how the process works. What do you do as a firefighter? Do you live
1:45:42 in the firehouse? How many days do you live in the firehouse? What’s it like? People really want
1:45:46 to know that stuff and the same thing for an author. If you ever hear me give a book talk,
1:45:50 it’s never about even the content of the book. I almost don’t tell you anything about what’s
1:45:54 inside the book. I tell you about the journey to write the book and that’s the method of
1:45:59 let me find half a dozen stories about the writing of the book, where the idea came from.
1:46:04 That better be a story, not just a one sentence. It’s a story. I don’t know if you’ve noticed
1:46:09 but I can’t answer a question without going on for a long time with a story. We’re looking for
1:46:15 those stories along the way that will lead people to want to open the book because they’ve taken
1:46:19 the journey on the creation of the book and now they’re going to want to open it up and find out
1:46:22 what’s inside. They’re invested in it almost. Right. The same thing with the keynote people.
1:46:26 For someone who says, “Can you help me with my keynote?” We start at the end just like a story.
1:46:30 What are you trying to say? When they say, “I’m trying to say three things,” I say, “Well,
1:46:33 you can’t.” You’ve got to say one thing and then we’ll say, “All right, that’s what you’re trying
1:46:38 to say. Let’s find a beginning that’s the opposite of that, the acknowledgement of there was once a
1:46:42 time when you didn’t know this thing and now you know this thing.” But then the next step is to find
1:46:46 those stories. Let’s find some stories along the way that led to that understanding because a keynote
1:46:52 is typically 60 to 90 minutes. We can’t tell a 60 or 90 minute story but we can tell six stories
1:46:57 over the course of 90 minutes that will support it and be entertaining. That’s what I’m helping
1:47:01 authors do all the time is find those stories to tell. But those are stories that you’re telling
1:47:08 people. I mean, in a book, I’m writing a book on XYZ. How do I tell a better story in that chapter?
1:47:14 I see. Yeah. What makes a difference when you’re writing a story versus you’re telling… You can
1:47:19 use intonation and pitch and you can speed things up and you can go faster and slower and you can
1:47:24 pull me… I can’t do that on the page as easy. Right. No. One of the things you can feel a little
1:47:29 better about with a book is you can actually use more adjectives because people expect them. I still
1:47:34 don’t. The first novel I wrote, I’ll never forget it. My agent called and said, “We have no idea
1:47:40 what your character looks like. You have not provided one ounce of description of your protagonist.
1:47:45 That’s crazy.” And I said, “Oh, no, I kind of visualized them as me.” And she’s like, “That’s not
1:47:50 actually a thing.” I have such a poor visual memory. That helps me as a storyteller.
1:47:54 I lived in my home for 10 years with my wife. We were driving home one day. Somehow we started
1:47:59 talking about the color of houses. I told her we lived in a yellow house. She said we live in a tan
1:48:03 house. I said, “It’s yellow like the sun.” And when we pulled down the street, I looked and went,
1:48:07 “Oh, my God, it’s yellow.” 10 years, I didn’t know the color of my house. So it’s not surprising
1:48:12 that I don’t love adjectives anyway. But on the page, we can use a few more so that can be helpful.
1:48:18 The paragraph and sentence structure oftentimes can replace intonation and pacing. What I’m always
1:48:24 fighting with my editors on is this single sentence should be part of the previous paragraph.
1:48:29 And I say, “No, it should not.” Because I wanted to stand out in the way I would punch the sentence
1:48:34 if I was speaking it. So if you look at the way I write, especially today, actually, if you compare
1:48:38 my first novel to my latest novel, you’ll see an enormous difference because this understanding has
1:48:45 come to me. I can craft the sentences and the paragraphs to look such a way that it can provide
1:48:49 some of the humor and some of the suspense. That’s why I hate closed captions. My kids watch
1:48:53 everything with closed captions all the time. And I can’t stand it because it gives the joke away
1:48:57 all the time. You see the joke before the person says the joke. But that’s how sometimes people
1:49:04 write, which is they don’t allow the punch to stand alone. They lose the punch in the previous
1:49:09 paragraph of the eight sentences and the punch is the last one. And I say, “Take the punch out and
1:49:14 make it its own paragraph.” It looks weird in the eyes of an editor because it is associated with
1:49:20 the paragraph before. But I say, “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the physical effect
1:49:25 that the reader has when they finish the paragraph and then bang, there’s another sentence there,
1:49:31 all by itself in a way that I love.” It’s also the reason I drop subjects all the time in sentences.
1:49:37 So rather than saying, “I went to the store,” especially if I’m emailing people, I’ll say,
1:49:42 “Went to the store rather than I went to the store.” Because I want to punch right away. I want to get
1:49:46 into the sentence quicker. I don’t want them to feel the action of it. So you can start to think
1:49:51 about things like that when you’re writing to sort of bring some of those things that we get to use
1:49:57 on a stage onto the page. A simple version would be someone would say, “Use italics and bold.” And
1:50:02 that’s fine. But I kind of feel like that’s a 400-year-old trick that’s been used for a very
1:50:08 long time. And I think sometimes it actually doesn’t work. It feels almost corny to suddenly
1:50:12 land on italicized words, or as I would much rather be doing the things like I’ve described.
1:50:18 So thinking about the way the print lands on a page can really make a difference in the way
1:50:22 that it’s affecting a reader. That’s really interesting. I think also your topic sentence
1:50:26 for a paragraph pulls people in or a lot of people just read the first sentence.
1:50:32 When you put the final point at the end of a paragraph that’s five or six sentences,
1:50:36 you’re losing a certain percentage of your audience along the way because they’re reading
1:50:40 the first sentence. And they’re like, “Okay, I get this paragraph. I’ll go to the next paragraph.”
1:50:43 Right. And so they missed that point.
1:50:47 Common mistake with storytellers all the time is I teach them you’ve been taught to write in a
1:50:51 boring way, which is topic sentence and supporting details. That’s a disastrous way to write.
1:50:55 Because you’re right. Once you present the topic sentence, people know you’re going to provide
1:50:59 some evidence. And unless I’m like a nerd who wants to know the efficacy of the evidence,
1:51:05 I’m moving on. So in storytelling, we never start with a topic sentence. If I want to say I had a
1:51:10 really rotten grandmother, right? I would never start the sentence with, “My grandmother was a
1:51:14 terrible person.” And then list the way she was terrible. That’s how you were taught to write,
1:51:17 but that’s a terrible way to write. Instead, I would say, “My grandmother did this to me. My
1:51:22 grandmother did this to me. My grandmother did this to me. And then the last sentence might be,
1:51:26 “My grandmother was a terrible person.” Or I might say to myself as the writer or the storyteller,
1:51:31 “I’ve made my point. I’m going to allow that topic sentence to go unsaid because I think they’re
1:51:36 going to know it already.” And audiences love that. They want to put things together on their own.
1:51:40 But you’re right. When you lead with a topic sentence, you’ve kind of failed most of the time.
1:51:45 Now, there are times when this is appropriate. If you’re writing for a newspaper, right? If you’re
1:51:50 writing scientific things, I was going to write a book with a sociologist at one point because I’ve
1:51:55 spent 26 years now primarily in the company of women because I’m an elementary school teacher.
1:51:59 I’m almost always the only man in a room. And I actually attended an all-women’s college.
1:52:03 So for four years before that, I was in a classroom and I was the only man.
1:52:10 So I wanted to write a book about sort of my reflections on living in a world filled with
1:52:14 females for all my life. And I was going to partner with the sociologist. And ultimately,
1:52:19 the project fell apart because she wanted to write it like a sociologist, which was topic
1:52:23 sentence and supporting details. And I said, “No one reads your books.” And I know why because your
1:52:27 book’s boring because you write in the way that you were sort of taught. And I wanted to do the
1:52:32 opposite. I said, “I want to lead them to the conclusion.” And she said, “No, you start with it
1:52:36 and then you explain why it’s the conclusion.” And we just couldn’t come together because
1:52:40 she wanted to write a boring book and I wanted to write an entertaining book. Her book would have
1:52:45 been respected by academics. Her book could have been read. And my book would have been read and
1:52:50 been impactful to the people I actually wanted to be impactful, which was not academics, but
1:52:57 basically men who maybe operate in a female world and are not doing it effectively,
1:53:01 which is what my goal was. As a fifth grade teacher, how do you advocate that parents
1:53:06 teach kids how to write? I tell them a bunch of things. One of the things is if you’re talking
1:53:12 about spelling, grammar, or handwriting, you’re making a terrible mistake. You’re making writing
1:53:16 unfun. When kids are little, they’re writing with pen and paper. And then when they get older,
1:53:20 they’re typing. They say, “Never look at the writing that your child is doing. Always have them
1:53:24 read it aloud.” Because what comes out of your child’s mouth is always more beautiful than what
1:53:29 they’re putting on the page. That nonsense on the page, that’ll get cleared up eventually.
1:53:34 We don’t have to worry about that. What we want is to make kids love to write. That is the only
1:53:38 goal every teacher should have. Because once you love to write, you’ll start writing and you’ll just
1:53:44 get good at it. So we want to do things like let kids write as many things as they want to.
1:53:48 There’s mistakes where teachers say, “Well, I need you to finish this before you start that.”
1:53:51 But as a writer, I can tell you I’ve never met an author who’s only working on one thing. There’s
1:53:56 the thing that’s to do and then there’s the thing you’re cheating on. And then there’s the thing
1:53:59 you’re not telling anyone about that you think is actually the greatest of all the things you’re
1:54:04 writing. And then there’s the writing in the new genre that you want to explore. There’s all of
1:54:08 that. And yet when we get to school, we tell kids they have to write one thing and finish the one
1:54:12 thing and then move on. We don’t let them abandon writing. My daughter is a writer. She’s a real
1:54:19 serious writer. I think she was 130 pages into a novel. I know at the age of 12, she’s an unusual
1:54:22 human being. At the age of 12, she got that far into a novel and she said, “Dad, I don’t think
1:54:25 it’s that good. I don’t think I’m going to finish it.” And I think a lot of parents would have said,
1:54:29 “You got to finish that. Look at all the work you put in.” As an author, I said, “Yeah, if it
1:54:34 sucks, you should abandon it.” I said, “The lesson is figure that out a little earlier next time. I’ve
1:54:39 abandoned a lot of things. I’ve never actually gotten that far into something and needing to
1:54:44 abandon it. So let’s try to figure out how to do that a little sooner.” But we often tell kids
1:54:49 they can’t abandon their work. They got to finish it. Let me look at it. Parents want to see spelling
1:54:55 and grammar and punctuation because that’s the things they understand how to fix. So they’re
1:54:58 like, “Oh, show me that because I can actually be helpful.” When a kid reads out loud, you don’t know
1:55:05 what to say. And I always say, “Say kind things. Say what you liked about it. Say the things that
1:55:09 you thought were extraordinary. And the thing that you know has to be fixed or the thing you
1:55:15 really want. Make it like the last thing you say after you say eight things.” In teaching,
1:55:20 we try to achieve a six to one ratio, six positive comments for every corrective comment that we’re
1:55:26 going to offer, and try to make that your home too. So just say good things so they keep writing.
1:55:31 Because if you say things that are not kind or you’re overly critical, the thing about writing or
1:55:37 even public speaking and storytelling is it’s not like math. Two plus two exists for everyone.
1:55:43 If you don’t get two plus two right, you got it wrong, but it doesn’t mean that you’re like bad
1:55:47 in a heart and mind sense. But when someone stands on the stage and shares a story, they’re
1:55:52 essentially saying, “Here’s my humanity. What do you think of it?” When a kid writes something on
1:55:57 a page, whether it’s an essay or a story, they’re saying, “Here’s everything I have that represents
1:56:01 me. What do you think?” And if you go, “Well, I didn’t really understand.” Right there, you’re
1:56:07 just like, you’re stabbing the person they are. You need a capital letter. Yeah. It makes them
1:56:11 want to never go back to it again. And again, the goal for every teacher or every parent is to get
1:56:18 kids excited about writing and worry less about the mechanics of writing. That comes and it’s
1:56:22 relevant, but not important. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for your time.
1:56:27 We always end on the same question, which is a personal question. What is success for you?
1:56:36 I just had this conversation with someone. For me, success is always that at some very
1:56:43 future tomorrow, I’ll be doing something different than I’m doing today. I think Stasis is death.
1:56:48 I have a company that produces storytelling content and I’ve got a business partner and
1:56:52 he always wants to plan out six months or a year. And I know why he wants to do it. Actually,
1:56:56 my production manager wants the same thing and I resist it all the time because I feel like if
1:57:02 you’ve planned out six months, we don’t have the opportunity for me to stumble upon the new thing
1:57:10 that I want to stumble upon. So for me, success is in six months, will I be doing something I never
1:57:16 could have imagined doing today that I’m now trying and maybe loving or maybe hating, but at least
1:57:21 finding a thing that I want to start doing that is different. As long as my life is constantly
1:57:28 evolving and I am being presented with new challenges and new opportunities or I’m cracking
1:57:35 doors open that I had never cracked open before, I feel like I’m successful. So avoiding this
1:57:39 moment that we’re in right now, making sure that everything that’s going on in my life right now
1:57:42 is not what’s happening six months from now, that’ll be perceived as success for me.
1:57:54 Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes,
1:58:01 transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project.
1:58:08 Recently, I’ve started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview.
1:58:12 I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about
1:58:17 other connections to episodes and sort of what’s got me pondering that I maybe haven’t quite figured
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1:58:39 episode. The Furnum Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking,
1:58:45 Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It’s a transformative guide that
1:58:50 hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for
1:59:03 unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time!
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