How to tell better stories

A yes can always become a no, right? Yes, I will try that. I step through the door, I give it a try, I spend some time with it. I look around and I say, you know what? Not for me. I step back through and I close the door. But so often in life, people don't step through the door.

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.

When someone offers you an opportunity, as crazy as it is, as ridiculous, as much as you don't want to do it, which many times in my life, the yeses that I have said about something I did not want to do, but forced myself to do it because of my belief system have resulted in the best and most extraordinary opportunities of my life.

When someone offers you an opportunity, as crazy as it is, as ridiculous, as much as you don't want to do it, which many times in my life, the yeses that I have said about something I did not want to do, but forced myself to do it because of my belief system have resulted in the best and most extraordinary opportunities of my life.

98% of your nervousness is actually before you begin speaking. Once you begin speaking, almost all of your nervousness falls away, and that is the experience of most people.

If your audience isn't wondering what you're about to say, they're no longer listening to you. And you have to internalize that in a deep and fundamental way. 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.

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 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.

If you know what you're going to say at the end, you know what's the opposite of that, and that's where you start. So essentially, a story is about these two moments in time, a beginning and an end, and they're operating in opposition to each other.

Our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart or facts or statistics or platitudes or ideas that are not attached to imagery. So the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten. 100%. You will be forgotten.

When 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. 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.

If your audience isn't wondering what you're about to say, they're no longer listening to you. And you have to internalize that in a deep and fundamental way. 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.

When you can signal to people, I'm now telling a story, they will get quiet for you and they will afford you the opportunity to speak. It silences the room for you and affords you some space to then start doing the work that a good storyteller does.