How to tell better stories | Matthew Dicks (Storyworthy)

1. 0:00 – 4:27

   Matthew’s background

   1. MDMatthew Dicks0:00

      Everyone loves the word storytelling in business. It's a huge buzzword. They love to think of themselves as storytellers. But when they come to me, they don't really want to be storytellers, because to be a storyteller means you have to separate yourself from the herd. And in their mind, that risks them getting picked off, right? Getting picked off by some predator. But the- the alternative is, you're in the herd, which means you're forgettable. I mean, how many times have you gone to a conference, listened to someone speak, and by the time you're pulling into the driveway, you really can't remember anything that they said? Because that's what happens if we don't speak in story. Our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart or facts or- or statistics or, you know, platitudes, or ideas that are not attached to imagery. So, the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten. 100%, you will be forgotten.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:51

      (Instrumental music) Today, my guest is Matthew Dicks. Matthew is the author of my all-time favorite book on storytelling, Storyworthy, which a previous guest of the podcast recommended to me and I couldn't put it down, so I reached out to Matthew and got him on the podcast. Matthew is a 59-time Moth StorySLAM winner and nine-time Grand SLAM champ. He's also the author of nine other books, including fictions, rock operas, even a comic book. In his day job, he is an elementary school teacher, and on the side, teaches both individuals and teams at companies like Slack, Amazon, Lego, and Salesforce the skill of storytelling and public speaking through his company, Speak Up. In our conversation, we get very tactical about how to tell better stories, both in life and in work, how to feel more comfortable speaking on stage, how to come up with story ideas that you can deploy when the need arises, why every good story is centered around one five-second moment of transformation, and so much more. Matt is an incredible human being, and I am excited to spread his message more widely. If you're interested in this topic, definitely pick up his book, Storyworthy. It'll change your life. With that, I bring you Matthew Dicks after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file, and building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into issues. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences, from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like error on line 53 and never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema's offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Maui Nui Venison, a mission-based food company bringing the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door. I actually joined Maui Nui Venison earlier this year after hearing their ad on The Tim Ferriss Podcast, and I'm excited to be spreading the message further. Not only does this company provide the most nutrient-dense and protein-dense red meat available, their operation produces the only stress-free 100% wild-harvested red meat on the market, that is the only one of its kind in the world, actively managing Maui's invasive axis deer populations, helping to restore balance to vulnerable ecosystems, food systems, and communities in Hawaii. Also, it is seriously delicious, not at all gamey, and easy to cook. My wife and I made stew and steaks and all kinds of grilled goodies with the meat. We also feel great about it as a protein from an ethical standpoint. I highly recommend trying their all-natural venison jerky sticks for an optimal protein snack, as well as a wide variety of fresh cuts, all available in their online butcher shop. There are limited memberships available, but you can sign up and get 20% off your first order at mauinuivenison.com/lenny. That's mauinuivenison.com/lenny.

2. 4:27 – 10:29

   The five-second moment

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:28

      Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

   2. MDMatthew Dicks4:31

      It's my pleasure. I'm excited to be here.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:33

      I'm even more excited to have you on. The way I found out about you is a previous guest mentioned your book as a book that really transformed the way they think about storytelling and even marketing. And I completely agree. It's the most tactical, practical, and also just entertaining book on just how to tell better stories. And when I was reading it, I was just like, "Hey, what if I reach out to the author of this book and see if he'd come on?" And, uh, here we are.

   4. MDMatthew Dicks4:55

      I'm thrilled to be here, and I appreciate what you had to say. I- I tried to make my book as sort of actionable as possible. You know, I think the only reason I'm sort of successful in what I do is that I've been a teacher for 25 years, and I'm a storyteller, so the two of those things come together pretty well for me.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky5:12

      Okay. So, I thought it'd be fun to start with, maybe the most mind-expanding takeaway I got from this book is this idea that all good stories are rooted in this five-second moment of someone's life. Can you just talk about this insight and maybe share an example or two to make this real?

   6. MDMatthew Dicks5:28

      Sure. Uh, well, that is true, what you just said, which is essentially every story is about a singular moment. I call it five seconds. It can be one second, honestly. It's a moment of either transformation, meaning sort of I'm telling you a story about how I once used to be one kind of person and now I'm a new kind of person. Or more common is realization, which is I used to think something, and then some stuff happened, and now I think a new thing. And those changes, they- they take place sort of over time, or really what happens is, it's an accumulation of events and feelings and thoughts,... that ultimately result in a singular moment where that flip actually happens, and I think that's true for almost everyone. It feels like it took a long time, but there really was one second when you thought one thing, and then the next second when you thought the new thing. And the purpose of a story is essentially to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible to the audience so that the audience can sort of, in a way, experience that flip, that transformation or realization along with the storyteller. So 98% of the story is the context to bring that singular moment into fruition, and that is true for stories that we tell out loud, stories we tell on the page, novels that I write, movies that I watch, television shows that I watch, all of the stories of the world that are worth hearing. And truly just about every story told that qualifies as a story has one of those moments.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky6:58

      That's a big statement. Is there- is there an example too you could share? Either stories we know or just tell a short story, whatever is easier to give people like, "Oh, wow, you're totally right."

   8. MDMatthew Dicks7:06

      Sure. Well, I'll tell you one that happened actually today. How about that?

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky7:09

      Amazing. Amazing.

   10. MDMatthew Dicks7:10

       So I'm teaching math today. I'm an elementary school teacher. And I'm teaching math, and I have a student in my class. Her name is Eileen, and she's one of those kids that I worry about a little bit because she's got some anxiety. So she's not the most confident person in the world. And in September, I was aware of this, so I've been working really hard at building confidence with her. And so today we're doing some math, and I'm calling kids to the board, and I'm sort of looking at Eileen and wondering, "Is today the day? Am I gonna call Eileen to the board?" Because doing so, there's a risk, there's inherent risk that she could, you know, be upset. She could embarrass herself in front of the- the class in a way that means something to her, and I just wasn't sure, so I didn't call her to the board. And so at the end of the math lesson, I wandered over to her desk, and I said, "So Eileen, I was thinking about calling you to the board today, but I just wasn't sure if you're there yet. What do you think?" And she said to me, "First of all, I don't like that cheeky smile of yours." And that is all I needed to hear. That was my five-second moment. That was the moment of realization where I understood that Eileen trusted me, felt confident enough in my classroom that she could be herself, that she could fire off a quip at a teacher, sort of like, you know, take a shot at me. I knew at that point that now I can call her to the board, that she's gonna be okay. So, you know, essentially, it is a very brief story that I could actually expand into something much more meaningful. I could make that into a five or six-minute story about my journey with this student, which would include in the longer version of it the steps that I took to discover who she was, the steps I took to help her reach the point she's at now. I- I would probably pull in some backstory about students who I was not so successful with, some of my failures before I learned how to be a better teacher, and then I'd bring it to the moment where she says, "First of all, I don't like that cheeky smile," and that's all I need to hear. So that is essentially a five-second moment for me. That is the same though as any other five-second moment. You know, if you think about a movie like Star Wars, the first Star Wars that came out, right, that is a movie essentially about religion, which people sort of don't always see but it is true. There's a boy on a planet, and he wants to go to space someday and fly a spaceship and use blasters to defeat the empire. And along the way, he meets a religious figure, so Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he introduces him to a religion called The Force. And when the final moment comes for Luke Skywalker to defeat the empire, his- his vision of using technology, a spaceship, and a blaster to destroy the empire, all of that goes away, and he turns off his technology in his spaceship. Instead, he uses The Force to guide his weapon to defeat the enemy. And that is a story about a boy who once had no religion, and then some stuff happened, and he had religion in the end. And that's why a story like that resonates with us in a way that another story might not because we all understand what it's like to not believe in something and then find belief in something, whether that is religious belief or I used to think cheeseburgers didn't taste good, and now I believe that they taste good. Either way, we understand that process and we can connect with Luke Skywalker in a meaningful way. So every story essentially has those moments, including, "I don't like that cheeky smile."

3. 10:29 – 14:28

   Knowing the ending

   1. MDMatthew Dicks10:29

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky10:29

      With this moment, what's also interesting is you talk about how knowing that moment of change also tells you how the story will end. So as a storyteller, you will know how it ends based on knowing what this moment is, which then also tells you how it's gonna start roughly. Can you just- can you just talk about that realization? 'Cause it- to me, every time I watch a movie now I'm like, "Wow, I know exactly how it's gonna turn out just from the beginning."

   3. MDMatthew Dicks10:51

      Yeah. Right, so we start as storytellers at the end. Well, we start at the end if we are telling true stories about ourselves or our companies or our products, things that we know. I'm also a fiction writer. So when I start my novels, it's much more self-discovery. I really don't know the end of it. But in the storytelling that we're talking about, you have to know the end because you've lived the moment and the end informs everything. So you know what you're going to say. You found a moment worth speaking to, that five-second moment, and then whatever that moment is, in my case, I discover that Eileen has more confidence than I realized and is ready to take a big step forward, what's the opposite of me realizing Eileen has confidence and is ready to step forward? It is Eileen does not have confidence, and I need to help her find that confidence. So that's the opposites that will work in a story. Essentially, a story is about these two- these two moments in time, a beginning and an end, and they are operating in opposition to each other, sometimes more so than others, sometimes exactly in opposition. But you're right. If you watch a movie and you pay attention to the first 10 to 15 minutes of a movie, you will ultimately know how that movie's going to end. You'll see a character. You'll discover what that character needs or their flaw.... or their desire, and you know that that's what's going to be at the end. You know, uh, the easiest one is a romantic comedy. Two people are not in love at the beginning of the movie. You know they're going to be in love at the end of the movie, right? Even knowing it doesn't mean the story's ruined. We can get there in a very entertaining way. When Harry Met Sally, that movie, when it begins, Harry and Sally actually say they hate each other at the very beginning of the movie. "I hate you, Harry." Right? "I hate that man so much." We know they're going to end up together, and their journey is well worth the fact that we know what's going to happen at the end. So, you know, it ruins a little bit of storytelling for people who sort of think like me and go, "Oh, well, I know where this is going." But you have to do it in an entertaining way, filled with all the other things we talk about in storytelling. But yeah, every story should be essentially a beginning and an end in opposition to each other, and you should start at the end. That guarantees that you have something important to say, rather than what most people do, which is they simply report on their lives. They just tell you stuff that happened over the course of time in some chronological way that ultimately doesn't lead to anything. You want to always be saying something of import, so we start at the end with that moment of import.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky13:21

      What's funny is I was thinking of When Harry Met Sally exactly as you were talking as an example. My wife wants to watch that movie basically every night. It's like the one movie she could just watch a billion times.

   5. MDMatthew Dicks13:31

      Well, that's the power of story. I tell people this all the time. You know, why are we telling stories? You've never asked to see a PowerPoint presentation a second time. You- you've never gone to bed and dreamt about a PowerPoint presentation. You've never heard someone give a keynote and thought, "I hope I get to watch that keynote again tomorrow." But movies, you'll watch a movie 100 times, because it's a story, and our minds are wired to enjoy story over, and over, and over again. You have a- you have a small child, right? Eventually, you're going to be reading to that child when you- when your baby's old enough, and you're going to discover kids want to read the same book 50 times. They're really no different than adults, except kid books are so small, you can read them, you know, endlessly. A movie takes two hours, so you don't get to read it as often as you might want or watch it as often as you might want. But Harry Met Sally comes on, and you're halfway through, you're probably in. Even though you know every scene, you can probably do the dialogue, we're wired for story. That's why it's so important.

4. 14:28 – 15:59

   The importance of including a transformation

   1. MDMatthew Dicks14:28

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky14:28

      Why is something changing so important? Why is that so critical to a good story, someone having a change or transforming?

   3. MDMatthew Dicks14:35

      Well, I think the actual moment of transformation lends importance to the story and allows the audience to connect to it. If I reported on my day to you, my day at- teaching in a classroom, I am unlikely to connect with you unless you are also a teacher and you experience things similar to me. My wife is a kindergarten teacher. I'm a fifth grade teacher. If both of us report on our day, oddly, we will not really connect very often. She is teaching them how to write the letter C, and I am teaching them how to use the standard algorithm in multiplication. They could not be further apart. So reporting on the moments that you have experienced in the day is not a way to connect to people. But when we talk about change, change has a great universal appeal. So you might not be a teacher who's trying to teach someone to find confidence in their life, but you might be a person who once lacked confidence and then found confidence in the way Eileen did. Or you might be a parent or, uh, the boss of someone who is trying to bring confidence to your child, or your employee, your salesperson, whatever it is. When we do change, when we're focused in on that change, we increase exponentially the universal appeal to the story and our ability to connect to an audience, even though the content we're speaking about has nothing to do with them. The actual emotional appeal will cause people to connect

5. 15:59 – 18:19

   The dinner test

   1. MDMatthew Dicks15:59

      to us.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky16:00

      Fascinating. So building on that same, uh, thread of change, you also have this kind of checklist for what makes a good story, what is a good story, and one of the... And I think it's only a three-point checklist. One is there's a change that happens. Can you talk about the other two? I think there's only other two.

   3. MDMatthew Dicks16:16

      Well, the dinner test is probably one that you're thinking of.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky16:19

      Yeah. That's right.

   5. MDMatthew Dicks16:19

      Right. So the dinner test is the idea that when you're telling a story in a formal way, if you're performing on a stage, or delivering a keynote, or even delivering sort of a pitch to entrepreneurs or a sales pitch, essentially the story that you're telling should be very closely related to the story you would tell someone if you were having dinner, right? So there should be no sort of performance art included within your story or within your- within your talk. So weird things that people do should not be done, like opening a story with unattributed dialogue. You know, so you're standing on stage and you open your story with, "'Jim, it's time to come in for dinner,' my wife said." Like, that's just weird. We don't talk like that as regular people, so you should not speak like that ever. In the history of the world, you should never speak like that. But people do it all the time. It's- it's this weird sort of appendage from childhood when bad writing teachers thought that this was a good idea. Or- or you start with a sound, which is very popular. In like first grade, you teach- you teach kids to start with sound mostly 'cause teachers are not writers, so they don't understand what writing actually is, and so they open with stories with things like, "Bang, the door opened." But if you and I were having dinner and you said, "Hey, how was your day, Matt?" And I said, "Well, let me tell you, Lenny. Bang, the door opened," you would not have dinner with me again. So you have to be thinking that this is a slightly elevated version of the dinner story, meaning you're probably not going to be interrupted in the middle of your story, and you want to have a little more shape to it, and you want to avoid some of the verbal detritus that tends to fill our lives. You don't want to be saying, "You know," and, "Like I said." You know, all of that nonsense sort of should get pushed to the side. But essentially people should feel like you're kind of speaking in a very natural way. So the dinner test is pretty important in that regard.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky18:09

      Awesome. Yeah. So the lesson there is when you're telling a story, make it sure that it's something that you could potentially tell at a dinner.... party slightly elevated, is the way you put it.

   7. MDMatthew Dicks18:17

      Slight- slightly elevated, exactly.

6. 18:19 – 20:24

   You can’t tell someone else’s story

   1. MDMatthew Dicks18:19

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky18:19

      I think the third point you make is that it has to be your story. You can't be telling a story on behalf of someone else. Maybe chat about that briefly?

   3. MDMatthew Dicks18:25

      Right. So if you're telling a story about someone else, essentially, you might as well be telling fiction, because that person's not in the room and, to the audience, they don't really exist, unless they're... You know, if they can't see them, that person is just another human being who supposedly lives somewhere in the world or once lived in the world. And because of that, you are almost unable to express any vulnerability in your story. You can't reveal anything about yourself. And storytelling is... One of the key parts of storytelling is to be vulnerable with your audience, meaning I'm gonna say stuff in a meaningful way. I might say stuff that most people are unwilling to share in a public way, but I'm at least going to, like, offer up a little bit about my heart and mind. If I offer up the heart and mind of someone else, that doesn't really require any vulnerability. The only vulnerability is I have to stand in front of people and talk, which I know is challenging for some people, but that doesn't mean anything to the audience. We kind of don't care if you're having a hard time presenting, if it's making you nervous. That doesn't mean much to an audience. What we really want is someone to open up their hearts and minds. So stories have to be about you in some way. There's tricks where you can tell stories about other people by sort of taking that story and centering it on yourself. You know, one of the examples I... I work with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. And in the past, what they would do is they would just tell the story of the Holocaust survivor, who has often at this point passed away, and it really does feel like fiction. You know, a long time ago, in a place that wasn't this, a terrible thing happened. And there's a certain level of empathy and sympathy that you might feel but, what I teach them to do is to tell stories about themselves, and then, at some point in the story about themselves, they're gonna talk about how the experience of their parent or grandparent during the Holocaust has informed or changed their own life too. So they get to dip into some history, but that history is relevant to the storyteller. So it's no longer history. It's now something changed in me, because something terrible happened to my parent or grandparent.

7. 20:24 – 23:14

   Vacation stories

   1. MDMatthew Dicks20:24

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky20:24

      Just as a tangent, you also have this funny, useful checklist for how to tell vacation stories.

   3. MDMatthew Dicks20:29

      (laughs)

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky20:30

      Can you share that?

   5. MDMatthew Dicks20:30

      Well, first try not to, right?

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky20:32

      I think that's step one, do not-

   7. MDMatthew Dicks20:33

      Yeah.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky20:34

      ... tell vacation stories.

   9. MDMatthew Dicks20:34

      Most vacation stories are just simply a recounting of your vacation at the expense of another person, right? So-

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky20:41

       Mm-hmm.

   11. MDMatthew Dicks20:41

       ... unless something happened on that vacation where you experienced one of these five-second fundamental moments of change, nobody cares about your vacation. And if something did happen, only be talking about the moment when it happened. So if I had a moment of change that took place on a Thursday night at dinner, right? That story is now going to take place on the Thursday night at dinner, and it's irrelevant that I'm in Aruba, right? The fact that I am on vacation is almost completely irrelevant to the story, other than I may want to offer my location, but I'm not gonna talk about the beach the day before or the scuba diving or the plane. All of that goes away. We're telling moments in our lives, and it doesn't matter where they happen. If your location is paramount to your story because you want people to know you were in Aruba, then you have to understand no one actually cares that you were in Aruba, and you're just a terrible person for trying to, like, dump that on someone and use up their time so you can relive your vacation and perhaps humble brag about how much fun you had.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky21:46

       This will be a good segment for people to send their friends if they want to tell them their vacation stories, and like-

   13. MDMatthew Dicks21:49

       Yeah.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky21:49

       ... here's a, here's a tip for how to do this better.

   15. MDMatthew Dicks21:51

       Exactly.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky21:52

       And just understand why it needs to be on a Thursday and at dinner. Is it just... Is the advice there keep it very s- focused and small unless there's some really essential reason to share the context, uh, around the dinner?

   17. MDMatthew Dicks22:03

       Yeah, exactly. The shortest version of every story is the best version of every story. Starting as close to the end of a story is always the best place to begin. So if I had a moment of realization during dessert, you know, in a restaurant in Aruba, I may never tell them I'm in Aruba. I might start my story with, "The dessert hits the table, and my wife says something that causes me to begin thinking," right? And that would be the beginning of the story. The fact that I'm on an island in the Caribbean may never come up in the entire story because it doesn't turn out to be relevant to the story.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky22:39

       There's a lesson that, uh, another guest shared, Wes Kao, about... She calls it start when the bear starts eating your tent or something like that. Like, jump to when the bear is eating your tent. Like, don't do this whole introduction to why or how you got to this tent. It's just like the bear is eating our tent. That's where the story should start.

   19. MDMatthew Dicks22:54

       Yes. Kurt Vonnegut said that. Kurt Vonnegut said, "Start as close to the end as possible." He was talking about short stories written on the page, but it is a true story. Uh, it's a true notion in oral storytelling too. And it is, of all the things I help people with their stories, the most frequent suggestion that I make for revision is you've started your story in the wrong place.

8. 23:14 – 25:12

   Adding stakes to the story

   1. MDMatthew Dicks23:14

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:14

      Mm-hmm. Okay. I want to shift to business context advice. But before we do that, there's another really important element of storytelling, which is having stakes and having important stakes. So could you just talk about what are, what is a stake and why is it important to have stakes? And then just what are examples of s- adding stakes to your story to make them more engaging?

   3. MDMatthew Dicks23:32

      Sure. So stakes are essentially sort of what your audience should be worried about, what they should be wanting for you, what they should be concerned about, what they should be wondering about. If your audience isn't wondering what you're about to say, they're no longer listening to you. And if you... You have to internalize that in a deep and fundamental way. When I work with people in business, they are constantly under this misconception that people want to hear what they have to say. You know, some vice president of marketing thinks that because they're a vice president of marketing and everyone is sitting in a chair and looking at them, that they automatically have that audience's attention. I assume all the time, 100% of the time, that no one wants to hear anything I have to say. And so I am relentless in my attempt to get the audience to be constantly wondering what the next sentence is. And stakes are a big part of that. Stakes are-I wonder what's going to happen next. I'm worried about this guy. Will he get what he wants? Will he get his comeuppance, because he seems like kind of a jerk in this story? All of those things are stakes. What is at stake for the storyteller, the company, the product, whatever it is, and therefore what the audience is worried about as well? It's why, it's why Star Wars opens with a big spaceship shooting at a small spaceship. We don't even know who's on it yet, but we're already on the small spaceship side. We're already worried that a small spaceship is being shot at by a big spaceship, right? That's why stories start this way. Alfred Hitchcock has a, uh, has, has a movie where it opens with a police officer is chasing a man across a roof. We don't know who to root for, but something is at stake here, and now we're wondering what's going to happen next. We have to do the same thing with our ordinary true life everyday stories. We have to put stakes into stories.

9. 25:12 – 29:20

   The power of surprise

   1. MDMatthew Dicks25:12

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky25:12

      There's something that you teach around surprise and the power of surprise as a part of stakes. I forget exactly what that is, but does that ring a bell?

   3. MDMatthew Dicks25:19

      Well, I'll separate them really.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky25:20

      Mm-hmm.

   5. MDMatthew Dicks25:21

      So with stakes, there's lots of ways to insert stakes. I always say you should have what I call an elephant at the beginning of the story, which is, which is actually a big spaceship shooting at a little spaceship, or a police officer chasing a, a guy across the roof. We have to immediately know that something is at stakes. We have to be worried about something. In my little Eileen story that I told you, I said, "I'm teaching math and I've got this student, and I'm worried about her 'cause I want to call her to the board, but I know she might lack some confidence." Right away, I have to make it clear what kind of story we're in. In a movie, you get a trailer. You don't often go to a movie and not sort of not have any awareness about what's about to happen. But when you open your mouth to begin telling a story, nobody knows what you're gonna say. You need to land something immediately that causes an audience to go, "Oh. Okay, what's gonna happen here?" Right? So that's an elephant. That's like plant some big thing in the beginning of a story. It doesn't actually have to be what the story's about either. Sometimes it takes a little time to get to what the story's about, but you plant something there to at least get the audience to be worried. And then you can use some other tricks. You can, you know, I, I call something called a backpack, which is I, you tell the audience what your plan is before you carry out your plan so that they sort of have your hopes and dreams packed up with them as well. Like, if you watch an Oceans 11 movie, right, you know what the plan is before they go into the casino. So as the plan goes awry, you can go, "Oh, no," 'cause you know what the plan is. If you didn't know what the plan was, you would not be able to go, "Oh, no!" Right? So that's sort of like loading your audience with your hopes and dreams so that they ha- they can feel those stakes. They can actually be hoping for you as well. Uh, there's things like breadcrumbs where you offer a little bit of a, a little bit of what's going on, but not the complete idea, sort of like drop a hint. You know, the classic one is sort of the, the gun. You know, there's a gun in the room and you know there's a gun in the room and it seems like it's not gonna be relevant, but if you have a gun in the room, you know it's going to eventually go off. There's something going on there. That's like a breadcrumb. Eventually, we're gonna get to that gun. Don't worry, it's gonna happen. Um, there's, there's hourglasses, which is sort of when you get to the moment where everyone is about to discover what's going to happen, that's the moment to slow time down. You load your story with details 'cause suddenly you know you have the audience on the edge of their seat and you wanna leave them on the edge of their seat as long as possible. When I know my audience wants to hear the next sentence, that is when I prolong the arrival of the next sentence by, I say, turning over an hourglass and letting the sand run for a while and making them wait for it. Uh, there's crystal balls where you can predict the future. You don't have to predict an accurate future. You can just predict any future. So, you know, I could have said something in the Eileen story, like, "If I get this wrong, Eileen's gonna begin to cry. She's gonna cry in front of 22 kids, 22 kids who, for the rest of the year, will continue to stare at this girl and remember the moment she cried." That's a crystal ball. That's me predicting a terrible future. Because I put that terrible future in the audience's mind, now they're worried, right? So that is a stake. I have planted a false stake, a, a false future, but they are gonna be worried about it 'cause it's also a realistic future. So all of those things are used to continue to get the audience to wonder what's gonna happen next, which is a little different than surprise. Surprise is just that beautiful, delightful, amazing moment where the audience didn't see something coming and then it was almost like it was inevitable. Surprise happens and they understand why it happened. And I think it's the best thing you can ever offer an audience is a moment of surprise. And every story has a surprise, at least one, because whenever we suddenly realize something for the first time, right? I hate the word suddenly, but what happens is we used to not think something and then we think a new thing and that's often a surprise for us. If we make it a surprise for the audience too, that's a delightful thing. So surprise is so powerful and wonderful and always ruined by storytellers.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky29:11

      I was just listening to an interview with, I think his name is David Mamet, and he made this point that endings of books and movies is, is always has to be both inevitable and also complete

10. 29:20 – 32:20

    The benefits of storytelling in business

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky29:20

       surprise.

    2. MDMatthew Dicks29:21

       Yes, both of those things. So inevitable means there has to be enough information placed earlier in the story so that when the surprise happens, the audience goes, "Yes," right? But also you have to be clever enough to plant that information in such a way that the audience doesn't see the surprise coming. You build information into the audience's mind that will allow the surprise to land in an inevitable and yet surprising way. That is the best surprise you can offer someone.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky29:51

       Easier said than done.

    4. MDMatthew Dicks29:52

       Yes. Well, there's lots of tricks to do that as well, but, uh, it takes some time.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky29:56

       Yeah.

    6. MDMatthew Dicks29:56

       But essentially what you end up doing is you're hiding the information that they need to know in a multitude of ways so that when it lands, they go, "Oh, my gosh, A, B, C, D." They don't connect it until the surprise hits and then they go, "Of course, A, B, C, D."

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky30:13

       Mm-hmm.

    8. MDMatthew Dicks30:13

       So you place A, B, C, and D in a story, but you don't place it in such a way that they can connect the dots until you want them to connect the dots.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky30:19

       I feel like that's a whole other hour of podcast conversation to figure that out.

    10. MDMatthew Dicks30:23

        That's like ninja level, next level storytelling, which is very teachable-It's not s- like everything I say is very, very teachable and, and doable by anybody. But yes, it's a trickier thing to accomplish.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky30:35

        Yeah, okay. That'll be for our second podcast episode. Uh, just to summarize, there's, you kind of shared I think five ways to add stakes. Just to summarize, one is crystal ball. You basically predict the bad thing that'll happen if you don't do this thing. Uh, hourglass, which is when something you know is about to happen, slow time down. I think of Pulp Fiction and Tarantino in this often of just like, you know some violence is about to happen and they're, they go next door and like, "Let's just eat a cheeseburger," instead for a while.

    12. MDMatthew Dicks31:00

        Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky31:01

        Um, and then this backpack idea of like, they know exactly what you're trying to do and it's on you in the entire movie. Uh, breadcrumbs where you kind of give them a little bit of information along the way. I think maybe that's it. Maybe there's one more.

    14. MDMatthew Dicks31:12

        And then the elephant at the beginning.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky31:13

        Oh, the elephant. Just like the big old, here's the stake. I always-

    16. MDMatthew Dicks31:16

        You got to have something.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky31:17

        Uh, I heard some advice in either your book or a different book about adding stakes is just any, just drop a dead body. Every new dead body is additional stakes that are added to the story. I don't, I don't know how often people can do that in just random stories.

    18. MDMatthew Dicks31:30

        Right. But what you can take from that is so often people load the front end of a story with all of the stakes-

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky31:38

        Mm-hmm.

    20. MDMatthew Dicks31:38

        ... because they're worried that the audience will not pay attention to them. So they think, "I'm going to throw everything right in front and that'll hold an audience for the rest of the story," and that's a mistake. What we want is stakes continually to build throughout a story. So dropping a dead body really means drop a new stake. Don't load it all, don't front load it. Give us something to wonder about, and then gauge when we need the next thing to wonder about, and spread out those stakes. We need most of the sec- stakes to occur within the first half of a story. It's ideally the second half of the story is now the rollercoaster to the end. So we might drop one in there at an appropriate time or just through plot. Sometimes they just happen to need to be in a place. But so often I hear people front load stakes because they're worried about audience attention.

11. 32:20 – 34:02

    An example of adding stakes

    1. MDMatthew Dicks32:20

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky32:20

       Just to give people something concrete to think about when they're thinking about this area, is there a story of yours that's online that we can point people to, to see an example of s- really good stakes in action?

    3. MDMatthew Dicks32:31

       So the one that I reference in my book, which you can go watch online, is Charity Thief.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky32:36

       Great.

    5. MDMatthew Dicks32:36

       And it needs a lot of stakes because two-thirds of the story, nothing really happens. Two-thirds of the story is explaining how I end up on a porch. And so that's not super entertaining unless I build in lots of stakes along the way. I'm not inventing anything. I'm just presenting the actual events in a way that makes you wonder what's gonna happen next. And so there's an elephant at the beginning of that story, which is actually w- not what the story is about, 'cause I say the elephant can change colors along the way, but I give you something to wonder about. And along the way, I know I use a backpack and I use a breadcrumb and an hourglass and a crystal ball. I do it all in that story mostly because it's not super entertaining. Some stories you don't have to worry so much about w- I perform as a stripper in the break room of a McDonald's restaurant when I'm 19 years old for a bachelorette party. There are stakes in that story, but I don't need to put any of them in 'cause everybody wants to know what's gonna happen alread- Sometimes you just have a story that the stakes are already pre-built because the ridiculousness of the moment. But most of our stories are not like that. Most of them are far more benign and we have to sort of jack up the stakes by using some tricks to get people to the point we want them to be in.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky33:50

       That stripper story I've also watched and I lo- and we'll point to it and I love, it's, uh, connected to another piece of advice you always share with people. Just say yes to stuff. Have the power of yes. I don't want to get into it yet. I want to come back to that.

    7. MDMatthew Dicks34:00

       It's true.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky34:00

       We'll leave, we'll leave that breadcrumb.

    9. MDMatthew Dicks34:01

       Yeah.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky34:01

        But,

12. 34:02 – 44:29

    Storytelling in the workplace

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky34:02

       uh, but I love that point. Okay, so let's, let's transition to helping people in business learn all these skills and translate them to becoming better in their work. And maybe actually to add some stakes, what benefits do people get/what problems do they run into if, if they aren't great at storytelling versus if they are learn the skill and can implement it at work? What do, what happens? What good things come out of that?

    2. MDMatthew Dicks34:25

       Well, if you don't tell stories as part of your business, whether you're looking for investment or speaking to your people or speaking to customers or clients, anything, if, if you're not telling stories, the good news is you're just like everybody else. The bad news is you're mediocre just like everybody else, right? You're, you're in a lane that everyone else is in, which means that you're gonna be forgettable. I often say most communication in business is round, white and flavorless, right? Intentionally so, 'cause a lot of people are afraid to stand out. You know, when I try to get people to tell stories, you know, everyone loves the word storytelling in business. It's a huge buzzword. They love to think of themselves as storytellers. But when they come to me, they don't really want to be storytellers, because to be a storyteller means you have to separate yourself from the herd and in their mind that risks them getting picked off, right? Getting picked off by some predator. But the alt- the alternative is you're in the herd, which means you're forgettable. I mean, how many times have you gone to a conference, listened to someone speak, and by the time you're pulling into the driveway, you really can't remember anything that they said? My wife and I actually attended an educational conference recently. She's a teacher, I'm a teacher. There was a bunch of speakers. The first person came out with his childhood lunchbox, put it on a table and told a story about how his parents had nothing while he was growing up, and yet they somehow kept him in new shoes and a new backpack every year and sent him to school with a lunch every day. And how much it meant to him and how as an educator today he thinks about every single kid in his class like he was, a kid who had nothing except for all of his parents' hopes and dreams. And I'll never forget that story 'cause it was a story. It was a story of vulnerability and humor and meaning. There was another person who spoke, a sort of executive we'll say, and he did a great job in terms of being fluent and presenting ideas and speaking well and speaking confidently. And 15 minutes after the conference, I said to my wife, who is a teacher and understands storytelling 'cause we do it together, I said, "What'd you think?" And she said, "Well, I'm never gonna forget that guy with the lunchbox." And I said, "I will not either." And I said, "What'd you think about the other guy?" And she goes, "He was great."And I said, "So what did he say 15 minutes after?" And she went, "You know, I actually can't tell you a single thing he said." Right? This is a woman who's a teacher and invested in storytelling and communication. Her impression was he was fluent, he was amusing, you know, he, he said some numbers, he said some things that seemed to mean something, but it was all forgotten, because that's what happens if we don't speak in story. Our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart or facts or, or statistics or, you know, platitudes or ideas that are not attached to imagery. So the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten. 100% you will be forgotten.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky37:18

       When people hear this, they may think like, oh man, there's this guy at work and he's always like telling stories. And we're like, shut up. Just tell me what you, what we need to do to make it a little more real of just like, what does storytelling look like where it's not annoying. It's not like, okay, everyone gather around. Let me tell you the story of our vision. What are some simpler ways and I guess maybe non-annoying ways to think about what storytelling looks like in the workplace that's not just like a public speaking like, hey everyone, I'm gonna give you...

    4. MDMatthew Dicks37:43

       Let me give you a couple of examples. I have a storytelling book coming out next year on business. So there's a couple heroes in that story. I'll... One of them is named Boris. His name's Boris Levin. He is a factory owner here in Connecticut. He's the one who convinced me I could start working with businesses. I thought I was just a storyteller who spoke about himself on a stage. And Boris one day saw me for some fundraiser and said, "Listen, I want you to come and help me." And I said, "I can't do that. I just tell amusing stories about myself." And he said, "No, no, you can help me." And it turns out he was totally right. So Boris has done it the right way. Boris has decided to become a storyteller who will then translate his stories into his business. So a great example was one of Boris's early stories. He came to me and he said, "My son was at bat in the Little League championship game. The bases were loaded. If my son got a hit, the team was gonna win the championship. And if my son struck out, the team would lose the championship." It's a three and two count. It is like the ultimate baseball moment. And his son strikes out, and he watches his son drag that bat back to the dugout. And he's devastated. His son's devastated, and Boris is devastated. And so he is trying to collect himself so he can figure out the right thing to say to a boy who's just lost the championship for his team. And by the time he makes it onto the other side of the field to catch up with his son, he sees his son running up a hill with his friends and they're already laughing. They're heading to the cars so they can go to ice cream and they can enjoy themselves. And so Boris is falling apart. He is still devastated, but his son has already moved past the failure. Boris takes that story and he crafts it as a beautiful story that he could tell on a stage and perform and make an audience laugh and cry. Once the story is done, he says to me, "So what are we gonna do with it? How are we gonna apply this to business?" And ultimately what happens is this, he's got a sales team. And quite often salespeople do not land the big account they're hoping to land. And Boris knows that when his salespeople fail to achieve what they wanna achieve, they will often sulk. For days, they'll sort of wander around the office and be useless because they're still trying to get past the fact that they just lost a million dollar contract. So he tells the story about his son and he says, "Listen, there's nothing wrong with being sad, being upset with failure, but we cannot allow it to slow us down as much as we are right now. We have to think about my son. My son dragged his bat back to the dugout. He sat down, he sighed, his buddies patted him on the back, he collected himself and he moved on. That's what we need to do. When we fail, we're gonna take a moment to collect ourselves, to think about the mistakes we made to, to decide what we're gonna do differently, and then we're gonna move on." And that becomes a really important moment in this company. And it's much better than him standing up in front of his people and saying, "Listen, every time you guys fail to land the big sale, you wander around this office like you're dead and you're wasting our time. It ends today. Today, from now on, when you fail, you are gonna move on." Right? The story becomes something meaningful to everyone because it reveals something about Boris. He's a father. He's a father who cares about his son. He's the kind of father that most of us are in life, right? He shares of himself with his people and he creates a tangible vision of what the sales team can do. He does that all the time. He comes to me and he is not looking to solve problems through story. He's looking to develop stories that he can then deploy into his business, right? So I compare it, I say bandaids versus bricks. If you're building bricks, you're a storyteller that's capturing stories and building bricks that you can eventually deploy into business. If you're a band-aid person, which is fine, that happens. I have a problem, Matt, and I need a story to solve it. Essentially what I'm doing there is I'm putting a band-aid over a problem, but you're not becoming a better storyteller. You're just sort of using me as a consultant to help you generate a story that will solve a problem. That's fine, but you're gonna need me the next time too. You're gonna keep needing me because you're not really becoming a storyteller. Boris is building bricks. He is building a vault of stories that he can then deploy into his business and he understands how to tell them and how to connect them to business. So that's something that you can do very easily. Another example, the other star of my book is a woman named Marsha Ratofsky. She used to be the director of corporate communications at Slack, and now she's sort of doing work on her own. But when she was with Slack, she and I were working closely together and she had to create the narrative that was gonna compete against Microsoft Teams. Essentially, Microsoft came along and said, "Hey, we copied your product and it's free, and everybody already has it." So Slack had to find a way to combat that, and Marsha was the one in charge of doing it. That's why we connected. She found me and said, "I need to tell a good story. Please help me tell a good story." So she crafted a brilliant narrative that worked fantastically. We worked really closely together and it came out great.The way she came up with that narrative was a Tuesday night. She had broken up with her boyfriend. She was alone. She was feeling pretty lonely. It was in the midst of the pandemic. She had two glasses of wine in her, sitting alone on a Tuesday night. She suddenly had an inspiration. She wrote three words down on a napkin, and those three words become the story that we develop that allows Slack to compete against Microsoft. When it comes time to her present that, that narrative, I say, "Well, you're gonna include the Tuesday night, and the two glasses of wine, and all that, right?" And she's like, "No, I'm not." Like, "That's not what we do in the corporate world. We do not insert ourselves into our narratives." And to her credit, she didn't put it in, and it still worked brilliantly. She was fine. But, you know, about a month later, she was presenting that same narrative to a smaller group, lower stakes. I said, "Let's just, just put it in. Just try it this time." And to her everlasting credit, she did. She put in a 30-second anecdote about Tuesday night, two glasses of wine, feeling lonely in the middle of a pandemic. She said to me later, "I can't believe the difference that that 30-second anecdote meant to the narrative, because suddenly when I reached the end of the narrative, people wanted to talk to me." People came up to me and the first thing they said was, "Oh God, I remember I was feeling the same way during the pandemic." People connected to her because instead of being a corporate monolith, sort of like Slack's spokesperson without personality, which is what we tend to be in business, she was an actual human being who had an inspiration on a Tuesday night, and then was bringing it forth in a meaningful way to an audience. And from that point on, she always has been doing those things in storytelling. She's always looking for a way in her narratives to insert herself, or if she's working with a client, let's find a way that we can work the client

13. 44:29 – 48:46

    Using personal inventory to make stories relatable

    1. MDMatthew Dicks44:29

       into the story as well. 'Cause people don't want to hear spokespeople present information. They want to hear human beings connect with you and then offer you something that perhaps will have value.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky44:41

       That is a really interesting lesson. So is your advice just when you're telling stories in business, try to find a way to make it personal about you as the person telling the story?

    3. MDMatthew Dicks44:50

       Yeah. I- I have this tool I use with corporate folks called a personal interest inventory. It is a list of all the things that you should be saying about yourself in clever and strategic ways that I teach.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky45:01

       Mm-hmm.

    5. MDMatthew Dicks45:02

       And each one of them has sort of an addressable market. So how many people could this potentially hit? And then the intensity of the connection. So for example, if you're married, you should always make it clear to people you're married, especially if you're a man. Because if you're a man and you're married, you're- you're safer in the world because men are inherently just dangerous human beings. We j- we just are, right? If you hear that the- if you hear that there was a shooting, right? You never think, "Oh, I wonder if that was a 23-year-old blonde woman," right? You don't... You know who did the shooting almost all the time. So if you're married, what you're essentially saying to people is, "Someone has agreed to spend theoretically their life with me." It's sort of like a validation that I have at least hygiene and some decency, right? So you... Right. And most people are in a committed relationship. So that means that a total addressable market is large, right? If I say I'm married, you're either married also, or you're in a committed relationship. So the- the connection is gonna be large. The- the total addressable market is large, the possible connection probably moderate. I say it's like, it's okay, but weird ones are like runners. I'm not a runner, and there's not a lot of runners in the world, but if you're a marathoner, right? Your total a- total addressable market is very small. There's not that many marathoners, but if you happen to find a marathoner, the intensity of that connection is enormous. Like marathoners are like almost automatically friends upon meeting what I've discovered. Like if you're just, "Oh, you ran a marathon?" "I ran a marathon," they're best friends already. And so if you've run a marathon and you're in a room and you discover someone else who's run a marathon, you have to find a way to bring that out because the possibility of that connection is incredibly intense. So as a person in the corporate world, you should not be seeking to be round, white, and flavorless. You should be seeking to be like full of color, and full of edge, and full of flavor. You want to be an individual that people remember as opposed to what most people are trying to be, which is, "I am just operating this corporate or this business sphere, and I'm not trying to stand out," which is just a foolish thing to want to do.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky47:07

       I could see why people wouldn't naturally do this. Like if I'm a head of comms for a company, the last thing I want is make it about me. And what you're saying is you actually should, because people will find it a lot more interesting, you know?

    7. MDMatthew Dicks47:20

       Yeah. No, you don't want to make it all about you-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky47:22

       Right.

    9. MDMatthew Dicks47:22

       ... but there's just little tricks. I mean, the easiest trick is, you know, if someone asks you, "How are you doing today?" If you say, "I'm doing great," you've just really screwed it up. That's the stupidest answer you can offer, right? If you ask me how am I doing today, I'm immediately gonna think to myself, elementary school teacher is probably my best personal interest inventory item 'cause if I'm an elementary school teacher, everyone loves me. They think I'm doing God's work even though they don't want to pay me a dime to do it, right? So if you say, "How are you doing today?" I will say to you, "Pretty good. My fifth graders were actually decent human beings today. They didn't try to kill me." So in that way, I'm going to slip in the fact that I'm an elementary school teacher by answering your question. I'm gonna demonstrate a bit of amusing content in the process, right? And maybe a little self-deprecation. But whenever I'm asked a question, I am trying to include an item of my personality, my life, something that might be of interest to people while also answering the question. You don't want to walk into a situation and say, "Hi, I'm a married elementary school teacher with two kids and two cats." But that's sort of what I want to do because I know that that's gonna make people feel connected to me. So I have to find strategic ways to work it in. I teach people to do it all the time, but it starts with understanding what about you might mean something to other people and how can I get it in there without me sounding like I'm only

14. 48:46 – 50:52

    Four ways to keep people listening

    1. MDMatthew Dicks48:46

       talking about myself?

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky48:47

       What else? So we're basically talking about ways to become a better communicator and storyteller in business. You've shared a few tidbits here. One is, think of this personal inventory about yourself that makes you relatable. Try to share it in stories you tell, in presentations and things like that. What else? What else can people do to become better storytellers in business? I know this is a big question, but let's see, let's see where it goes. (laughs)

    3. MDMatthew Dicks49:07

       Let's go back to the idea that in business, you have to accept the fact that nobody wants to hear anything you have to say. That is not accepted by most people, even after I say it. So once you understand that, and once you truly believe it, there's essentially four ways to keep people listening to you. In any story really, but especially in business, because really no one wants to listen to you in business. So the first is stakes, which we've really talked about already. You have to have stakes, you know? And every good product story and every good PowerPoint present to everything, there are stakes and they're set out in exactly the way I've described. All five of the stakes that I've described to you that I use in that story, Charity Thief, can also be used in every business story, every PowerPoint deck, every entrepreneur pitch, everything. So stakes is one of them. Another one we've talked about is surprise. There should absolutely be surprise in every talk that you give. Steve Jobs was a master of it. We could just, we could look at one of his talks and I could show you how he planned it perfectly. Some others include suspense. So keeping an audience in suspense. And often suspense leads to surprise. So mastering the ability to be suspenseful. And then humor, like daring to be funny, which no one in corporate America can do. Everyone wants to be funny. Every person I've ever met who I've worked with, every businessperson in some way wanted to be funny. But that's really not actually what they want. They want to have been funny, because being funny means you must take a risk. You must say something that you believe is funny and you expect an audience to also feel is funny. And if it doesn't happen, that hurts. And so people oftentimes tell me they want to be funny, but when I tell them how they need to be funny, they say, "Well, I can't say that," right? They say, and then I

15. 50:52 – 53:09

    Using humor in business storytelling

    1. MDMatthew Dicks50:52

       say, "Well, that's the part that's funny." So I was working with a guy, sort of a, a, an executive at a company that you interact with every day. And he was delivering a talk at the Javits Center, and he was gonna be funny. He, we built in a talk, lots of jokes. He was ready to go. He went to the Javits Center, and four hours later he called me and I said, "How'd it go?" And he said, "I pulled out all the jokes." I said, "Why did you pull out all the jokes?" And he said, "The first two speakers weren't funny at all. I felt like if I went on stage and I was funny, I was gonna stick out like a sore thumb." I said, "No, you were going to, like, rise from the ashes like a phoenix that everyone has been waiting to hear all day." It's the best thing in the world to follow two terrible people and then go out there and land some jokes. But again, he thought, "I have to stay within the confines of the herd rather than doing something different." But humor is a brilliant and beautiful and simple way to differentiate yourself, differentiate yourself from other people. But you have to be willing to try to do it. And it's just, it's a scary thing for people, but I say it's, it's stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're gonna hold people and keep them listening. And if you're not engaged in one of those four things while you're speaking, people are not listening to you anymore.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky52:12

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16. 53:09 – 58:43

    Advice for adding humor

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky53:10

       To follow this thread on humor, which w- I was gonna ask, what do you tell people to become more funny? What are some tricks?

    2. MDMatthew Dicks53:17

       Well, there's, you know, I have currently 26 strategies to be funny. Uh, some are better for business than others. I will give you two that we can use in business all the time. The first one you can use is nostalgia, 'cause nostalgia is always funny. The fact that the first VCR I had was 22 pounds and had a remote control attached by a cord that was thick enough that I could trip my brother as he walked through the living room is funny. You know, the fact that I grew up and no one was allergic to anything, and we all ate, you know, bread packed with gluten and baked in asbestos factories and no one ever wore a helmet while they rode their bike. All of these things can be made to be funny. And it's so easy in business because oftentimes you are rolling out a new product or a new service, or you're updating a product or service in a way that allows you to speak nostalgically about the past. I was working with this company and they failed me. They did not listen to my advice, which was a mistake. They're sort of like an Indeed company. They're helping find employees, you know, for companies that one of these people. And I wanted to start their narrative with the idea of, "In 1983, the primary source of employment was a 16-year-old kid riding on the back of a Schwinn throwing newspapers at doors. And in that newspaper, which was like a paper version of the internet, you would turn to the back page. And on that page there was the help wanted ads. And that was essentially all you had to find a job in 1983." Everything was geographically based, meaning you only could look into three or four towns around you to find a job.And it had to be in the paper, and you had to own a phone connected to a wall so you could call a company within business hours and hope to get an interview, right? All of the power lived with the employers in 1983, and a 16-year-old who was dropping a newspaper off at your porch every day. That's funny. Like, and I didn't even try to be funny with it, I just sort of stated the facts. We could have punched that up and made it really funny. And then we flipped the script, again, the opposites, right, in story. In the beginning, employers had all the power. Today, employees have all the power 'cause today you can work in Singapore or Chattanooga, right? While you're living in ten- while, while you're living in Orlando, right? And today, you don't have to wait for a 16-year-old to deliver the paper with all of your job opportunities. Every single job opportunity on the planet is now accessible to you on the internet. And you can work basically anywhere from anywhere, right? So that's why we need companies like Indeed or the company I was working for because they have to actually gain some power for the employers. So that was the narrative we were going to tell, and the beginning would have been funny. And the CEO of the company said, "I don't like it." He said, "Nobody cares about the 1980s," which was the dumbest thing he could have said because Stranger Things was the biggest television show on television at the time, which was nothing but a 1980s. And if he just looked around, he would see that 1980s fashion is coming back, 1980s music is being popularized again. We're remaking 1980s music all the time. Taylor Swift put out an album called 1989. Like, whether or not the 1980s are relevant or not, it's relevant to talk about the past as a company to demonstrate your expertise in your field, to understand that we know the market backwards and forwards for the last 50 years. We have expertise, and we can demonstrate it by telling a story, right? So that's the power of nostalgia. And we can use that all the time in business to make people laugh. The other one I'll give you, again, there's a whole bunch, but a simple one is a game they used to play on Sesame Street, which is one of these things is not like the other. Essentially, it's, it's three things, two of them are expected and one is unexpected, and the unexpected one will be funny, right? So you can say like, "Well, my competitor, they have this, uh, you know, my hardware competitor, the guy down the street, he does sell shovels, just like I do. That's true. And he does offer a wide selection of nails just like I do, right? But there's a nameless, faceless machine at the front of the roo- at the front of the store that you have to swipe your own stuff through and your credit card. There's not actually a human being in the store." And we can make that funny, right, by showing that the third one is unlike the other two. So it's essentially a simple game. Once I've told it to you, you'll see every comic do it all the time. They just say thing that's expected, thing that's expected, unexpected thing, and you make it funny. So it's a simple trick that we use in business all the time.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky57:52

       This is awesome. This list you're talking about, is this going to be in your new book that you're writing?

    4. MDMatthew Dicks57:57

       I have not all 26 of them 'cause some are not like the best business ones in the world-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky58:03

       Mm-hmm.

    6. MDMatthew Dicks58:04

       ... um, but a large number of them. I think I maybe have like the top 12 that work best in business in terms of humor, but you can just take a humor class. I teach humor all the time. I teach all 26 strategies. You know, it's something that can be practiced. The beautiful thing is so often many of the strategies that I offer in business, if it doesn't end up being funny, you're still telling a story. So nobody... It's not sort of like a, you know, ba-bum-bum-ching kind of joke. We're not telling those jokes. We're telling s- we're telling humor in the confines of a story so that if this joke doesn't land, we're still telling a story. And oftentimes people don't even realize we were trying to be funny.

17. 58:43 – 1:02:06

    An example of how storytelling helped a biotech company sell product

    1. MDMatthew Dicks58:44

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky58:44

       I'm going to come back to where story can help you in your work. So obviously giving a public talk is the classic y- way to use this. Maybe giving a presen- like a PowerPoint deck in a meeting. Is there any other maybe non-obvious places that you think this skill can help you in that's not just like, "Hey everyone, welcome to my town."

    3. MDMatthew Dicks59:02

       Well, I've worked with a lot of, um, scientists in biotech and places like that. Um, I worked with a biotech company. Five of their scientists were going to a conference. And essentially it's a company that sells tubes. All of their competitors sell a tube for experiments, and you, you have to sort of retrofit the tube to fit your needs. The company I was working with, they sell like 12 different versions of the tube, better sized, so you don't have to retrofit it, much more expensive, but the reliability of your experiments are improved by using their properly sized tubes. So I prepare all the scientists and they all do a good job. They all tell stories of some sort and they go off to their conference. One guy, though, doesn't present any data whatsoever. He just tells a story. He tells a story about going to the sh- going to the grocery store. And when he goes to the grocery store, his family is really annoying when it comes to apples because everyone likes a different apple. So he's got to go and he's got to buy three honey crisp for his wife and two gala for his daughter and they're baking a pie this week, so they got to get some Macintosh and he likes Red Delicious. He said, "It's a nightmare, you know, buying these apples." And so he tells that story about the nightmare of buying up-apples. And then he says, "That's what my company does," right? There are companies that say, "We offer Macintosh, make do with it. You're going to make your pies, you're going to eat your, you're going to eat it. All of the things that you want to do with an apple, all you get is Macintosh. Good luck. We believe you should have access to all the apples. We believe that you have particular needs and specific requirements and we're going to make sure you have it, just like my family gets all the apples they want." That's all he said. A longer version of it, but that's it. No data. He got more leads at the conference than the other scientists combined, all the other four scientists combined. Now the, the vice president of marketing was not happy about this at all when I met with her-... because she's a scientist. She's 50 years old. For her entire life, she's been sending scientists to conferences and presenting data. And she said to me, "So what am I gonna do, send scientists to conferences now and not present data?" And I said, "Well, I mean, maybe. Because it worked," right? And she said, "Well, what about the data?" I said, "Now that he has the leads, you don't think they're gonna want the data? Like, he's gonna get on the phone and they're gonna say, 'Tell us about the data.'" But now, they've established a connection. And the best thing about that story, the thing she didn't even understand was, every single time someone at that conference goes into a grocery store now and they're looking at apples, they're gonna think about that company. And it's a positive feeling that they're gonna have about that company. If they have forgotten to call but they meant to call, when they're picking out a honey crisp at the grocery store, they're gonna make a note, "Oh, right, I gotta call that company and look into the tubes that they sell." Right? We create positive connections with items in the world related to our company by telling stories, and that means we've, like, built advertising into people's lives without them even being aware that we've done it. So there's a billion ways to add storytelling into business. It's

18. 1:02:06 – 1:06:35

    Advice for people who don’t want to become storytellers

    1. MDMatthew Dicks1:02:06

       just another one.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:07

       You touched on this kind of two-way approach. One is you have a problem, let me think of a story to help you solve this problem-

    3. MDMatthew Dicks1:02:13

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:13

       ... versus I'm gonna become a storyteller, come up with this whole brick wall of stories, and then I'll deploy them. You said that the first approach is not something you'd recommend. I imagine most people are probably gonna be in that bucket like, "I don't want to be a storyteller. I just want to, like, solve my problems, and stories can sometimes help me there." So maybe in that bucket, do you have any advice for how to find a story that somehow helps you with that problem on demand? Or is it just, like, that is not gonna work, you're not gonna think of a story every time you have the same problem?

    5. MDMatthew Dicks1:02:40

       I think sometimes you will. Like, I have a company that calls me Metaphor Man. They call me essentially and say-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:45

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm., I get that.

    7. MDMatthew Dicks1:02:46

       ... "We've added a boring feature to our boring platform and we need to make people understand what it does. Will you give us the metaphor we need?" They don't understand that I'm not really generating metaphors. I am just taking stories from my life, pulling myself out of the story. And if you take yourself out of a story, often what's left is a metaphor, a simile, an example. And then I just offer that to them. So they... And I tell them, "If you just use some of my storytelling generating techniques, you could do the same thing." But they're a Band-Aid company. They just want me to fix, fix things, and I understand that. If you're trying to do it, the best way to, the best way to sort of tell a story about something that you want people to understand is to do what I call speaking with adjacency, which means we're not gonna match content to content. Instead, we're gonna match theme, meaning, or message, right? So that scientist, for example, he wasn't talking about tubes, right? He was talking about how people deserve to get what they want in life, right? His family gets... deserves to get the apples they want, and you as a business deserves to get the tubes that you want. But so often in business, what people think is content to content. "Well, I gotta find a way to talk about these tubes to make people understand how important they are." And I say, "Well, let's not talk about the tubes. Let's talk about something else instead, and then we're gonna move what we were talking about over to tubes. You know, we're gonna snap it in place." That snap when someone realizes, you were telling me about apples, but really you were telling me about tubes, that snap is so powerful. I use it with students all the time, right? A student acts like a fool, gets in trouble, sitting at my desk. I'm not talking about their behavior. I'm telling a story that they have no idea, like, why I'm telling them the story. They're like, "I'm in trouble. Why is he telling me about his dog," right? "Why is he telling me his dog about... a story about his dog when he was 12?" 'Cause I'm gonna snap it into place, 'cause I'm not talking about content. Theme, meaning, or message. So when they come to me and they say, "Here's what we've got," I'm not thinking about the thing. I'm thinking about what is the theme they want to convey, or the meaning that they want to convey, or the message they want to convey.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:53

       Mm-hmm.

    9. MDMatthew Dicks1:04:53

       And what story do I have that will match that? Or what story can I get out of them? The scientist did not come to me with the apple story. The scientist came to me with the tubes and I said, "Well, it sounds like you're a, you're a company that wants to give people what they need. Let's find a story in your life about a time when you have to give people something that they need." Right? And we brainstormed it. And when we landed on apples, I knew we had it, 'cause he was gonna be able to talk about, "I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm the kind of husband who takes apple orders from his family before going to the grocery store." I'm gonna be able to be funny, 'cause, like, befuddled husbands in grocery stores are always funny, right? So it wasn't that he came to me with a story. I came to him with the idea of, "Let's look at theme, meaning, and message, and then snap it over to the, to the tubes." That's what we want to do when we're putting a Band-Aid on. We don't want to think about what we're talking about. We want to think about the feelings we want people to have about what we're talking about.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:52

        Amazing. Okay. So the advice here essentially is you're trying to find a story to tell about something to help you convince someone of something, you want to think about, what is the theme of this problem that I have? What is the meaning behind it? And what is the message?

    11. MDMatthew Dicks1:06:04

        Yeah, one of those. Usually one of those, yep.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:07

        And then you also touched back on make something in the story relate to something personal about you so that people are like, "Oh, I'm a runner too. I gotta pay attention to this guy," or, "I'm a- I'm shopping... I shop all the time for apples."

    13. MDMatthew Dicks1:06:18

        Yes, you can drop... See? So we're, we're sort of stacking strategies, which is a really good thing to do, right? So we're pulling in all of the things we've talked about, and it really makes for a powerful moment for people and a memorable moment. 'Cause the most important thing is that we're becoming memorable. We're in a conference amongst other scientists and we're actually

19. 1:06:35 – 1:15:26

    The power of “Homework for Life”

    1. MDMatthew Dicks1:06:35

       the one who's being remembered.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:37

       Okay, so we... That was the Band-Aid approach. Then there's the way you recommend is just build a bank of stories. I imagine this is where the Homework for Life framework you recommend comes from. So maybe let's transition and talk about that, 'cause I think that has a lot of benefits beyond even just coming up with a bunch of story ideas.

    3. MDMatthew Dicks1:06:53

       Yeah, it's the most important thing that I teach. Whether or not you're ever gonna speak in your life, if you plan on being a hermit-... and going off into the woods and never speaking to someone again, you should be doing homework for life regardless. Uh, it's a process I came up with, you know, maybe 15 years ago now. Essentially when I began telling stories on stages, I fell in love with it immediately, and I got worried that I was gonna run out of stories. I saw a lot of storytellers on stages performing, and they would tell the same six, seven, eight stories every time, and I didn't want to be that guy. I wanted to have a brand new story every time I took the stage. So sort of in a fit of panic, I decided to assign myself homework. Being an elementary school teacher, it's sort of natural for me to have that inclination. And so, I just decided every day before I go to bed, I'm gonna look back on the day and find one moment that would have been worth telling as a story. Even if it wasn't really worth telling, I was gonna write it down. Now, I don't write the whole thing down. That's crazy. It's not doable. What I do is I took an Excel spreadsheet, two columns, the date, and then I stretched the B column across. And in that B column, essentially the length of a computer screen, that's where I write my story. My goal was I find one new moment per month, 12 new stories per year. That would be amazing. Instead, something far more amazing happens. I discover that my life is filled with more stories than I will ever have time to tell, and I'm not a unicorn. Thousands of people all over the world are doing the same thing right now and discovering that their lives are filled with stories. Moments like Eileen, which 20 years ago, I would have forgotten that moment within days, and now I've held onto it because it's gonna be a homework for life moment, right? So I start writing those moments down, and I discover that I've- I'm developing a lens for storytelling. I see the moments that I did not see before. In fact, I just did some analysis f- analysis for my new book. In the first year I did homework for life, I found 1.8 moments per day. So you can find more than one. Eventually, I started recording more than once. So 1.8 moments per day. I now find 7.6 moments per day. It's not 'cause my life is more interesting. It's because I have a better lens and I understand what to look for, what to see, and what is worth remembering. And so I've become a person who has an endless number of stories, like Boris. Boris does homework for life. It's why whenever we meet, he's got three new stories to tell me, and then we work on the stories and then figure out the business applications for them, right? So it's so important 'cause what we do is we throw our lives away, you know. People say that time flies, and it doesn't. What happens is it goes by unaccounted. If you can only remember 89 days of 365 in a year, of course time flies because you had 365 and you only remember 89. It's gonna feel like it went by quickly. It's not going by quickly. You're just failing to account for each day, and e- each day has something worth remembering. Homework for life is the acknowledgement that every single day should have something. The- the prompt that I actually use for myself is this. I say, "If someone kidnapped my family and said, 'You can't have them back until you stand on a stage and tell a story about something that happened today,' what would you tell?" That was what I would think in my head every night, and then I would write it down. To be honest, nowadays, I'm not sort of sitting down at the end of the day and writing them all down. I'm recording them as the day goes on. I'm- my laptop is around me. My phone is around me. When I hear something, my son says a bit of dialogue, I can't believe you just said... You know, I see something for the first time or the last time, or a- a stray thought enters my mind. I have a new thought that I had not occurred before. All of those become moments for homework for life. Not every one becomes a story. I did some analysis on this too. About 10% of the things that I write down ultimately either become a story or part of a story, but the other 90% is just as valuable 'cause I'm holding onto my days. And the other amazing thing that happens is once you start doing this, you'll sort of crack open, and all of the stories that you've left from the past, the ones you've forgotten, they'll start to rise up. They'll bubble up. And I include those in my homework for life too as memories, because once you start looking through the lens of storytelling, you see something, like you see Eileen find confidence, and suddenly your brain connects to other students or moments in your life or moments in your children's life where confidence was an issue and you think, "Oh, that's right. It's just like that kid," and now I have another moment that I've recovered from the past. A day has returned to me. It enters my homework for life, and suddenly I have more stories than I ever have time to tell. And it's not just me. Like I said, thousands of people all over the world, my own children and my students do homework for life, and all of them will tell you it's the most valuable thing that you can do.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:30

       And I think you touched on this. It's not just to collect a bunch of stories. There's like a therapeutic element to this too that you talk about.

    5. MDMatthew Dicks1:11:37

       Yeah, absolutely. Many therapeutic elements. First is you're recovering your time and slowing time down, which is beautiful, right? My kids are 14 and 11. Thank goodness I started homework for life just about when Clara was first born because they feel 14 and 11 to me. They don't feel like they were just born yesterday, which for a lot of parents, they do. Lots of parents say things like, "Oh my God. You're not gonna believe what my kid said. I gotta write it down." But nobody writes it down. Every, "You're not gonna believe what my kid said," is in homework for life for me. So I'm holding onto the moments, stretching out time. You also start to do things, like you start to see patterns in your life that you don't realize, you know, unless a- unless you really think about your life, and I think you should. Storytellers tend to be slightly self-centered in a positive way, meaning we afford ourselves time to think about ourselves. You start to see patterns if you start doing this. So I think what I talk about in my book is, uh, I always tell people, "My wife and I never fight. We've never raised our voices to each other. We really don't ever argue." But I noticed in my homework for life a moment when she'd asked me to put in the air conditioners before I had central air in the house, and I hated it. I- I hated it 'cause we agreed to never buy a house without central air. And every year, the air conditioners somehow get heavier. I don't understand the physics behind it, but every year it's worse. And so there's like a... And she always asks on the 98-degree day. "Hey, can you put the air conditioners in?" And there was a day when I was like, "No, I'm not gonna do it. It's really hot." And she was like, "Okay, no problem."And then, you know, 10 minutes later, I'm in the basement pulling them out, complaining, grumbling, arguing, you know, only to myself. Banging them on purpose so she can hear. You know, she's like, "What's going on?" I'm like, "I'm putting in the air conditioners," right? And so that becomes a Homework for Life moment. And then, like, you know, a month later, she asks me to mow the lawn on a 98 degree day. And I say, "I'm not gonna mow the lawn. I'm busy and it's really hot." And she goes, "Okay, no problem. Maybe tomorrow." And then I sit for a while and I stew. And then I'm mowing the lawn, but I'm doing it aggressively. I'm, like, running and, you know, just angrily mowing the lawn. And when I see these patterns, I suddenly go, "Oh, I do fight with my wife. On my own." Like, I fight in a way that she's not aware I'm doing it. I yell at her through chores and she's not aware that it's even happening. That becomes a story that couples love. You know, they, they think it's hilarious.

Episode duration: 1:42:56