Why Stories Get You Hired (Not Your Resume)

Why most people are bad at interviews and how YOU can be different.

In this episode, bestselling author and master storyteller Matthew Dicks breaks down the surprising science behind storytelling, attention, and trust. Learn how to stand out in job interviews by telling stories that connect. Discover why most interview answers are forgettable and how to make yours unforgettable.
Plus: Find out why we talk about frogs in E.T.!

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Chapters

00:00 Intro 
01:01 From Spielberg Critiques to Moth Champion 
06:12 How Storytelling Builds Instant Trust 
10:05 Confidence Can Be Taught 
16:55 🎯 How to Build Your Story Bank 
24:45 Homework for Life: The Habit That Changes Everything 
33:40 🎯 Nail Your Interview With a Great Story 
40:25 🎯 How to Use Humor Without Falling Flat 
46:25 🎯 Want to Stand Out? Be the Zebra 
55:05 The One Slide Tip That’ll Make You Look Like a Pro 
01:01:35 The Pop-Tart Rule (And Other Storytelling Mistakes) 


🎤 Podcast Recommendations:
The Moth Podcast:   ( on Youtube)
Matt recommends listening to The Moth to naturally absorb the structure and rhythm of great stories.
“You start to pick up on strategies almost without trying.”

Speak Up with Matthew and Elysha Dicks


📚 Book Recommendations:
Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks
A must-read guide to becoming a better storyteller—whether you’re on a stage, in a meeting, or in a job interview. Packed with actionable strategies like “Homework for Life” and the “5-second moment,” it’s one of the most practical storytelling books out there.
Ashley directly endorses it as a must-read.
“Everyone should read it… then reread it every couple of years.”
Matt also references it when explaining concepts like the five-second moment and Homework for Life.

📣 Connect with Matthew Dicks: https://matthewdicks.com/

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📣 Connect with Ashley!!!

LinkedIn, website, X

P.S.

To see all the Career Starter Program Book recommendations, click here: 

Transcript

0:00

Wow. I have like 25 questions just out of that introduction. When you tell a story to another human being, you change the brain chemistry of that person, that audience member, in a powerful and significant way. That's amazing. That's amazing. Tell a story and people are more likely and more inclined to believe you. I love the origin story. I love the origin story. If you just think that people are looking forward to the next slide, you're crazy. How can we hold people's attention? Nobody wants to hear anything we have to say unless we give them a reason to listen. If you can come out as a good storyteller in a lot of ways, the world is your oyster. Yeah, it's going to change the way you see your life. Welcome back to another episode of the Career Starter Podcast. My name is Ashley Misquita and I'm your host. If you’ve already subscribed to the show, thank you very much, but if you're new, please go ahead and subscribe. Because today, like every day, I'm going to be bringing you amazing guests, and we're going to uncover the tips and strategies that will help you get your dream job. And once you're in that job, help you launch your career and accelerate it like a rocket ship. Okay. Matt Dicks, I am so excited to have you on here. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while. As I mentioned to you earlier on, read your book, I think it's tremendously insightful and so thank you so much for joining us. I know it's going to be valuable for our audience. Thanks. It's my pleasure to be here. Well, Matt, I know some of your background in storytelling. And I've read your book, but I'd love for you to maybe share with your audience about some elements of your background and why, this is going to be such a great conversation. Sure. Well, I guess there's lots of places I can begin. I've been interested in story for a very long time. You know, I remember when I was ten, back in 19, I guess, 81, I went and saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at the movie theater, and, it's great movie, but it has this sort of appalling scene that doesn't really work. That sort of breaks the movie in some ways. And so at the age of ten, I came home and I wrote to Spielberg and told him that his movies are great, but he seems to always have one mistake that's pretty obvious to me. And I suggested to him that if he send me the rough cut of the film prior to releasing it, I could sort of make that final correction for him and make the movie perfect. So, you know, I certainly wasn't telling stories in the way I tell them today at the age of ten. But, you know, early on I was sort of paying attention to movies and books and television, how they were telling stories and sort of picking them apart, you know? So that was as early as I can remember in terms of being engaged in storytelling. You know, more recently it was July of, 2011. My friends sent me to New York City to perform at the Moth, storytelling organization, competitive storytelling live on stage without notes. You know, they told me to go there because I've had the worst life of anyone they knew, which is not true. And not a nice thing to say. But I went, you know, I figured I was going to take the stage, tell one story, check it off the list and be done. And, that was the night at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and, New York City. I took the stage. I told a story about pole vaulting in high school, and I fell in love with storytelling. I won the competition. That helps too. I'm highly competitive. And, I started telling stories, and that snowballed to where I am today, which is, you know, a person who tells stories on stages and does comedy and solo shows. And I do enormous amounts of work with corporations and businesses and keynote speakers and the FBI, clergy members, anyone you can imagine helping them tell better stories to accomplish the goals that they're seeking. Wow. I have like 25 questions just out of that introduction. I love the origin story, ten years old. Did Spielberg ever write back just out of curiosity? No. Well, you know, I was angry at him for a very long time because he didn't write back. And then it occurred to me just recently, just in the last few years, my mother never sent that letter because in 1981, there's no internet. Like to find Steven Spielberg's address is basically impossible for a mom in 1981. So I gave her the letter. I said, please send it to Steven Spielberg. I'm sure she said, yes, honey, that sounds great. And then eventually it ended up in the trash. So you know, I was angry with him for a very long time. And then I came to the realization that he never saw the letter. So I just recently rewrote the letter to him. And I'm about to send it to see if he responds this time. That's fabulous. I am, going to follow along to hear the end of this story. That's amazing. Matt, let's start with the why of storytelling. I'm curious why you think storytelling is valuable to students, to knowledge workers, to other professionals. I mean, you talk about the FBI, you talk about clergy and others. Why is storytelling valuable? Oh, there's a whole bunch of reasons. You know, I'll start with the science, because I think a lot of times people think storytelling is a “nice to have” instead of essential. You know, when you tell a story to another human being, you change the brain chemistry of that person, that audience member, in a powerful and significant way. If I begin telling you a story right now without any control on your part, five chemicals will get released into the brain, and those chemicals will increase your ability to attend, your ability to remember the connected feeling you have to me, your personal well-being. Actually, endorphins will get released when I start telling a story so that if your knee is sore by the time I'm done telling the story, your knee will be less sore because endorphins are painkillers. And so simply by telling a story, I can hack your brain chemistry to cause you to pay attention to me, remember me, feel connected to me, and trust me. So I think it's kind of silly not to be telling stories, because whatever we're trying to accomplish in terms of communication, we can predispose the person we're speaking to in a really significant way simply by engaging them with a story. Laughter, for the record, also has the same impact on people. So if you tell a funny story, you can really overwhelm someone's brain. So that's the science behind it. There's also things like neural coupling so that, you know, they look at brain scans. If I give you some statistics or I give you some non nonfiction information, aspects of your brain will light up when you receive that information. But if I tell you a story your entire brain lights up and it lights up in the same way my brain lights up, meaning our brains become one. Your brain is seeking to create the images that already exist in my brain. So like there's a there's many, many reasons in science that we should be telling stories. So knowing all of that, depending on what your goal is, if you're trying to, you know, connect with people because you want them to believe in you, trust in you by your product, believe that the paper you just wrote is an A+ instead of a B+. All of these things tell a story, and people are more likely and more inclined to believe you. But I think ultimately, for me, the first and most important reason we tell a story is for ourselves. I think, you know, many of the stories that I tell, the only audience member, whoever hears it is myself. The most important audience member for any story you tell is yourself. And I think that storytellers are self-centered in a positive way, meaning we actually afford ourselves time to think about ourselves. Real storytellers are obsessed with the idea of trying to figure out who they are and why they are, and how they are, you know, and how they should move forward in life. And so while most people truly, I think almost all people sort of plow through life, they have something happen to them. They, you know, they they they feel something, something bumps them. I think most of the time people just move on. But storytellers are the people who stop and say, let me figure that out. There's a story there. It might be a story for an audience, it might be a story for your loved one, or it might be for yourself. But regardless of who you're telling it to, that ability to understand yourself, I think, is the most important part of storytelling. That's super interesting. I don't think I, I don't think I don't really to put that way before, but it makes a lot of sense. I think one of the things I've certainly felt, and I think other people have felt when I see people who are just such good storytellers, they, they're, they're relating something and you're just hooked. You're just enraptured by what they're saying. Having read your book, I feel like I've improved a bit over time. And there's some specific things which we'll talk about. But in general, do you think people are born good storytellers or is this a skill someone can develop? It's a skill. People who say that, you know, storytellers are born. Those are people who want to feel special about themselves and want to feel like they emerged from the womb with some superpower. It's just nonsense. I have taken some of the most miserable communicators in the world and turned them into great storytellers. It's merely the deploying of strategy, the accumulation of strategy, and then figuring out when to use that strategy to its most effective means. So it's really decision making when, you know, ultimately it's when you open your mouth, you have a choice of what you're going to say and how you're going to say it and when you're going to say it. And storytellers are people who make good choices. They understand that decision making process, and they have the strategies to enhance that process. But it is honestly, anyone can learn it. I teach ten year olds, you know, I'm a fifth grade school, I'm a fifth grade teacher, and I teach ten year olds to tell really good stories better than a lot of adults. And, you know, ten year olds are not the most equipped human beings in the world. You know, they they have a lot of problems and a lot of things they still have to work out. And yet I can get them to tell great stories. Storytellers are not born. They're they're made over time. It's funny you mentioned that actually I hadn't really thought of that way, but that might be one of the valuable years of schooling they have. If you can come out as a good storyteller in a lot of ways, the world's your oyster. Yeah. I as a fifth grade teacher, I'll tell you that I spend about half of my time teaching kids to be confident. I think that's actually one of the that's actually a superpower. If you're feeling confident and you genuinely stop caring about what other people think, that is tremendous. And most kids need a lot of that. So, you know, academics are important, but they are, you know, probably third, when it comes to things that I find important to teach to children, especially at the age of ten, because at ten they can read and they can write for the most part, and they can do some solid math. And at that point, probably the problems are, they lack confidence. They might not understand kindness well enough. They might have, an inability to socialize in a meaningful way to make friends. Those are the things kids need at that age. And that's what I spend a lot of my time on. And yes, storytelling, communicating effectively to people. Just out of curiosity, is there anything you would highlight that’s worked well for you helping kids build confidence? Well, I think what I do for kids is I put them in situations that make them deeply uncomfortable and yet utterly safe. So I will tell a kid something like: “Here's an envelope with a note inside,” which is a lie. It's just an envelope. And I'll say, “there's a lady on the other side of the building. Her name is Pam. I can't remember her last name. She's a grown up and she's somewhere between first and third grade. I don't know where she is. I don't know what room she's in, but you need to get her this envelope, and you can't come back until you do.” And then I. And the kid looks at me like, are you crazy? Like you're just sending me into the school to find some lady named Pam? And I say, yes, that's what I'm doing. So goodbye. And I send them off like it's safe because they're in school, right? There's no hazard that no one's going to kidnap them. There's not going to be any terrible thing. They're they're dealing with adults who respect and enjoy children. But I've given them an impossible task. And when they accomplish it, everything else seems easy. And so I'm in the business of challenging children, giving them hard things to do in very safe environments and, permitting them to sort of use their voice in ways that a lot of teachers don't seem is entirely appropriate. You know, I let kids, tease me, I let kids, make fun of me. I let kids hassle me because all of that allows them to find confidence that they can make fun of a 54 year old man and effectively sort of stab me in the heart. That's confidence building, and that's probably not a terrible framework in general for confidence building, right? Whether you're a ten year old or whether you're a 30 year old, take on challenging tasks that are generally varying levels of, safe, but safe. You come out the other end and hey, guess what? Look at what I accomplished. And the craziest thing is, you know, I work with a lot of corporate executives, everything from CEOs, you know, to vice presidents to directors and the number one request I get from people I work with after we've engaged in storytelling and communication, is, I'd love for you to teach me the confidence that you have. Please show me how to do it. And for a long time I said, I don't think it can be taught. I you know, I think I'm confident for basically what I've explained to you, which is I was in impossible situations that were not safe, but I managed to get through them, you know, kicked out of my house when I was 17, on my own ever since, you know, arrested and tried and jailed for a crime I did not commit. Victim of violent crime. All of these things have sort of made made everything else seem like nothing to me. And I stopped caring about what people thought a long time ago. I don't know why. When I was a kid, I just stopped caring. But I didn't know how to teach it, you know? And so for a long time, I just tell people I can't teach it. But then one day, literally sitting at my desk, it dawned on me, you're a teacher, idiot. Like, figure it out. And so since that day, I've been working on a curriculum to help people find confidence. And it's it's almost done. So I'll be rolling out a workshop or writing a book. I'll be I'll be doing something with it soon. That's fabulous. I'm looking forward to to hearing more about that. Shifting gears a little bit, one of the things that so I end up doing a lot of client presentations, and I really enjoy talking to clients. I really enjoy presenting. I enjoy the content I'm talking about. One of the questions I've had people ask me is, how do you not get bored basically saying the same thing? That would almost be more relevant in your case, right? Because you're on stage telling stories. You're you're repeating relatively similar stuff as you're talking to people. How do you not get bored telling that same story? I'm always telling different stories. That's the first. I'm always developing a new story, literally. Right now I'm developing a new story. And when it's done, which could take anywhere from an hour to a month, depending on how difficult the story is when it's done, I'm going to eventually perform it on a stage, and then I'm while I'm getting ready to perform it on a stage, I'll be working on the next one. So I'm constantly engaged in developing new content at all times, and so that part of you know what I do, the other thing is, you know, every sort of speech I give, every keynote I deliver, every company I work with is different. Tomorrow I'll be flying to Toronto, and I'm going to be working with a Canadian company, and they have specific needs relative to their business. And so I don't walk into a business rolling out the same, you know, the same song and dance. Every time I look at their business, I ask them myself, what's their problem? I look at their competitors. I figure out how I can deploy storytelling and the strategies around it into the work that they do. And so for me, it's not sort of, here's my speech, here's my strategies, here's my process. Storytelling is let me see which strategies and which techniques will best help each company. And so everything is a little different. And I like that challenge. Let's say we're flipping it around. So for many of the CEOs you coach on storytelling, they're going to have a relatively limited repertoire of stories they're bringing in to, you know, over a one year or two year period. How do you help them? Not how do they not get bored telling that story? Well, I help them constantly develop stories, too. Oh, yeah. One of the things we do is we're just always looking for new stories to tell. The person who has the most stories to tell is probably the most effective communicator. Okay! So that's part of it. You know, I'm working with a company right now, the CEO of a very large American company, and we're actually preparing the CEO to sort of go out on a speaking tour. Sort of like a, you know, sort of a Ted talk branded sort of thing. And the first thing I did was give him homework, and I said, I need a dozen stories from you. And I gave him categories that the stories had to sort of fall into. So I don't want to hear all your successes. In fact, I kind of don't want to hear any of them. So I said, I need 12 stories. I don't need you to tell me the 12 stories. I need to have a 2 to 3 line pitch for each one of the stories, and then I will look at that list and assemble the right number, which is probably going to be, you know, in the course of a 15 to 20 minute talk. I probably want him to tell three stories, and I'm going to choose the right three, and then I'm going to choose another section, another selection of three. I'm probably going to have three sets of three. So as he tours the country, he can be telling three different sets of three stories around the same topic, and that will keep things fresh and it will allow us, you know, me and the people I'm working with at the company to determine which stories are landing best with audiences. So ultimately this moves into marketing or branding, or we make a commercial about it. We're going to have the right stories because we’re going to be testing it with audiences. So, you know, those CEOs that, you know, the ones that want to push back and say, you know, I got this one great story. I always tell them like, well, everybody, I promise you knows it already. If you have one great story, you've told it already too much and you're boring people. And the reason they're not telling you that is because you're the CEO and because I don't really work for you, but sort of alongside you, I will always be honest with you. And I tell them, you're just you're a one trick pony and, one trick pony is nobody likes. Got it? Let's now get into stories themselves. What are essential elements of a great story? Setting aside delivery for the moment in terms of characteristics of the story itself, that makes someone feel drawn to listening to it? Well, first it has to be a story. You know, most people certainly don't understand what a story is. They often think something happened to me, and now I'm going to tell you what happened to me, and therefore I will have told you a story. You know, at best, that's an anecdote. And usually it's just reporting on your life, just relaying a series of events that took place to someone else, which is not something anyone has ever wanted in the world. No one wants you to report on their life. A story is about change over time. It's about a, I believe, a singular moment in your life where something significant shifted inside you. You either changed suddenly as a human being, like on as a as a foundational person, or more likely, you changed your mind or your heart about something. That's what a story is about. That's every movie you've ever seen, every TV show, every novel you've ever read, every play you've seen. Essentially, we start with one or more protagonists. It's either you or maybe, in the case of a movie, some character. At the beginning of the movie in one place and then some. Something happens over the course of time, and at the end of that time, you've changed in some way. That's a story, and that's what causes people to remember things, because those are those are the things that allow people to access their hearts and minds while simultaneously sort of occupying your heart and mind. You know, if your story is just about stuff that happened and you're not revealing anything interior, that story will ultimately be forgotten. It doesn't mean it can't be entertaining. Anecdotes are lovely, and many stories are comprised of anecdotes, many anecdotes are used as examples and support and keynotes and all hands and all these kinds of things. But ultimately, if we want to tell a story, it has to be about change over time. You've talked about in your book a five second moment. Can you maybe expand on that a little bit? Yeah, it's sort of the idea that, I just think change happens instantaneously. I'm giving it five seconds. I really should have called it a one second moment, but I'm being generous. I think there's a moment in life when you didn't think something, and then there's a moment that you did like a lot can lead up to it, you know? But eventually you have to change your mind about something in a meaningful and significant way. You know, I'm working on this right now because I'm dealing with a company that that has a product that is going to require consumers to change their mind about things. And so the first thing I did was started to make a list of stories where I changed my mind in a significant way. One of the simple ones that I came up on the list was driving a stick shift. For a long time I thought, I have to drive a stick shift for the rest of my life, because that is that is the means by which I have the most control in the rain and snow. Why would anyone not drive a stick shift? Right? A manual transmission, you know? And for a long time I thought that my friends would tell me I'm crazy and I'd see people driving automatics and all of these things. And then one day, my girlfriend Jen needed to be picked up, and I got into her Nissan Sentra and it didn't have a stick shift. It had an automatic, and I shifted and pulled out of the parking lot, and I had a five second moment, which is. As I turned onto the street, I said to myself, well, you're an idiot. This works just fine, right? Now that's not a huge and meaningful moment that's going to connect with people. But it really was a five second moment, which means a lot led up to it. A lot of my friends said, you don't really need to drive a stick if you don't want. You don't need to. You could drive an automatic idiot, you know? And then I had a moment where I actually did it and discovered they were right. So I think most change happens in that way. I think there was a moment when I didn't love my wife, and then there was something that flipped in my head that said, I love her. Now I think something built up. I think, you know, I knew her a year and a half before we started dating. So for a year and a half, she went from colleague to acquaintance to friend to very good friend to crush to one day I said, My God, I love her and I think it happens instantaneously. And storyteller, we seek the instantaneous moment because that is what we're trying to convey to people. There was a moment in my life when everything changed. Let me tell you about it. Interesting in your book Storyworthy, which is, I think, an outstanding book I may have mentioned this already. Everyone should read it. They should get it, read it, and then reread it every couple of years. You talk about tiny moments making for the best stories. I thought that was really interesting. Can you maybe expand on that? Yeah. So my friend sent me to The Moth in New York originally because I've had this, what they described as a terrible life. Right? So twice in my life, I have died. My heart has stopped beating, I have stopped breathing. CPR has been used to bring me back to life. I was homeless for a period in my life. Arrested, tried, jailed for a crime I didn't commit all of these things. That's the tip of the iceberg nonsense. That's been my life. So that's why my friends thought I'd be good at telling stories. They said, you've got a lot of stories to tell. And so I went to New York and I did tell stories like that. But what I quickly discovered was if I tell you the story about the time I went headfirst through the windshield of a car and stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating the back of the ambulance, you can't really relate to that. Most people can't think to themselves. I remember the time I went through a windshield and died. Matt, you know I feel your pain, right? So those stories are hard to tell because they sound great, but they don't really connect with audiences in any meaningful way. You know, just last week, my wife and I were listening to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me that radio show on NPR and, and Anna Kendrick was the person being interviewed. And after the interview, my wife paused the radio. I paused the podcast we were listening to, and she said, if I die, you should marry Anna Kendrick. She's perfect for you, right? And first I was thrilled because I was thinking, this is great. I'm going to find out what she thinks of me because I'm going to ask her why Anna Kendrick. Right. And that's going to give me information. So I asked my wife, why Anna Kendrick and, you know, she said, you're both funny in the same way. You're both willing to be mean when necessary. You're both very direct. You're both very accomplished. A bunch of things that were very nice. And so then I ended up thinking, well, I have to pick someone from my wife now, like she gave me Anna Kendrick. And, you know, I told her what a fan of Kendrick's married. She said, you break up that relationship, you're perfect for her, right? So, you know, because it was so serious, I was like, I got to find a guy for my wife. So I spent three days trying to find the person to replace me in the unlikely event I ever die, right? I even used ChatGPT. I had a long conversation with ChatGPT telling, you know, telling AI everything about my wife and asking it to give me options right? I thought about my own friends. I went through all of these people, really accomplished human beings. I couldn't find one, and it wasn't until I was lying next to my wife and we had turned out the lights to go to sleep, and I was about to close my eyes when it hit me why I couldn't find anyone to replace me. I thought it was because I'm so amazing. I'm irreplaceable. It occurred to me that it's not true. Like George Clooney can absolutely replace me. In a lot of ways. The problem was, I didn't trust anyone in the world to love my wife as much as I do. Right that moment with my head on the pillow, falling asleep next to the woman I love, was a five second moment that I had, and I know that when I come around to telling that story, someday, that's going to be a hell of a lot better than the story about the trial I was on, which I've never told, because I know that's a hard story for people to relate to. Or I had a raccoon as a pet as a child. I've never told that story because that's a hard story to relate to. I'd rather tell a little story about listening to the radio with my wife and pondering something about her, and then discovering the depth of love I have for her. That will mean something to people, and so you don't have to have raccoons as pets, and you don't have to go to jail or be on trial or die, in order to tell a great story. You just have to be in tune to these moments in our lives when someone says something to us and we think, oh, like that means something. If it means something to you, it will always mean something to other people if told well, so I love that story first of all. And partway through I occurred to me I don't even remember what I asked, but I'm so, like, fascinated by the story that you're telling me now. Thankfully, I remembered. Yes, we got there, but you know, it's what's so interesting about that, too, I think, is that you've made the point before that we all have these stories. They abound, but they just disappear and we don't recognize them. We don't keep track of them. Now, I think everyone should go and watch your Ted talk. Hopefully that's, you know, hopefully you're okay with that. Yes. It's I think it's a great Ted talk it's titled Homework For Life. Is that right? Homework For Life. Yeah. So, Matt, you hit on something so interesting there. And what I'm. I'd love for you to talk about what you talked about in your Ted talk video Homework For Life about how do we identify these stories because we all seem to have them. You've certainly made that point before, but it's just us, our ability to actually capture them. Yeah. Well, I'll say, first of all, you probably haven't given yourself enough time. If we were to go back to my homework for life when I started doing it in 2012 and we looked at the first six months, that's atrocious. You know, I was I was really aggressively looking for stories, and now I needed them for the stage and I was running out at the time. So there was a reason for it. But back then I was sort of judging and analyzing moments and saying, is this a story? Can I make it into a story? Right? And that's the wrong approach. You know, the approach that I like people to have is the world, and our lives contain moments that may or may not have long term meaning to us, but, you know, were enough to make us notice on that day. And rather than judging the moment because it costs nothing to write down 2 or 3 sentences, which is essentially Homework For Life says take an Excel spreadsheet or take my app, and in 2 or 3 sentences capture a moment, right? And that's it. And you don't judge it. You just you write it down and you move on. So back in 2012, I was finding like 1.1 moments per day to write down, you know, today I find 7.8 moments per day, not because my life is more interesting, but because I have a clearer sense of what's happening around me. I see it more clearly, but most importantly, I don't judge it. I just say, oh, there's a thing that happened, I'm gonna write it down. And it's either going to someday become a story, or it's going to become a part of a story, or it's never going to be spoken aloud, but it's going to be a moment from my life that I will hold on to forever. Right? So like a couple weeks ago, I was picking up the crayons off the floor and, I noticed that my kids, they never used the brown crayon like it's the least used crayon of all the crayons. And so as I'm picking up the brown crayon, I'm looking at it and going, why don't they use this crayon? And then I thought to myself, is this because brown is the color of poop? Like, are we predisposed to avoid the brown crayon because brown is just not a great color? Because it's the color? Now, I don't know if that's true. It probably isn't true, but I had a thought in the back room of my home in the early morning hours as the sun was rising and I was holding a brown crayon, and I went into my homework for life. I don't think I'm ever going to tell that is a story or a part of a story. I don't think I've told my wife it. I think you might be the first person I've told it to. Right? And if nothing comes of it in five years, both of my children will likely be out of the house in college or beyond. And when I go and review my homework for life from July of 2025, I will have a moment that I will return to, and it will be in the early morning hours and the sun picking up crayons that I used to find annoying, but probably at that point I'll be wishing I could still be picking up crayons and that my children were young enough to still be coloring, right? And so even if it doesn't become a story that I tell people, remember I told you the most important audience for every story we tell is ourselves. And I have those moments to hold on to. And so I would say, don't judge the moments. Write them down, move past them, and then give yourself a month or two, which is what I do. I give myself a month or two, and then I go back and reflect and say, all right, let me look now, sometimes it just happens. Anna Kendrick I know that's a story I knew at the moment it happened, right. I knew the moment when I thought to myself, nobody loves my wife enough to replace me. I knew I had a story to tell a lot of times I don't, though a lot of times I need some perspective. I need some thought, you know, I need some context. I need to see what happens before and after. A lot of times I think I have a story, and then two months later I realize it was a nothing burger. I think, oh, that's going to be a story. And then, you know, 90 days go by and I'm like, well, I actually didn't pan out. It's kind of boring. It's just an anecdote. And like, it's not going to be a story, but the goal is just to write it down, write it down as simply as possible, not a chore. That's why I use a spreadsheet. I only afford myself the length of a computer screen for each one of my moments, and that way, you know it costs you five minutes and you get to hold on to a whole day, which is what no one ever does. You know, the meanest thing I ever do to people as I sit in a workshop and I say, think back on 2019. How many moments from 2019 can you remember if I gave you an hour to write down all of the things you can remember from 2019? Why do you got the best people do? Like if you've got a really great memory, you might have 50 memories from 2019, which means you've shrunken 365 into 50, right? And that's if you're really good. And that's why time feels like it flies. It doesn't, you know, ask an incarcerated person if time flies, ask a fifth grade teacher on recess duty. If time flies, it doesn't. We just allow it to go away without any thought and any memory. Right? So even if the only memory I have from the other day was do my kids, not use the brown crayon because brown is the color of poop I've got that day. I've got one thing from that day and it's never going to be lost to me. I'm sure I have more from that day, but one's pretty good to start with. That's really interesting. I think everyone should go and watch that video. Homework For Life. It's actually really good. You you did a great job of explaining it there. But there's some stories in there, particularly around preventing time from just disappearing and and just passing. I just think there's some very powerful stories in there that are really good encouragement that we should all go and do that. Yeah, it's going to change the way you see your life. You know, my son and I went to a Styx concert last night, and, it's days like that that you end up with like 23 homework for life moments. You know, when you take your when you take your 13 year old son to his third Styx concert in three years, right. The conversations that we had on the two hour drive to the concert and the conversations we had in the concert, and the conversations we had with the people around us in the concert, and then the conversations on the way home like that stuff that people literally forget a month after it's happened. And for me, it was an enormously significant time spent with my son that I have about 24 entries from. And I'll never I'll never lose that day where most people just throw it away like it's true, you know? So funny you say that because we, we just drove up north a couple of weeks ago, and my son has recently got his license, and so he wanted to drive part of it. And because we were driving, he wasn't on his phone and we were talking the whole way through, and it was just delightful. It was just so great an experience. And I realize now that on that day, I didn't go and do my Homework For Life. I'm gonna have to go back and do that and try and, and recapture some of that. Yeah. I was jotting down memories in between acts. You know, we, we saw the Eagles guitarist play some Eagles songs, and then we had 20 minutes in between, and then REO Speedwagon came out and they played, and then we had 20 minutes in between. And in between moments, I had my phone out, and I was jotting down moments that I knew would ultimately end up in my homework for life. Nice. Yeah, Matt, we've had we've talked about the context of storytelling in general, which is probably like somewhat stage oriented in the context that you do it. We've talked about it in the context of, somewhat around public speaking, and a lot of people think of storytelling in the context of small social settings. Right? Yeah. Got all that. Now, when we think about it in the context of job interviews, because a lot of our audience is gonna be interested in that context. Does it work and make sense in the same way there? 100 percent. I tell people, once you've sort of cleared the hurdle of, I know how to do the job, you know, they're like, okay, this person can do the job. At that point, an interview essentially becomes, do I want to have lunch with this person for the next five years? Is this person a good hang? Right? Can I envision myself in a collaborative dispute with this person? Well, we're going to work out a problem together, even though we might disagree. And I think all of that can be accomplished through storytelling. Those five chemicals that get released into the brain. I mean, why would you not want your interview committee to feel connected to you? Be more attentive when you're speaking. Remember, you better, you know, just think about like when you were a kid, you saw movies and read books and saw television shows that you can still remember today. Decades later. Right? But you can't actually remember the last pie chart that you saw, and you probably can't remember the last PowerPoint deck that someone presented to you. You probably even can't remember the last interview that you were in yourself. You probably can't remember what you said and what the questions were, right. But stories get remembered forever. So you'll, you know, if you go back and listen to this podcast we're doing right now, you will know that when you ask me a question, I ultimately find my way into a story because I know that if I'm telling a story, my answer will be impactful and remembered, right? So as an interviewer, you want to tell stories all the time. You want to answer every question with a story. If they say, you know, tell us about a time when you had a real problem, you know, and how you overcame that problem. My first sentence is going to be something to the effect of, so I'm sitting in class one day around 3:00. When I notice right now the brain has been triggered. The sooner you trigger the brain to let it know a story is being told, the sooner you're going to get that chemical hack, and the sooner those those chemicals are going to begin working for you. So for me, it's I drop into a story instantly. Right. And that causes people to think, wow, what's what's this about? What's he saying? Why is he saying this this? As long as the story yields the answer, it reveals. Here's how I handled that problem. You know, and I'm not going to just explain how I handle that. I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to give you a movie in your mind that's going to show you how I solved the problem. That's the way you should answer every question, regardless of whether you're in an interview or I was playing golf with my buddies today and this morning they said, so how was the concert? Right. I could have said the concert was great, which is a stupid answer that people give all the time. Instead I said, so I'm sitting at the concert and it's the last song of the night when all of these guys around me start tapping me on the shoulder and they're saying one of three things they're saying, how did you get your 13 year old to be into Styx and REO Speedwagon and the Eagles? Or they're telling me you're the greatest father we've ever seen, or the best of all was the guy right behind us who said, I've seen Styx a dozen times? He said, this time the only thing I did was watch your son. He knows the words to every song. I can't believe it. It was such a joy to watch a young boy do that. That's how the concert was for me. That's a hell of a lot better than saying it was great, right? Which is what most people say. If someone asked you, how are you doing? You know, how's it going? You're never going to hear me say, great, I'm always going to tell you something specific and story oriented, rather than the simple answers which are ultimately forgettable. So I'm guessing you didn't prepare that story in advance. And, you know, you've been doing this long enough that your brain sort of automatically went into that mode. What's happening behind the scenes when you're I know you're not consciously thinking about it but for the rest of us, as we think about how do I like on command, if you will create a structure that goes from here to here to here to here, it sounds like now we're getting to tactics specifically. But you talked about I was at so, you know, I think you said something like it's the last song of the night and blah blah, blah. That first trigger, can you talk about that a little more and then we'll move into the next steps. Yep. So the first thing I ask myself is what I'm ultimately trying to say. I start at the end. I have a goal to accomplish, right? If you start speaking and you don't know where you're going, then you are not going to get anywhere. So I said to myself when they said to me today, how was the concert? I said to myself, I want to tell them about the best moment of the night, right? That's the end. So I knew what I was aiming at. I was aiming at a guy who told me the best part of the concert for him was watching my son have, you know, sing those songs, right? That's what I was aiming at. So then to start the story, location and action, put them in a place, tell them what I'm doing. Right. So it's the end of the concert. Sitting next to Charlie actually was standing right. It's a Renegade is the song that's playing if you know it by Styx right we’re shouting the words to Renegade. When I feel a tap on my shoulder. Right. Can you feel how that's a story already, right. And the tap on the shoulder. You say it that way. Now people want to know what the tap is. Some people automatically think, oh, something has gone wrong, right? Someone taps you on the shoulder. People who are pessimistic are predisposed to thinking, oh no, something bad's about to happen. People who are predisposed to optimism will think something good. Either way, they're wondering what's about to happen. And now I'm off, right? I've opened with location and action, meaning I've started the movie in their minds, and I've started moving through the movie and I know where I'm aiming at. I'm aiming at the guy who said, I've been to a dozen Styx concerts, and this one, what I enjoyed most was watching your son sing every song. It was incredible. He's the youngest guy. There's 10,000 people at this concert. Your son is by far the youngest one here, and he knows the words, the songs better than we do. It's pretty amazing. Right? So you start at the end. You ask yourself what you're trying to say. You go back to the beginning, location, action, start moving forward. And then is it it largely just sort of happens organically that point once you know the end once you know the beginning, you're just walking them through. It can well no there's strategies in between, but you don't need the strategies. I say the beginning and the end of the most important. The beginning harnesses the attention and the end delivers the promise. Right? We can be muddy in the middle. The middle doesn't have to be pretty. Now, if we can get a pretty fantastic, you know. So in the middle I'm going to do things like deploy suspense for sure. I'm going to say some of the thing, but not all of the thing. Right? I'm going to try to be funny in most of my stories. I'm going to try to drop jokes here and there. I'm going to plant some stakes for sure, so that people are sort of like the tap on the shoulder is a state. It's oh. I wonder what that is. That feels like that's going to be a thing, right? So I'm trying to get stakes in suspense. I'm trying to deliver that final five second moment as a surprise, because that's the way all of the five second moments in the world happen to us. When that man told me that, I was surprised and therefore I want my audience to be surprised as well. Right. So I'm going to deploy lots of strategies along the way. I'm going to be thinking about transitions and and I'm going to avoid adjectives whenever possible because they suck. I'm going to do all of those things. But if you can't do all of those things yet, but you can at least have an ending in mind and then have an effective beginning that launches that movie with location and action. You're better than most of the people telling stories today. And if we're talking about this in the context of job interviews, there's really only so many questions people are going to ask. And you can roughly prepare these ahead of time. You can. I mean, what I when I work with people in job interviews, what I say is, let's have a basket of a dozen stories that you can draw from at any time, you know, so and it, I haven’t interviewed for a job in a very, very long time, other than clients who will get on a call with me to see if they want to work with me. You know, I have enough stories to tell that if you ask me a question, it will not take me long to find a story to tell that will fit the question. And so ultimately, that's the best version of the interview, which is I have a host of stories to choose from. Ask me any question. I'll give you a story. Admittedly, you know, in a lot of interviews there are questions you can expect and you can sort of be more prepared for those. But I would not be too prepared for those because a a storyteller who sounds overly prepared is no longer a storyteller. You know, they're a memorizer and nobody likes memorizes because no one wants to have lunch with someone who has to memorize their stories. You know, if you’re a story memorizer you're not a good hang. And I do believe that most of a job interview is, is this person a good hang? Do I want to have lunch with this person? Can I disagree with this person but still like them the next day? I think most of it is that. Yeah, I think one of the core things in interviewing is just not memorizing your answers. Like whether it's a story, part of the answer, or I guess maybe all of it should be the story part of the answer, really. But one way or another, you want to be spontaneous, or at least have some elements of spontaneity to it, I think. Yeah, absolutely. The beauty in a story oftentimes is the mistake a storyteller makes. You know, when I see a storyteller make a mistake on stage and they say, oh, I forgot to tell you something, I love that because that tells me they're not memorized. They're actually they've prepared it. They've got an idea of what they want to say. They may have even memorized funny lines and transitions and things, but there's some fluidity to what they're speaking. And those mistakes, I think, are they're really a storyteller. They're not a monologuist. They're not an actor who has come and memorized lines and are now delivering those lines for us. So, yeah, the imperfection often is an indication that we're dealing with a real storyteller here and not someone who has overly prepared. I think sometimes, you know, you touched on here where you touched on stakes. I'd like to just dig in a little further on those. Number one, with respect to humor, can everybody be funny? Yes. Some people are like, oh, I'm just not funny person. Now. People who think they're born funny also are just looking to be special. Being identified as superheroes. Story as humorous strategy. Just like storytelling and strategy. I teach 27 humor strategies. I used to have 26. I just found a 27th. All I do is I pay attention to when people or things make me laugh, and when they make me laugh, I say, how did that make me laugh? And most of the time now I go. I know how they did it. They used exaggeration right? Which is a simple humor strategy that everyone can deploy. Sometimes I run into one and I go, wait a minute, like I've never really considered that one before. I've seen it, but I've never really identified it as a strategy. And so humor is the same thing. It's strategic, it's deploying strategies. And once I teach someone a strategy and humor, you'll go watch a comedy special. You won't be able to unsee it. You'll it'll almost become math to you. You'll see a comedian, they'll call me. People call me and say, Matt I saw him do it nine times in one hour. I'm like, I know that's how it works. It doesn't mean that he's not brilliant and creative and working hard and crafting stuff, but ultimately it's a hammer and it's a nail. What you build with it is your choice. But ultimately it's a hammer and a nail. And so you can learn all those strategies and, you know, be just as effective as other people. Perhaps not just as effective. There's some things like delivery that is really hard to teach. And oftentimes this requires a lot of stage time. There's also voice. You know, one of the best lessons I ever got from one of my clients was we were working on a keynote that she was going to deliver, and she said, I want to work on building in some humor today. But can we make it humor that doesn't sound like it's coming from a sarcastic white guy who lives on the East Coast, which was her way of saying, every time you give me a joke, it's the kind of joke you would tell, but not the kind of joke me a woman who's half your age living in San Francisco, would tell, right? And that was the lesson for me on like, what you are humor is, or what your sense of humor is, is going to be very different than mine. So part of it is finding your authentic voice, like what makes sense for you. You know, if you know the comedian Nate Bargatze, right? He's hilarious. And I would never be able to tell any of his jokes. Right. Because Nate is very invested in the idea of I'm a dummy. I come from a place where I barely graduated from high school, and the world is a very confusing place to me. And that's a lot of his humor. It's a naivete. It's, the world is big and large, and I am small and confused. That would never fit me. I'm like an overly confident, you know, borderline arrogant, you know, aggressive human being who can't get away with going. You know, I just I don't understand. That's just not going to work for me. You know, I have a different brand of humor than Nate. Nate's absolutely funnier than me. For the record, I am not implying otherwise. He's 100 times funnier than me, but his brand of humor and mine would never work, right? So you have to find your own voice, which is part of the process too. But the joy is if you're if you're interviewing for a job, if you're in business, there are strategies that you can deploy all the time, and they're effective no matter what. Some strategies just don't work in business or in job interviews. Swearing, actually, a well-placed bit of profanity can be hilarious. Not in a job interview, not in a marketing campaign(I’m glad you clarified that) not in a branding campaign. Right? So some strategies are not available depending on your context but there are some that are available to everyone and they work for everybody. Can we maybe go through one example of one that might be effective in an interview? Yeah. So I guess, nostalgia is often highly effective. The beauty of nostalgia is, well, nostalgia is essentially reminding people of the way the world used to be, which is often fairly amusing. So if I tell you there was a time in my life when I didn't own a phone because I was homeless and, you know, back then, in order to own a phone, you had to own a wall to place the phone on. And so like the requirement was you had to have a house before a phone, even though a phone cost a lot less. Right. And so because I didn't on a wall, I didn't on a phone. And that makes people laugh. They're like, that's right. It's weird that your phone was once affixed to a wall and couldn't be removed from the wall. And then eventually we came up with these curly cords that stretched 30ft through the house. But you was still you could maybe get out of the dining room and into the kitchen, but that was it. Like a mobile phone back then was, wow, I can get all the way into the living room from the dining room. Isn't this amazing? Right? So the trick of that is most people will find that funny, but if they don't find it funny, it's also educational. It doesn't feel like you're trying to make a joke. If nostalgia doesn't land the laugh you're hoping for, it just feels like you're reminding people of a time that once existed. And so you don't get that ding of, oh, he was trying to be funny, but he wasn't funny, which is really scary for a lot of people. So there's a lot of strategies that you can use like that, which are if the joke doesn't land, you're still getting away with providing relevant information of some kind, you know? So if someone said to me, you know, can you tell me about a time in an interview, can you tell me about a time when you really struggled? And I want to choose a time from when I was 14, you know, I might say so it's it's 1985, which means no one's allergic to anything. And, bike helmets haven't been invented yet, and we're all eating gluten packed bread baked in asbestos factories by people who are smoking cigarets and never seen a latex glove in their life. Right. So that might be funny to people, but even if it's not, it's like, oh, he's setting the scene, right? He's establishing that the context of what he's about to talk about so I can get away with that not being funny because it's informative. So you can do strategies like that and make people laugh, and if not, you still That's, that's really interesting. And as an approach, because it's you're right. It's the upside. You want of the humor, but you want to lop off the downside of people thinking that didn't go well. Right? I mean, if you're that if you're a coward, but a lot of people are cowards when it comes to humor. Well, I mean, especially in an interview where the stakes are real, right? It's, are more robust than if I'm having a chat with buddies over a golf course. It's true. But I still think I'd rather hire someone who's trying to be funny than someone who seems afraid to be funny. You know, I credit people for the courage of attempting to make me laugh, because I would rather work with someone who comes in to work every day with the spirit of I'm going to try to make people laugh while I get the job done, even if it doesn't always go well. Rather than the person who comes in and says, I'm afraid to try to make people laugh, so I'm just going to do the job and go home, right? I'd rather I'd rather have the person who's trying to be funny. I also think in every job interview, you should aggressively be trying to do what everyone else is not doing. Like, I think it's weird that most of the time people attempt to conform to the expectations of a situation which essentially says you're just trying to be like every other person who's going to be in the seat before and after you. So instead, I think you should try to find something that makes you look or sound or feel different at all times. And maybe that is in a job interview. Hey, he tried to make us laugh. He bombed, but he did try to make us laugh and that was pretty good. I think that's pretty great, actually. Yeah, well, I think you hit it on the head in terms of not trying to be like everyone else. One of the sort of core things I talk about in interviewing is, you know, what are the ways you can stand out from everyone else? Because if you're just like everyone else, Um good luck. Right. Yes. I'm a big believer like, get out of the herd. You know, the problem with leaving the herd is you're afraid you're going to get picked off by a lion. You know, the herd feels safe. But if you're moving through life hoping to stay safe, you will not get ahead. You will be one of the many zebras, and you will not be noticed. You'll blend in beautifully and no one will notice you, and you will go nowhere like you've got to take a risk and get out of the herd and do something different. Even if the thing different is I know everyone is going to wear a traditional tie at the interview, so I'm going to wear a bow tie because you know what? They're going to remember the guy in the bow tie, right? And then if they ask me about the bow tie, that will be fantastic because then I'll be able to say something about the bow tie. Right? I'll be able to tell them I have lots of those regular ties that those other boring people you're interviewing are going to wear today. I wanted to make sure that you remembered me. My answers are going to be extraordinary. But for visual learners like some of you may be I affording you this reminder as well. So let's go. Right. They're never going to forget me if I say something like that. 100%. It's, it's interesting to the way you put that in that one of the things I think is a really good strategy is to sort of drop these lines in the water that you want them to ask you about, which then gives you the ability to to jump onto that. So yes, storytellers do this all the time. I teach people to when you end a story, don't wrap it up in a bow. Leave a couple knots hanging loose. The goal of a storyteller is for someone to say, oh, tell me more about that. That just says, tell me another story. If you're a storyteller, all you're looking to do is tell the next story. And so oftentimes, I will not wrap up my story in a beautiful way. I will wrap it up where I have a five second moment. Right. But you know, in the Anna Kendrick example, I decide there's no one in my life, no one in the world who can love my wife as much as I do. Right? I leave it right there. People, you know will ask me, so did you keep looking? Did you eventually find someone? And that's just me being invited to tell another story. Yeah, well, I mean, to some extent you did and I didn't bite, but I wrote it down. I'll ask you now, what was it in E.T. that Steven Spielberg botched? Right. There's a scene in E.T. where Elliot is in a science lab at school, and they're going to dissect frogs. And as a ten year old, I knew this. That whole scene was nonsense. First of all, the kids were going to have to kill the frogs. They were alive already. So we're going to, like, take some poison pill and drop it in a jar and put it over the frog and then watch the frog die. There's no way that happens. Even in 1981, where there's no bike helmets. And, you know, we're all all eating gluten packed bread. There's no way the kids are like first murder your frog. That's not going to happen. Right? And so then Elliot decides we're not going to murder the frogs because he's connected to E.T. and for some reason, this has given him empathy. So Elliot starts releasing all the frogs as a schoolteacher or back then, as a student. I know that the most you're going to release is two frogs before that teacher is all over you, right? And there's no way the kids aren’t going to stop you, either, because some of them are murderous and they want to kill their frog. So he just sort of, like, runs around and lets all the frogs go and nobody cares. They all just like, watch him do it. And then the frogs. The worst part is these frogs. They all just miraculously start hopping towards an open door in a science lab and a school out to a field. So there's like just a conveniently open door to a grassy field. And all these frogs, for some reason, are predisposed to, like, figure out exactly where to go and how to get out. And no one stops a single frog from getting away. I saw that scene and I thought, this man hasn't been in a school in a really long time, because none of this makes any sense to any child on the planet. Well, I mean, to some degree, like, thank goodness they didn't kill them because they may be some of the smartest frogs ever. They know exactly where to go, right? Yes. Yeah, they were. But yeah, that is interesting. You know, it's just moments like that that like it happens in stories all the time where someone's like, that doesn't sound right, you know? And oftentimes it is right. And you didn't explain it well enough. But sometimes you hear a story and you go, that didn't really happen. You know, just like those frogs that did not really happen, Stephen. That could not happen in that scene. So jumping back to interviews for one second, there's one last thing I wanted to touch on going back through your book. One of the things you mentioned is that you never want to make yourself the hero of the story and this, you know, grand character except in interviews. And I think one other setting you highlighted, you really want to marginalize yourself or malign yourself. I think of the examples you gave in interviews you do to kind of need to make yourself the hero of the story. Well, I think you can make yourself, someone who has learned something, someone who has made progress but has not sort of reached the pinnacle of success. I believe in telling stories where if I'm going to be sort of the hero, we'll say my accomplishment is going to be small. I'm going to indicate one step forward, and I'm going to indicate all the support that I received along the way. And you're right, I'm going to malign myself as I go along, which is to say, if I'm going to say something nice about myself, I'm also going to tell you how I'm an idiot in the process. Right? So if I take the stage and someone has just given me an introduction and they say the most lovely things about me before I take the stage, the first thing I do is I get on stage and go, so I shrunk my wife's sweater yesterday and she's still mad about it, and I forgot to pick my daughter up at scouts because I just kind of forgot she existed for a little while. And so that wasn't very good, right? And like a month ago, somehow I put on two pairs of underwear before I went to school, and I made the mistake of telling my students this after I came out of the bathroom. All of those things are an indication to you that despite that lovely introduction I just received, you're also dealing with an idiot. Now let me proceed. Right. That's just me. Sort of like level setting. I do the same thing. Or the I would do the same thing in an interview. This would never be an interview question, but if someone said so, Matt, you're an internationally bestselling novelist, tell us what that's like, right? I would tell the story about sitting in my classroom one day while my students were away at music, and my phone rang and it was my agent, and she was calling to tell me that someone might be interested in buying my first novel, and I'd stop the story right there. Right. Because people understand, they believe they've seen, like a phone call yielding potential and maybe success down the road. That makes sense to them. If I was to tell them, well, my book’s in 27 countries like that doesn't mean anything to anyone, right? It doesn't connect. It doesn't even mean anything to me. I haven't even been in 27 countries. I don't know what it means to be an internationally bestselling novelist. Right. So. And no one wants to hear that story. They'd rather hear about a phone call and excitement and some promise on the other end of it. So when we're interviewing, we want to we want to afford ourselves the opportunity to tell about our successes. But we don't want to, like, make ourselves sound like we've reached the end. There is no finish line in life, so there should be no finish line in the story, right? It is “I've taken steps closer to a finish line that I will never reach”. Those are the stories I like to tell. Cool. Just a couple more quick questions. You've been very generous with your time, Matt. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. We wrap up here. Let me ask you storytelling in presentations at work, often the content is so you're relating information. Do you think you can apply this there as well to sort of make those more memorable and effective? Yeah. Or just the strategies themselves. You know, a good example I give to people is, you know, I watch someone present something at work and, they have three ideas or three strategies that are presenting today. And then they throw all three strategies up on the slide. And I say, well, that was stupid. That's the dumbest thing you can do, right? Tell me that you're going to be presenting three strategies today. Put the numbers one, two and three on the slide and then show me the first one, but not the next two. That's called suspense, right? I don't understand why the business world doesn't doesn't believe in the multi. Click on a slide like every slide you know software or presentation tool allows you to click more than once on a slide and continue to bring information up, which means create a dynamic slide that's constantly changing, rather than the wallpaper that most people put up on the slide. Right. And so like if you're thinking about suspense and surprise, which are strategies used in storytelling, do that in the work that you do. Meaning don't throw everything up on the screen at once, right? Aaron Sorkin famously said, the worst thing you can do in an audience is tell them something they already know. And so oftentimes I'll show this. I'll see people. Here's this three strategy is going to work with. It'll be the strategy and words after the strategy. People have already read the slide while you're still talking about the first one. And it's weird because people don't acknowledge that. Like you can't actually read and listen at the same time. So probably they weren't listening to you and they were just reading your slide, which now you've just created a book on a screen for people to read, or they didn't read your slide and they're listening to you. But now the content is meaningless on the slide, right? So stuff like that happens all the time, and it makes no sense to me. And that can be really impactful when you start presenting in a way that the things you're saying are being supported by what's on a screen, and that the things you haven't said yet aren't yet on the screen. Right. I always say, like the most valuable real estate on a slide is the bottom third of the slide, because that is the the bottom third is the thing that's going to drive you to the next slide. If you just think that people are looking forward to the next slide, you're crazy. Like everyone is hoping the slide you're on is the last slide. They're always hoping that unless you're giving them a reason to want to see the next slide, right. So a lot of my slides will have some information. And then the bottom right corner there'll be a little thing that says but that's not all. Bottom right corner right bottom real estate. They go oh really? That's not all that makes them want for me to click right. I want them to go click that slide. I want to know what's going to be on the next slide man. Right. The same way movie people do it. They're like one scene to the next. Right. And so we have to think that same way when we're presenting, we have to think, how can we hold people's attention? Nobody wants to hear anything we have to say unless we give them a reason to listen. And I'm convinced I'm the only person on the planet who believes this. It is weird that people get up in a room in front of people with a microphone, or in front of a in front of a slide deck, and they just assume people want to pay attention. I assume everyone, including you, don't want to listen to me like you've invited me to the podcast, but legitimately 100% in my bone marrow. I was thinking to myself, he doesn't want to hear me. And by the way, the audience doesn't want to hear me either. Every person who loves his podcast hates me. That's how I assume I am being, like approached when I come into a situation. And so I am relentless in my efforts to hold people's attention and get them to want me to continue talking. Most people just think, wow, they're sitting and I'm standing, so they must want to hear from me. And that's the dumbest thing you can think in the world, right? I'm convinced the only reason I believe this is because 27 years teaching fifth graders, I have literally stood in front of human beings who don't want to hear a damn thing I have to say, unless I give them a reason to listen. I don't think adults are any different. I think they're just a little more polite about it. Okay, that's a great insight. I'm gonna have to go back and look at my presentations again and think that one through. Let me ask you another one. In terms of just specific skills, can people so how do you improve as a storyteller? Is it just reps or like from a very specific tactical perspective. And this is now sort of not someone who tells stories professionally per se as a like on stage at The Moth, but someone who's just like going about their normal life in social settings, in work settings in interviews, that kind of thing. Is it just reps or how can we get better? It's reps. It pretty much is reps. It's tell lots of stories. Find stories using things like Homework For Life, and then tell them as much as you can. Tell the same story to different groups of people. So I told the story of the concert to my friends at golf today. You know, tomorrow I'm going to be in Toronto with a client and if I want to, if they knew I went to the Styx concert and they say how it Styx, I'm going to tell that same story. I'm going to try to tell it a little bit better. Right? So take a story that you like, tell it to a different audiences, see how it lands, see if you can change it, and then do that again. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. You want to get to the point where something happens. Then five minutes later you can tell a highly effective story about it, and that's going to be getting in the reps. And if I'm playing baseball, I can tell I'm improving because I'm my batting average. Maybe is going up, maybe I'm making fewer errors. How do we do that in storytelling? I mean, the best thing you can do is find people who don't like you and tell them stories. For me, it's like being on a stage in front of 500 people. They don't like me unless I tell a good story. The tricky thing is we tell stories to people we love most of the time, and so oftentimes we get positive reinforcement on bad storytelling. So you want to find the critical friends of your life who are willing to be honest with you, maybe even put a group of them together. I know a lot of people who have worked with me, who now sort of have a group of six people where they get together once a once a week, once a month, and they just tell each other stories. You know, they've read Storyworthy and they know some of the strategies, you know, collectively they can start really being honest. So my wife is super honest with me. She always has been. So I have that as a resource. I have a couple other friends who are very, very honest with me and I managed to get a lot of stage time. So if a story doesn't land, I know it pretty much right away. You just have to look into the eyes of an audience. They will tell you if they like or hate you. So if you don't have that opportunity, find some critical friends. Maybe create environments, simple environments like gather on a zoom call and once a week someone's going to tell a story and they're going to get feedback from it. And the next week it'll be somebody else. If you want to get better, though, you've got to, like, do what you've described, which is find a way to improve and and objectively know whether you're improving. Yeah, that's interesting when you when people are struggling with with it, you've coached a lot of people over the years. And by this point, are there things that are common stumbling blocks people seem to run into? They always want to say more than they should. They always want to tell three stories instead of one, right? They get interested in things like, but I want to talk about the the pink dress that my mother was wearing. I love that dress. And I'm like, I know you loved it, but nobody cares. Like it's so irrelevant to the story. It doesn't mean anything to anyone but you. So hard for people to let go of things that don't matter. I used to have the same problem. It was with humor. You know, I’d tell a story and my wife would be like, that was a great story, but why do you spend like 90 seconds on Pop Tarts? And I'd be like, because there was like four good Pop-Tart jokes in there was hilarious because they were hilarious, but they don't serve the story, right? So for me, it's always, this can be funny, but I can't be funny. I have to move on because it doesn't serve the story. So you have to ask yourself, am I telling the story in a way that's making me feel good? Or making the audience feel good? Because those things are very different. The version of the story that I want to tell is different than the story I have to tell. If it's an audience listening to me, the story I tell my shower head when I'm taking a shower, that's the one I want to tell. I'm like, I'm going to tell myself the story that I want to hear. But as soon as I'm out of the shower and I'm going to speak to somebody else, now, I have to modify it and say, well, what do they really want from me? They don't want the pink dress. They want to know what happened, what was said, what was thought was what was felt adjectives suck. Nobody. No one's ever finished listening to a story and thought, boy, I wish they had described more stuff, right? If anything, they're like, I wish they hadn't described so much stuff and gotten to the good parts. When you think about, someone wants to get better in the next six months and what are what are resources you would point them to, podcasts you'd recommend in the YouTube videos? I mean, the first one, the first thing I would recommend is, reading Storyworthy. I would, you know, check out Homework For Life. What are other things, other resources out there people can use to help get better? I guess I start looking for, you know, I start going through the podcasts. I guess that’s where stories are being told, the Moth is a good example. You know, I think early on I was listening to the Moth podcast before I was telling stories. And you start to like pick up on strategies almost without trying. So you got to start just listening to stories, too. It's the same way, like, you know, Stephen King said, if you're not going to read, you might as well not write. You know, if you're not going to tell stories, if you're not going to listen to stories, you might as well not tell stories. So find places where you can hear stories. The Moth podcast go to live shows. Ask your friends. Say, tell me a story, right? As a storyteller, actually, as a as a white man, as a white, straight American man. I understand that. Like, I don't enter a room without assuming everyone wants to hear everything I have to say. And so I have a brake. You know, I hit the brake all the time. I try to be the last person to speak in a room, and I try to say, tell me a story, or oh, tell me that story. You know, someone will say, oh, I had the worst day yesterday. Really? Tell me that story. You'll hear me say that all the time. You know that's being generous, but also being selfish. I want to hear a story. You know? I want to see if I can pick up a new trick. Maybe they'll make me laugh in a way. So I'll have 28 humor strategies instead of 27. You know, it's funny you just mention that because that was literally where I was going to go to next is I thought it was so insightful about listening to why did that make me laugh and noticing that pattern. And, you know, you talk about, you know, noticing it in movies. You talk about, you know, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. But it's a real skill and a real unlock. I think once you start noticing those things and you start paying attention to it, then you can, you know, take those for yourself. Yeah, yeah, that's the beauty of it. Same thing with movies. Oh, wow. They really had me in suspense there. How did they keep me in suspense? Right. Sometimes that's something I can apply to oral or written storytelling. Sometimes it's only applicable to the screen. But I'm doing the same thing all the time. Cool. Matt, before we wrap up, is there anything you think we should talk about in storytelling we haven't done yet? I know there's a lot of stuff obviously we haven't talked about, but anything where you're like, we got to talk about this. I guess the one thing I'll say is when I work with people, one of the tragedies I find in the world is that a lot of people don't think that they that others want to hear what they have to say. I meet, a lot of people have stories, but they just don't think anyone wants to listen to them. And I can tell you that most of the people who feel that way are women, people of color, and people who occupy marginalized communities, mostly because people like me have not afforded them the space to actually say what they want to say. I hate that, that makes me crazy. So as I said before, if it means something to you, it will mean something to other people. And regardless of what you've experienced in the past, and regardless of the attention that you seem to have garnered or not garnered from people, if you have stories to tell, you should tell them. People genuinely want to hear them. There's always going to be a person in the back of the room with their arms folded, glaring at you, and that's the exception and not the rule. And yet we tend to look at that person and forget the people who are looking at us, anxious to hear the story. We look at the critic. Right? And I just say, ignore the critic, ignore that person. They're broken inside, they're failed. They're flawed, they're useless. You know, when I see someone sitting in the back of the room with their arms folded, leaning back, looking at me like they don't believe in me. They don't believe in what I'm saying. I just think you're a problem. Like you have a problem in your life that is not related to me or what I'm doing right now. So you're irrelevant to me. And the sooner we can start thinking like that confidence, the sooner we can tell stories. So if you're one of those people who just doesn't think people want to hear you, it's not true. Okay, Matt, you have so much valuable stuff to share. How can people, follow up with you to find more? MatthewDicks.com is my regular website and Storyworthy.com is where you can go to get a storytelling instruction. I have a free academy about eight hours of free online videos, and other forms of content that you can begin consuming. It's a great place to start. Okay, fabulous Matt Dicks, thank you so much. That was fantastic. And so enjoyable to have this conversation. I really enjoyed our chat. So you are wrong by the way, I was very excited to hear what you had to say. Thank you! I was relentless in attempting to hold your attention. Fantastic. All right, thanks again. We'll talk to you. Thank you.