How to tell better stories | Matthew Dicks (Storyworthy)

Matthew Dicks (00:00:00):
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 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 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.

Lenny (00:00:54):
Today my guest is Matthew Dicks. Matthew is the author of my All-Time favorite book on storytelling Storyworthy, which a previous guest of the podcast recommended to me and I couldn't put it down. So I reached out to Matthew and got him on the podcast. Matthew is a 59-time Moth Story Slam winner, and nine-time Grand Slam champ. He's also the author of nine other books, including fictions, rock operas, even a comic book.

(00:01:20):
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.

(00:02:09):
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(00:04:28):
Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Matthew Dicks (00:04:31):
It's my pleasure. I'm excited to be here.

Lenny (00:04:33):
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, also just entertaining book on just how to tell better stories. And when I was reading, I was just like, "Hey, what if I reach out to the author of this book and see if he'd come on?" And here we are.

Matthew Dicks (00:04:55):
I'm thrilled to be here, and I appreciate what you had to say. I tried to make my book as actionable as possible. I think the only reason I'm 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.

Lenny (00:05:12):
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?

Matthew Dicks (00:05:28):
Sure. 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 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 take place overtime. 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.

(00:06:19):
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, 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.

Lenny (00:06:58):
That's a big statement. Is there an example too, you could share of either stories we know or just tell a short story, whatever is easier to give people like, oh wow, you're totally right?

Matthew Dicks (00:07:06):
Sure. Well, I'll tell you one that happened actually today. How about that?

Lenny (00:07:09):
Amazing.

Matthew Dicks (00:07:10):
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 looking at Eileen and wondering, is today the day? Am I going to call Eileen to the board? Because doing so, there's a risk, there's inherent risk that she could be upset, she could embarrass herself in front of the class in a way that means something to her.

(00:07:52):
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 take a shot at me. I knew at that point that now I can call her to the board, that she's going to be okay. So essentially it is a very brief story that I could actually expand into something much more meaningful.

(00:08:39):
I could make that into a five or six minute story about my journey with this student. Which would include, in the longer version of it, the steps that I took to discover who she was, the steps I took to help her reach the point she's at now. I would probably pull in some backstory about students who I was not so successful with. Some of my failures before I learned how to be a better teacher. 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. If you think about a movie like Star Wars, the first Star Wars that came out that is a movie essentially about religion, which people don't always see, but it is true.

(00:09:23):
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 to 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 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.

(00:09:56):
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."

Lenny (00:10:29):
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'll know how it ends based on knowing what this moment is, which then also tells you how it's going to start roughly. Can you just talk about that realization? Because, to me, every time I watch a movie now I'm like, wow, I know exactly how it's going to turn out just from the beginning.

Matthew Dicks (00:10:53):
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, that's much more self-discovery. I really don't know the end of it. But in the storytelling that we're talking about, you have to know the end because you've lived the moment, and the end forms 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.

(00:11:39):
So that's the opposites that will work in a story. Essentially, a story is about these two moments in time, a beginning and an end, and they're operating in opposition to each other. Sometimes more so than others, sometimes exactly an opposition. But you're right. If you watch a movie and you'll 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 going to be at the end. 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. 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?

(00:12:32):
I hate that man so much. We know they're going to end up together, and the journey is well worth the fact that we know what's going to happen at the end. So it ruins a little bit of storytelling for people who 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 and 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.

Lenny (00:13:21):
It's funny, as 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.

Matthew Dicks (00:13:31):
Well, that's the power of story. I tell people this all the time. Why are we telling stories? You've never asked to see a PowerPoint presentation a second time. You've never gone to bed and dreamt about a PowerPoint presentation. You've never heard someone give a keynote and thought, I hope I get to watch that keynote again tomorrow. But movies, you'll watch a movie a hundred times, because it's a story, and our minds are wired to enjoy story over and over and over again. You have a small child, right? Eventually you're going to be reading to that child 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 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 every scene you can probably do the dialogue. We're wired for story. That's why it's so important.

Lenny (00:14:28):
Why is something changing so important? Why is that so critical to a good story, someone having a change or transforming?

Matthew Dicks (00:14:35):
Well, I think that actual moment of transformation lends importance to the story and allows the audience to connect to it. If I report it on my day to you, my day teaching in a classroom, I am unlikely to connect with you unless you are also a teacher and you experienced things similar to me. My wife is a kindergarten teacher. I'm a fifth grade teacher. If both of us report on our day, oddly, we will not really connect very often. She is teaching them how to write the letter C, and I am teaching them how to use the standard algorithm in multiplication. They could not be further apart.

(00:15:11):
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 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 to us.

Lenny (00:16:00):
Fascinating. So building on that same thread of change, you also have this kind of checklist for what makes a good story. What is a good story, 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.

Matthew Dicks (00:16:16):
Well, the dinner test is probably one that you're thinking of.

Lenny (00:16:19):
Yeah, that's right.

Matthew Dicks (00:16:20):
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 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. So there should be no performance art included within your story or within your talk. So weird things that people do should not be done. Like opening a story with unattributed dialogue. So you're standing on stage and you open your story with, "Jim, it's time to come in for dinner." My wife said, 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.

(00:17:12):
It's this weird appendage from childhood when bad writing teachers thought that this was a good idea, or you start with a sound, which is very popular in first grade. You teach kids to start with sound, mostly because teachers are not writers, so they don't understand what writing actually is. And so they open with stories, with things like, bang, the door opened. But if you and I were having dinner and you said, "Hey, how was your day, Matt?" And I said, "Well, let me tell you Lenny. Bang, the door opened." You would not have dinner with me again.

(00:17:41):
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, all of that nonsense 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.

Lenny (00:18:09):
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.

Matthew Dicks (00:18:18):
Slightly elevated. Exactly.

Lenny (00:18:19):
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?

Matthew Dicks (00:18:25):
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. 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 one of the key parts of storytelling is to be vulnerable with your audience. Meaning I'm going to say stuff in a meaningful way. I might say stuff that most people are unwilling to share in a public way, but I'm at least going to offer up a little bit of my heart and mind. If I offer up the heart and mind of someone else that doesn't really require any vulnerability.

(00:19:09):
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 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 taking that story and centering on yourself.

(00:19:36):
One of the examples, 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. 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 going to talk about how the experience of their parent or grandparent during the Holocaust has informed or changed their own life too. So they get to dip into some history, but that history is relevant to the storyteller. So it's no longer history. It's now something changed in me because something terrible happened to my parent or grandparent.

Lenny (00:20:24):
Just as a tangent, you also have this funny, useful checklist for how to tell vacation stories?

Matthew Dicks (00:20:30):
Well, first try not to, right?

Lenny (00:20:32):
I think that's step one. Do not tell vacation stories.

Matthew Dicks (00:20:34):
Most vacation stories are just simply a recounting of your vacation at the expense of another person. So 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, that story is now going to take place on the Thursday night at dinner, and it's irrelevant that I'm in Aruba.

(00:21:07):
The fact that I am on vacation is almost completely irrelevant to the story, other than I may want to offer my location. But I'm not going to talk about the beach the day before or the scuba diving or the plane. All of that goes away. We're telling moments in our lives, and it doesn't matter where they happen. If your location is paramount to 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 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.

Lenny (00:21:46):
This will be a good segment for people to send their friends if they want to tell them their vacation stories. And here's a tip for how to do this better.

Matthew Dicks (00:21:51):
Exactly.

Lenny (00:21:52):
And just understand why it needs to be on a Thursday in that dinner, is the advice there? Keep it very focused and small, unless there's some really essential reason to share the context around the dinner.

Matthew Dicks (00:22:03):
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 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, 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.

Lenny (00:22:39):
There's a lesson that another guest shared, West Cow about... She calls it, When The Bear Starts Eating Your Tent, or something like that. Jump to when the bear is eating your tent. 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.

Matthew Dicks (00:22:54):
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 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.

Lenny (00:23:16):
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 is a stake and why is it important to have stakes? And then just what are examples of adding stakes to your story to make them more encouraging?

Matthew Dicks (00:23:32):
Sure. So stakes are essentially 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 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. 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.

(00:24:17):
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 a 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.

(00:24:39):
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 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.

Lenny (00:25:12):
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?

Matthew Dicks (00:25:19):
Well, I'll separate them really. So with stakes, there's lots of ways to insert stakes. I always say you should have, what I call an elephant at the beginning of the story, which is actually a big spaceship shooting at a little spaceship or a police officer chasing a guy across a roof. We have to immediately know that something is at stakes. We have to be worried about something. In my little Eileen story that I told you, I said, I'm teaching math and I've got this student and I'm worried about her, because I want to call her to the board, but I know she might lack some confidence. Right away, I have to make it clear what kind of story we're at. In a movie, you get a trailer. You don't often go to a movie and not have any awareness about what's about to happen. But when you open your mouth to begin telling a story, nobody knows what you're going to say. You need to land something immediately that...

Matthew Dicks (00:26:00):
Nobody knows what you're going to say. You need to land something immediately that causes an audience to go, "Oh, okay, well what's going to happen here?" 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. I call something called a backpack, which is, 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. If you watch an Ocean's 11 movie, you know what the plan is before they go into the casino. So as the plan goes awry, you can go, "Oh no," because you know what the plan is.

(00:26:42):
If you didn't know what the plan was, you would not be able to go, "Oh no." So that's loading your audience with your hopes and dreams so that they can feel those stakes. They can actually be hoping for you as well. There's things like breadcrumbs where you offer a little bit of what's going on, but not the complete idea, sort of drop a hint. The classic one is sort of the gun. There's a gun in the room, and there's a gun in the room, and it seems like it's not going to be relevant, but if you have a gun in the room, it's going to eventually go off. There's something going on there. That's like a bread crumb. Eventually we're going to get to that gun. Don't worry, it's going to happen. There's hourglasses, which is 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.

(00:27:28):
You load your story with details because suddenly you know have the audience on the edge of their seat, and you want to leave them on the edge of their seat as long as possible. When I know my audience wants to hear the next sentence, that is when I prolong the arrival of the next sentence by I say turning over an hourglass and letting the sand run for a while, and making them wait for it. There's crystal balls where you can predict a future. You don't have to predict an accurate future. You can just predict any future. So I could have said something in the Eileen story like, "If I get this wrong, Eileen is going to begin to cry. She's going to cry in front of 22 kids, 22 kids who for the rest of the year will continue to stare at this girl, and remember the moment she cried." That's a crystal ball.

(00:28:10):
That's me predicting a terrible future. Because I put that terrible future in the audience's mind, now they're worried. So that is a stake. I have planted a false stake, a false future, but they're going to be worried about it because it's also a realistic future. So all of those things are used to continue to get the audience to wonder what's going to happen next, which is a little different than surprise. Surprise is just that beautiful, delightful, amazing moment where the audience didn't see something coming, and then it was almost like it was inevitable. Surprise happens, and they understand why it happened. 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, 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.

Lenny (00:29:11):
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 always has to be both inevitable, and also complete surprise.

Matthew Dicks (00:29:21):
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." 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.

Lenny (00:29:51):
Easier said than done.

Matthew Dicks (00:29:52):
Yes, well, there's lots of tricks to do that as well, but it takes some time. But essentially what you end up doing is, you're hiding the information that they need to know in a multitude of ways so that when it lands, they go, "Oh my gosh, ABCD." They don't connect it until the surprise hits, and then they go, "Of course, ABCD." So you place ABCD 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.

Lenny (00:30:20):
I feel that's a whole other hour of podcast conversation to figure that out.

Matthew Dicks (00:30:23):
That's like ninja level next level storytelling, which is very teachable. Everything I say is very, very teachable and doable by anybody, but yes, it's a trickier thing to accomplish.

Lenny (00:30:35):
Okay, that'll be for a second podcast episode. Just to summarize, you shared I think five ways 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. Hourglass, which is when something is about to happen slow time down. I think of Pulp Fiction and Tarantino in this often of just like, you know some violence is about to happen, and they go next door, and like, "Let's just eat a cheeseburger," instead for a while. And then this backpack idea of they know exactly what you're trying to do, and it's on you and the entire movie. Breadcrumbs where you give them a little bit of information along the way. I think maybe that's it. Maybe there's one more.

Matthew Dicks (00:31:12):
And then the elephant at the beginning.

Lenny (00:31:14):
Oh, the elephant, just like the big ol', here's the steak. I wish-

Matthew Dicks (00:31:16):
You got to have something.

Lenny (00:31:18):
I heard some advice in either your book, a different book about adding stakes is just drop a dead body. Every new dead body is additional stakes that are added to the story. I don't know how often people can do that in random stories.

Matthew Dicks (00:31:30):
But what you can take from that is, so often people load the front end of a story with all of the stakes because they're worried that the audience will not pay attention to them. So they think I'm going to throw everything right in front, and that'll hold an audience for the rest of the story, and that's a mistake. What we want is stakes continually to build throughout a story. So dropping a dead body really means, drop a new steak, 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 stakes to occur within the first half of a story. 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.

Lenny (00:32:21):
Just to give people something concrete to think about when they're thinking about this area. Is there a story of yours that's online that we can point people to see an example of really good stakes in action?

Matthew Dicks (00:32:31):
So the one that I reference in my book, which you can go watch online is, Charity Thief. 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. 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 going to happen next. So there's an elephant at the beginning of that story, which is actually not what the story's about because I say the elephant can change colors along the way, but I give you something to wonder about 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.

(00:33:19):
Some stories you don't have to worry so much about. I perform as a stripper in the break room of a McDonald's restaurant when I'm 19 years old for a bachelorette party. There are stakes in that story, but I don't need to put any of them in because everybody wants to know what's going to happen already. Sometimes you just have a story that the stakes are already pre-built because 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 jack up the stakes by using some tricks to get people to the point we want them to be in.

Lenny (00:33:50):
That stripper story I've also watched, and I'll point to it, and I love, it's connected to another piece of advice you always shared. People just say yes to stuff, at the power of yes. I don't want to get into it yet, I want to come back to that.

Matthew Dicks (00:34:00):
True.

Lenny (00:34:00):
We'll leave that breadcrumb but I love that point. Okay, so 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 they aren't great at storytelling versus if they learn the skill, and can implement it at work? What happens, what good things come out of that?

Matthew Dicks (00:34:25):
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 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. You're in a lane that everyone else is in, which means that you're going to be forgettable. I often say most communication in business is round white and flavorless intentionally so because a lot of people are afraid to stand out. When I try to get people to tell stories, 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, getting picked off by some predator.

(00:35:18):
But the alternative is, you're in the herd, which means you're forgettable. 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.

(00:36:04):
I'll never forget that story. 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 because we do it together.

(00:36:27):
I said, "What'd you think?" She said, "Well, I'm never going to forget that guy with the lunchbox." I said, "I will not either." I said, "What'd you think about the other guy?" And she goes, "He was great." I said, "So what did he say?" Five teen minutes after, and she went, "I actually can't tell you a single thing he said." This is a woman who's a teacher, and invested in storytelling and communication. Her impression was, he was fluent, he was amusing, 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 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.

Lenny (00:37:18):
When people hear this, they may think, "Oh man, there's this guy at work, and he's always telling stories." And we're like, "Shut up." Just tell me what we need to do to make it a little more real of just 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 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 going to give you."

Matthew Dicks (00:37:43):
Let me give a couple of examples. I have a storytelling book coming out next year on business. So there's a couple of heroes in that story. 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 it was just a storyteller who spoke about himself on a stage. Boris one day saw me for some fundraiser and said, "Listen, I want you to come and help me." I said, "I can't do that. I just tell. I'm using stories about myself." 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.

(00:38:19):
So a great example was, one of Boris's early stories, he came to me, and he said, "My son was at bat in the Little League Championship game. The bases were loaded, if my son got a hit, the team was going to win the championship. And if my son struck out, the team would lose the championship." It's a three and two count. It is like the ultimate baseball moment, and his son strikes out. He watches his son drag that bat back to the dugout. He's devastated. His son's devastated and Boris is devastated. 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. 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.

(00:39:09):
They're heading to the cars so they can go to ice cream, and they can enjoy themselves. So Boris is falling apart. He's 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's done, he says to me, "So what are we going to do with it? How are we going to 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 want to achieve, they will often sulk for days. They'll wander around the office, and be useless because they're still trying to get past the fact that they just lost the million dollar contract.

(00:39:56):
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 going to take a moment to collect ourselves, to think about the mistakes we made, to decide what we're going to do differently, and then we're going to move on." That becomes a really important moment in his company.

(00:40:32):
It's much better than him standing up in front of his people and saying, "Listen, every time you guys fail to land a big sale, you wander around this office like you're dead, and you're wasting our time. It ends today. Today from now on when you fail, you're going to move on." 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. He shares of himself with his people, and he creates a tangible vision of what the sales team can do. He does that all the time. He comes to me, and he's not looking to solve problems through story. He's looking to develop stories that he can then deploy into his business. So I compare it, I say, band-aids versus bricks. If you're building bricks, you're a storyteller that's capturing stories and building bricks, then 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."

(00:41:34):
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 using me as a consultant to help you generate a story that will solve a problem. That's fine, but you're going to need me the next time too. You're going to 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. He understands how to tell them, and how to connect them to business. So that's something that you can do very easily.

(00:42:02):
Another example, the other star of my book is a woman named Marsha Rakofsky. She used to be the director of corporate communications at Slack, and now she's sort of doing work on her own. But when she was with Slack, she and I were working closely together, and she had to create the narrative that was going to compete against Microsoft Teams. Essentially, Microsoft came along and said, "Hey, we copied your product and it's free, and everybody already has it."

(00:42:25):
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.

(00:43:04):
When it comes time to her present that narrative, I say, "You're going to include the Tuesday night and the two glasses of wine, and all that, right?" And she's like, "No, I'm not. 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 about a month later, she was presenting that same narrative to a smaller group, lower stakes. I said, "Let's 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.

(00:43:42):
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."

(00:43:59):
People connected to her because instead of being a corporate monolith, sort of like Slack spokesperson without personality, which is what we tend to be in business, she was an actual human being who had an inspiration on the 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 into the story as well. Because 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.

Lenny (00:44:41):
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?

Matthew Dicks (00:44:50):
Yeah. 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. Each one of them has 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 safer in the world because men are inherently just dangerous human beings. We just are. If you hear that there was a shooting, you never think, "Oh, I wonder if that was a twenty-three- year-old blonde woman." 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.

(00:45:41):
It's like a validation that I have, at least hygiene and some decency. Most people are in a committed relationship so that means that a total addressable market is large. If I say I'm married, you're either married also, or you're in a committed relationship. So the connection is going to be large. The total addressable market is large. The possible connection, probably moderate. I say it's like, "It's okay." But weird ones are like runners. I'm not a runner, and there's not a lot of runners in the world. But if you're a marathoner, your 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. Marathoners are almost automatically friends upon meeting what I've discovered. If you're just, "Oh, you ran a marathon? I ran a marathon." They're best friends already.

(00:46:32):
So if you've run a marathon, and you're in a room and you discover someone else'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 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.

Lenny (00:47:07):
I could see why people wouldn't naturally do this. If I'm a head of comms for a company, the last thing I want is to make it about me. And what you're saying is, you actually should, because people will find it a lot more interesting.

Matthew Dicks (00:47:20):
Yeah, you don't want to make it all about you, but there's just little tricks. The easiest trick is, 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. If you ask me, "How am I doing today," I'm immediately going to think to myself, elementary school teacher is probably my best personal interest inventory item. Because if I'm an elementary school teacher, everyone loves me. They think I'm doing God's work, even though they don't want to pay me a dime to do it. 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."

(00:48:01):
So in that way, I'm going to slip in the fact that I'm an elementary school teacher by answering your question, I'm going to demonstrate a bit of amusing content in the process, 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 what I want to do because I know that that's going to make people feel connected to me. So I have to find strategic ways to work it in. I teach people to do it all the time. But it starts with understanding what about you might mean something to other people, and how can I get it in there without me sounding like I'm only talking about myself?

Lenny (00:48:48):
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, and presentations, and things like that. What else can people do to become better storytellers in business? I know this is a big question, but let's see where it goes.

Matthew Dicks (00:49:07):
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. In every good product story and every good PowerPoint... Everything, there are stakes, and they're set out and exactly the way I've described. All five of the stakes that I've described to you that I use in that story, Charity Thief can also be used in every business story, every PowerPoint deck, every entrepreneur pitch, everything. So stakes is one of them.

(00:49:52):
Another one we've talked about is, surprise. I should absolutely be surprised in every talk that you give. Steve Jobs was a master of it. 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, daring to be funny, which no one in corporate America can do. Everyone wants to be funny. Every person I've ever met, who I've worked with, every business person in some way 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 it's funny, and if it doesn't happen, that hurts.

(00:50:43):
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." And then I say, "Well, that's the part that's funny." So I was working with a guy, sort of an executive at a company that you interact with every day. He was delivering a talk at the Javits Center, and he was going to be funny. 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?" He said, "I pulled out all the jokes." I said, "Why did you pull out all the jokes?" He said, "The first two speakers weren't funny at all. I felt like if I went on stage and I was funny, I was going to stick out like a sore thumb."

(00:51:27):
I said, "No, you were going to 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 from other people, but you have to be willing to try to do it. It's a scary thing for people. But I say it stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're going to.

Matthew Dicks (00:52:00):
Stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're going to hold people and keep them listening. And if you're not engaged in one of those four things while you're speaking, people are not listening to you anymore.

Lenny (00:52:12):
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Matthew Dicks (00:53:17):
Well, I have currently 26 strategies to be funny. 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, because nostalgia is always funny. The fact that the first VCR I had was 22 pounds and had a remote control attached by a cord that was thick enough that I could trip my brother as he walked through the living room is funny. The fact that I grew up and no one was allergic to anything and we all ate 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.

(00:54:09):
I was working with this company and they failed me. They did not listen to my advice which was a mistake. They're like an Indeed company. They're helping find employees for companies they're one of these people. And I wanted to start their narrative with the idea of in 1983, the primary source of employment was a 16-year- old kid riding on the back of a 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.

(00:55:03):
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. Again, I didn't even try to be funny with it. I just stated the facts. We could have punched that up and made it really funny. And then we flip the script again, the opposites in story. In the beginning, employers had all the power. Today, employees have all the power. Because today you can work in Singapore or Chattanooga, while you're living in Orlando. 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. 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.

(00:55:57):
So that was the narrative we were going to tell, and the beginning would've 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 in 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. 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. So that's the power of nostalgia and we can use that all the time in business to make people laugh.

(00:56:50):
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 that's not like the other. Essentially it's three things. Two of them are expected and one is unexpected, and the unexpected one will be funny. So you can say like, well, my competitor, they have this. 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. But there's a nameless, faceless machine 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 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.

Lenny (00:57:52):
This is awesome. This list you're talking about, is this going to be in your new book that you're writing?

Matthew Dicks (00:57:58):
Not all 26 of them because some are not the best business ones in the world, but a large number of them. I think I maybe have 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. 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. It's not a ba-bum-bum-ching joke. We're not telling those jokes. 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.

Lenny (00:58:44):
I'm going to come back to where story can help you in your work. So obviously giving a public talk is the classic way to use this, maybe giving 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..."

Matthew Dicks (00:59:02):
Well, I've worked with a lot of scientists in biotech and places like that. 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 have to retrofit the tube to fit your needs. The company I was working with, they sell 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.

(00:59:43):
One guy though doesn't present any data whatsoever. He just tells a story. He tells a story about 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 is got to buy three Honeycrisp for his wife and two Gala for his daughter. And they're baking a pie this week so they got to get some McIntosh and he likes Red Delicious. He said, "It's a nightmare buying these apples." So he tells that story about the nightmare of buying apples, and then he says, "That's what my company does." There are companies that say, "We offer McIntosh, make do with it. You're going to make your pies, you're, you're going to eat it. All of the things that you want to do with an apple, all you get is McIntosh. 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.

(01:00:42):
It's all he said. A longer version of it, but that's it. No data. He got more leads at the conference than the other four scientists combined. Now the vice president of marketing was not happy about this at all when I met I met with her. Because she's a scientist. She's 50 years old. For her entire life, she's been sending scientists to conferences and presenting data. And she said to me, "So what am I going to do? Send scientists to conferences now and not present data?" And I said, "Well, I mean maybe because it worked" And she said, "Well, what about the data?" I said, "Now that he has the leads, you don't think they're going to want the data?" He's going to get on the phone and they're going to say, tell us about the data. But now they've established a connection.

(01:01:22):
And the best thing about that story, the thing she didn't even understand was, every single time someone at that conference goes into a grocery store now and they're looking at apples, they're going to think about that company. And it's a positive feeling that they're going to have about that company. If they have forgotten to call, but they meant to call, when they're picking out a Honeycrisp at the grocery store, they're going to make a note. Oh, right, I got to call that company and look into the tubes that they sell. We create positive connections with items in the world related to our company by telling stories, and that means we've built advertising into people's lives without them even being aware that we've done it. So there's a billion ways to add storytelling into business. It's just another one.

Lenny (01:02:07):
You touched on this two-way approach. One is, you have a problem. Let me think of a story to help me solve this problem, versus I'm going to become a storyteller, come up with this whole 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 going to be in that bucket like I don't want to be a storyteller. I just want to solve my problems and stories can sometimes help me there. So maybe in that bucket, do you have any advice for how to find a story that somehow helps you with that problem on demand, or is it just like that is not going to work? You're not going to think of a story every time you have some problem?

Matthew Dicks (01:02:40):
I think sometimes you will. I have a company that calls me metaphor man. They call me essentially and say-

Lenny (01:02:45):
I get that.

Matthew Dicks (01:02:46):
"... 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. And I tell them, if you just use some of my storytelling generating techniques, you could do the same thing. But they're a bandaid company. They just want me to fix things. And I understand that. If you're trying to do it, the best way to tell a story about something that you want people to understand is to do what I call speaking with adjacency, which means we're not going to match content to content. Instead, we're going to match theme, meaning or message.

(01:03:33):
So that scientist, for example, he wasn't talking about tubes. He was talking about how people deserve to get what they want in life. His family deserves to get the apples they want, and you as a business deserves to get the tubes that you want. But so often in business what people think is content to content, well, I got to find a way to talk about these tubes to make people understand how important they are. And I say, well, let's not talk about the tubes. Let's talk about something else instead, and then we're going to move what we were talking about over two tubes. We are going to snap it in place. That snap when someone realizes, you were telling me about apples, but really you were telling me about tubes. That snap is so powerful. I use it with students all the time.

(01:04:21):
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 why I am telling them the story. They're like, "I'm in trouble. Why is he telling me about his dog? Why is he telling me a story about his dog when he was 12?" Because I'm going to snap it into place. Because I'm not talking about content, theme, meaning or message. So when they come to me and they say, "Here's what we've got." I'm not thinking about the thing. I'm thinking about, what is the theme they want to convey or the meaning that they want to convey or the message they want to convey. And what story do I have that will match that or what story can I get out of them?

(01:04:58):
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 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." And we brainstormed it. And when we landed on apples, I knew we had it. Because he was going to be able to talk about, I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm the husband who takes apple orders from his family before going to the grocery store. I'm going to be able to be funny, because befuddled husbands in grocery stores are always funny. 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 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.

Lenny (01:05:52):
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?

Matthew Dicks (01:06:05):
Yeah. Usually one of those. Yeah.

Lenny (01:06:07):
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 got to pay attention to this guy. Or I'm shopping. I shop all the time for apples.

Matthew Dicks (01:06:18):
Yes. See, so we're stacking strategies, which is a really good thing to do. So we're pulling in all of the things I've talked about and it really makes for a powerful moment for people and a memorable moment. Because the most important thing is that we're becoming memorable. We are in a conference amongst other scientists and we're actually the one who's being remembered.

Lenny (01:06:37):
So that was the band-aid approach. Then there's the way you recommend it was just build a bank of stories. I imagine this is where the Homework for Life framework you recommend comes from. So maybe let's transition talk about that. Because I think that has a lot of benefits beyond even just coming up with a bunch of story ideas.

Matthew Dicks (01:06:53):
Yeah. It's the most important thing that I teach. Whether or not you're ever going to speak in your life. If you plan on being a hermit and going off into the woods and never speaking to someone again, you should be doing Homework for Life regardless. It's a process I came up with maybe 15 years ago now. Essentially when I began telling stories on stages, I fell in love with it immediately, and I got worried that I was going to run out of stories. I saw a lot of storytellers on stages performing, and they would tell the same 6, 7, 8 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.

(01:07:25):
So in a fit of panic, I decided to assign myself homework being an elementary school teacher, it's natural for me to have that inclination. So I just decided every day before I go to bed, I'm going to look back on the day and find one moment that would've been worth telling as a story. Even if it wasn't really worth telling, I was going to write it down. Now I don't write the whole thing down. That's crazy. It's not doable. What I do is I took an Excel spreadsheet, two columns, the date, and then I stretched the B column across. And in that B column, essentially the length of the computer screen, that's where I write my story.

(01:07:59):
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 discovered 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've forgotten that moment within days, and now I've held onto it because it's going to be a Homework for Life moment.

(01:08:29):
So I start writing those moments down, and I discovered that I'm developing a lens for storytelling. I see the moments that I did not see before. In fact, I just did some 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 one. So 1.8 moments per day. I now find 7.6 moments per day. It's not because my life is more interesting. It's because I have a better lens and I understand what to look for, what to see, and what is worth remembering. So I've become a person who has an endless number of stories like Boris.

(01:09:07):
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. So it's so important because what we do is we throw our lives away. 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 going to feel like it went by quickly. It's not going by quickly, you're just failing to account for each day. And each day has something worth remembering. Homework for Life is the acknowledgement that every single day should have something.

(01:09:48):
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 sitting down at the end of the day and writing them all down. I'm recording them as the day goes on. My laptop is around me, my phone is around me. When I hear something. My son says a bit of dialogue I can't believe he just said. I see something for the first time or the last time, or a stray thought enters my mind. I have a new thought that I had not occurred before, all of those become moments for Homework for Life.

(01:10:28):
Not everyone becomes a story. I did some analysis on this too. About 10% of the things that I write down ultimately either become a story or a part of a story, but the other 90% it's just as valuable. Because I'm holding onto my days. And the other amazing thing that happens is once you start doing this, you'll 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.

(01:11:11):
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.

Lenny (01:11:31):
And I think you touched on this. It's not just to collect a bunch of stories. There's a therapeutic element to this too, that you talk about.

Matthew Dicks (01:11:37):
Yeah. Absolutely. Many therapeutic elements. First is you're recovering your time and slowing time down, which is beautiful. 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 going to believe what my kids said. I got to write it down." But nobody writes it down. You're not going to 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, 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.

(01:12:22):
You start to see patterns if you start doing this. So I think what I talk about in my book is I always tell people, my wife and I never fight. We've never raised our voices to each other. We really don't ever argue. But I noticed in my Homework for Life a moment when she had asked me to put in the air conditioners before I had central air in the house, and I hated it. I hated it because we agreed to never buy a house without central air. And every year the air conditioners somehow get heavier. I don't understand the physics behind it, but every year it's worse.

(01:12:50):
And she always asks on the 98 degree day, "Hey, can you put the air conditioners in?" And there was a day when I was like, "No, I'm not going to do it. It's really hot." And she was like, "Okay, no problem." And then 10 minutes later, I'm in the basement pulling them out, complaining, grumbling, arguing. Only to myself banging them on purpose so she can hear. She's like, "What's going on?" I'm like, "I'm putting in the air conditioners." So that becomes a Homework for Life moment.

(01:13:13):
And then a month later, she asks me to mow the lawn, on a 98 degree day. And I said, "I'm not going to mow the lawn. I'm busy and it's really hot." And she goes, "Okay, no problem. Maybe tomorrow." And then I sit for a while and I stew. And then I'm mowing the lawn, but I'm doing it aggressively. I'm running and just angrily mowing the lawn. And when I see these patterns, I suddenly go, "Oh, I do fight with my wife, on my own." 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. They think it's hilarious.

(01:13:48):
You also start to see stories that you would've never seen. So it was a day last May when the neighbors to my left and the neighbors to my right came over to the house and had a cookout, the first one of the year. And that was a day when I didn't find anything in the day. I had one moment, which is very unusual for me. And I remember thinking, "Really, all you got is you had a cookout with the neighbors, that's the best you got?" It's not even really a story. But it was the best I had so I wrote it down and I moved on. About four months later, the neighbors to our left announced they were getting divorced. It devastated us. Because they have two kids. We've got this big communal backyard with the three houses. Three boys to the right, two kids to the left, friends. Couldn't believe it that they're getting divorced. Known each other since high school. We just never saw it coming.

(01:14:33):
One day later, neighbors to the right announced they're getting divorced. Left and right within a day of each other. And it becomes a story about how you never understand what's going on in a marriage unless you're in that house. But I don't have that moment in May when there were three couples on a porch, one of them was happy. I thought all three were happy. I don't get that moment unless I'm doing Homework for Life, and I write it down, and now I see a trajectory of a story. I have the opposite. Now I actually have an opposite moment which is I'm serving hot dogs to people I think are happy, but they're only pretending to be happy for our sake. And then they're returning to their homes, to discord and eventually to disillusion of a marriage. So Homework for Life gives you all of that that you don't normally have in life because we tend to live day by day, and we leave that last day behind.

Lenny (01:15:27):
I got tingles listening to that story. For someone that's now motivated to try this. I know there's a template that we'll link to in the show notes where you give people, it's very simple, but I think seeing it will be helpful. But what's something someone could do tonight to start on this process and maybe set a habit to do? How do you actually go about doing this?

Matthew Dicks (01:15:44):
Well, they have to start Homework for Life. And I have a TED talk about it that I go on for 17 minutes about. So I suggest watching it because you'll just get more than what I just told you and I think that's important. And you have to decide to do it every single day, even on the day when the best you have is a cookout. If that's all you got, that's what you got, and you write it down. You have to have some faith too, that it's going to happen over time. Remember, I started with 1.8 and now I'm up to 7.6. And that's over more than 12 years it takes for me to make that jump.

(01:16:12):
So in the beginning, you're not going to be very good at it. You're not going to see the right things, and that's just the way it is. If I go back to my original Homework for Life, I see myself looking for stories. And you're not really looking for stories. You're just looking for moments that touch your heart, touch your mind. That's all you're really hoping for. And some of those will become stories. So you've got to start Homework for Life right away. And then if you can just find some people who are willing to listen and begin telling some stories, that's really helpful because most people are unwilling to listen. There's not a lot of good listeners in the world. Everyone says they're a great listener, but active listening is a skill that most people do not possess in any way whatsoever. But if you find people who are willing to listen, you got to start telling stories. You got to start practicing in meaningful ways. And your first stories aren't going to be great. But the good news is most people's stories are terrible. Most storytelling in the world is not very good. So if you put a little thought into what you're about to say, you're going to be better. Because storytelling is not about facility with the language or your vocabulary. It's all about decision-making. That's all it is.

(01:17:14):
Storytellers are people who think before they speak. They make strategical tactical decisions before they speak. And ultimately, they make enough good decisions to entertain people. Ultimately, no matter what you're doing, whether I am teaching a fifth grader how to behave better, or presenting a new product for a large company, or helping someone deliver an all hands, the first and most important thing you have to be is entertaining. You have to entertain or people will not listen to you. So you got to practice, you got to get reps.

Lenny (01:17:47):
I want to talk about public speaking skills, but just to close the loop on that. So if someone was trying to do this Homework for Life exercises, the idea, would you recommend at night before they go to sleep, open up Google Sheets on their phone and just add something? Is there something else you'd recommend?

Matthew Dicks (01:18:00):
No. Yeah. That's what I would do. Although ideally, as you go through...

Matthew Dicks (01:18:00):
No. Yeah, that's what I would do. Although ideally, as you go through the day, things get forgotten quickly. Your son says something hilarious and by the end of the night you can't remember what it was. So if you can start sort of tracking it through the day a little bit, maybe you make it a habit where at lunchtime you're going to ask yourself what happened that morning? And when you get home from work, you're going to say what happened in the afternoon? And then in the evening you're going to say what happened since then? And then sort of take a whole view of the day and then be open to those memories, allow them to come back. I record them in my Homework for Life as memory, sort of a capital M-E-M-O-R-Y. Because what happens is you start to build up so many homework for life memories that you get confused.

(01:18:39):
You're like, what? When did I see a deer? And then I go, oh, that's a story from when I was 14. But you get confused because it's sitting on when you're 38 years old. So you mark them as memories. You hold onto them, you put them into spreadsheets because eventually you're going to want to move that data around and keep track of it in some meaningful way. But yeah, get started today because if you don't, you will lose today. Every day that you don't do homework for life is a day that is going to be lost to you forever.

Lenny (01:19:06):
And just very practically, you recommend like Google Sheets, I imagine is what you use?

Matthew Dicks (01:19:09):
I actually use old-fashioned Excel, but yes, Google Sheets would work too, because I started so long ago, right, Excel was the thing I used, and Excel is the thing I still use. I mean, it's backed up in 19 places because it's the most precious thing I have other than my wife and children, cats. But yeah, that's what I would suggest to use.

Lenny (01:19:26):
Awesome. Okay. Just a couple more questions before our very exciting lightning round. In your book, you say that you've only been nervous twice on stage giving a story. Most people, I don't know, is that [inaudible 01:19:36].

Matthew Dicks (01:19:26):
Yeah, that's true. I'm like,-

Lenny (01:19:26):
Okay.

Matthew Dicks (01:19:37):
I can remember the two times. It was yeah, it was PTSD related and Seth Meyers cost of ticket related.

Lenny (01:19:44):
Oh, I remember that story.

Matthew Dicks (01:19:44):
Yeah.

Lenny (01:19:46):
Okay. So most people are not like you. Most people are nervous, including me, every single time I get on stage, tell a story. What advice do you give people to help them get better with the nerves of getting on stage and telling a story? Classically, it's the thing people fear most in life.

Matthew Dicks (01:20:00):
Well, the first thing you have to understand is that 98% of your nervousness is actually before you begin speaking. Once you begin speaking, almost all of your nervousness falls away, and that is the experience of most people. So what you're really suffering is from pre-talk nervousness. And when you find that out, that's kind of a relief because if you do it enough. Someone just spoke in the Netherlands, and today I'm waiting to find out how it went. He spoke it for the Florida State Legislature, same topic, and he was really nervous about going into today. He was also really nervous speaking to a bunch of scientists in the Netherlands. But I told him, I said, "After you began speaking in the Netherlands, once the talk began, how nervous were you?" And he said, "Oh, actually, when I began speaking, I was pretty okay. I was incredibly nervous before the talk." And I said, "Well, that makes sense."

(01:20:49):
So if you own the fact or you believe the fact that, oh, most of my nervousness comes before the talk, but once I start speaking, I'm pretty good. That's really relieving for a lot of people because what we imagine is that we're nervous while we're talking, which is often not the case, particularly if you're kind of prepared, if you know what you're talking about. So be aware that most of your nervousness happens before you speak, and that's a normal thing, and you're just going to have to accept that until some day when perhaps it starts to go away through repetition, through continued performance on a stage. For some people, they're always nervous. I was performing with, I won't say her name, but someone who you have watched on television before, and we were both backstage and I was chatting up the room and she finally said to me, this very famous person, "Would you stop talking? Because the rest of us are trying to keep information in our head and stay calm." I'm a terrible person backstage because I'm always calm, I never care.

(01:21:45):
So I have to sort of sequester myself from these people because I torture them. But once she began speaking, all of her nerves fell away. So that's a good thing to know. The other thing to know that's really great is everyone's nervous, except for me. I'm the only monster in the world. So if you're feeling nervous, you're just like everyone else, including a very famous person who you see on TV all the time. That person was nervous, you're nervous, you're in the same camp, right, you're in the same boat. And then preparation is going to reduce your level of nervousness. One of the things that I tell people to do that is most helpful is it's good to practice your talk or practice your pitch, whatever you're doing, but one of the best ways to prepare for it is to record it and listen to it.

(01:22:26):
Listen to it passively, listen to it while your grocery shopping, listen to it while you're folding laundry, doing the dishes. What happens is, I really believe this, as you start to listen to it over and over again, it just sort of seeps into your soul, and so it becomes part of you. I have done this technique. I've told a story a decade ago, haven't told it since. Someone hears it on YouTube and says, "Hey, can you tell that story at our event?" I say, "Yes". I can listen to it once and it comes right out again because I allowed it to sort of sink into my memory in the same way that When Harry Met Sally has sunk into your wife's memory. She can replay that movie in her mind probably perfectly. If you listen to your talk enough, you will get to the point where you can retell it with ease.

(01:23:09):
The other thing you can do is some active listening with it. Most people don't forget their talk. They forget the transitions in their talk. So I'm talking about this, but then I got to transition to this, then I got to transition to this. So when I'm listening to my stories or a talk that I'm going to give, I'm playing a game with myself.

(01:23:26):
So I'm listening and I go, oh, okay, this is closing out and the next thing I have to talk about is this, and then the next thing I have to talk about is this. And if I don't know what I'm going to, if I'm like, Ooh, what am I going to next? That's where I go, oh, I got to create a mnemonic there. I got to create a bit of memorization there to train myself for that transition. Once you're in a new section of a talk, even if you're following it up a little, you're going to be okay because you're like, oh, I got to talk about the data related to the this or the that. And if it doesn't come out perfectly, you still know what you're talking about.

(01:23:55):
But what happens when you're done with the data related to this or that, you go, ah damn, what am I supposed to do next? Right. So we're working on building those transitions. Before a talk or before a story let's say I will do something like I'm going to start in the car and then I'm going to get out into the store, and then I'm going to head out to the parking lot, and then I'm going to be in the park, and then it's three weeks later. I don't tell myself the story. I'm just bouncing between the scenes because once I know the scenes and I know, okay, there's seven scenes, and here they are, and here's the transitions. Again, if I follow up each scene, that's okay because I'm going to get the information out. It might not come out as perfectly as I hoped. You also, if you can avoid memorizing, that'll save you a ton of suffering because memorizers, they're the most tortured souls in the world. So avoid that if all possible. Remember your talk without memorizing your talk.

Lenny (01:24:43):
Reminds me, a friend of mine gave a TED Talk and he shared that they give you this advice that people are different kind of learners. Some are audio learners, some are visual. So if you're like an audio learner, listening to it is the most helpful. Some it's seeing the script.

Matthew Dicks (01:24:55):
Yes.

Lenny (01:24:55):
And looking at it,-

Matthew Dicks (01:24:56):
And I'm very much an auditory learner. The other thing though about listening to it is you just get sick of practicing. It gets so frustrating to practice. So at some point you don't want to say it anymore. So rather than saying it, you start to listen to it. You listen to yourself, tell a story about yourself to yourself, which is the most narcissistic thing you could probably do in the world. But even if you're a visual learner, because it's so annoying to practice eventually, I think listening to it can be really helpful.

Lenny (01:25:26):
Okay. Last question is I want to talk about, I mentioned I bring this up, is the power of saying yes, something that you recommend people say yes to stuff versus no. It reminds me, David Sedaris in a, I don't know, Dave Masterclass video or something, said the same thing. He's just like, "I just say yes to everything because it creates great stories."

Matthew Dicks (01:25:41):
Really?

Lenny (01:25:42):
Yeah, it's in his Masterclass talk,-

Matthew Dicks (01:25:44):
And I just finished Sedaris's Happy-Go-Lucky, which is a great book. I love him.

Lenny (01:25:48):
Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to hear your advice here for people just to give them a little bit of a final takeaway.

Matthew Dicks (01:25:53):
Sure. So I'm going to disagree with Sedaris a little bit. Nah, I won't disagree with him by saying, yes, you do end up with some great stories, but that's not the purpose of the yes. There's actually a book, a storytelling book in the world that I'm not going to mention, and it talks about how to find great stories and it says, go do crazy things and you'll have great stories. I disagree. Fundamentally first, that's a foolish way to live your life. And also some of the best stories I tell, I think the best stories I tell are about tiny moments in our lives where nothing extraordinary happens except everything in our head, right? Most stories that I tell, if you had actually witness the moment of transformation or realization, you would've never known it was happening because most things that happen to us happen in our heads.

(01:26:34):
It's not while we're hanging from a cliff, right, for our dear life that we suddenly have a revelation. It's usually like we're walking across a parking lot and suddenly something hits us that's been building up for three weeks, but now it's hit us walking across the parking lot. So the reason we say yes to everything is if you don't say yes, what you're essentially saying is, I am so presumptuous that I understand what's on the other side of that door already even though I've never set foot beyond that door. Right. I just know so much about the world that I know that what's behind that door is not for me. And I think that's foolish and arrogant and full of hubris that is not helping anyone in any way.

(01:27:19):
So I say when someone offers you an opportunity, as crazy as it is, as ridiculous, as much as you don't want to do it, which many times in my life, the yeses that I have said about something I did not want to do, but forced myself to do it because of my belief system have resulted in the best and most extraordinary opportunities of my life. A yes can always become a no, right? Yes, I will try that. I step through the door, I give it a try, I spend some time with it. I look around and I say, you know what? Not for me. I step back through and I close the door.

(01:27:54):
But so often in life, people don't step through the door. They're too afraid. They've already prejudged the opportunity in some way. They fail to see the benefits of it or the value because they can't see that because they haven't gone through the door. And then there's this ridiculous belief in the world that we're supposed to learn to say no so that we can sort of sequester our time and make it as meaningful as possible, which sounds really terrible to me. The problem is you're going to be 100 someday, and when you're 100, no one is going to be asking you to step through any more doors, and at that point, you're going to look into the past and you're going to say, there were a lot of doors I didn't step through, right, and you're not going to be thinking, I'm so glad I didn't because I allowed myself to stay on the one path that I knew was going to be good for me.

(01:28:46):
I just think that there is no one good path that's good for you. I think there's a multitude of paths, and they're all great, and a few of them are terrible, but you find out which ones are terrible by stepping through the door, deciding this is not for me and coming back. So I think most of the time people say no because they're afraid. And when someone asks me to do something that scares me, that is when I run to that thing as quickly as possible with all of my might as terrified as I am, because I know that it's the things that frighten me are often the things that are the best for me.

(01:29:19):
So we say yes with the acknowledgement that we can say no eventually, but a yes can lead to extraordinary things. And if you watch my TED Talk on saying yes, you'll see that yeses just lead to these extraordinary chains where you said yes to something you didn't want to say yes to, and suddenly it forced you to meet someone who you never would've met, who opened a different door for you. And I mean, the causal chain that you can sort of create by saying an odd yes is extraordinary.

Lenny (01:29:47):
There was a quote I often come back to around this, which is, "The cave you fear contains the treasure you seek."

Matthew Dicks (01:29:51):
Yeah, that's really good. I mean someone, I do standup now quite frequently. I was just in the New York City Comedy Festival, and I do standup because six years ago, one of my buddies sent me an email saying, "Hey, we should do standup." And I replied to him and said, "No, I'm not interested in that." Hit reply. And then I said to myself, "Whoa, why did you just do that?" And I said to myself, "I'm terrified of it." I can tell funny stories and if it's not funny, still telling a story, but if I'm doing standup and I'm not funny, I'm failing. And that's a terrifying thing.

(01:30:24):
So I immediately sent a second email that said, "Okay, I'm in. When are we doing it?" I have now done standup many, many, many times. That guy who initially asked me to do standup with him has never done it. Not once in his life. He wanted to do it, but he's afraid to step through the door. He's too afraid to do the thing that he challenged me to do that I now do on a regular basis because he challenged me and it's still the thing that probably scares me the most. And therefore, it's the thing that I'm relentlessly trying to do at all times because I know the things that scare me are the things that are the best for me.

Lenny (01:30:56):
Amazing. Matt, is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to your very exciting lightning round?

Matthew Dicks (01:31:04):
No, I've said enough. They've heard enough from me. Let's go to the lightning round.

Lenny (01:31:08):
We've covered a lot. Let's do it. Well, welcome to our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Matthew Dicks (01:31:12):
Yes.

Lenny (01:31:14):
What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Matthew Dicks (01:31:18):
Oh, so Nathaniel Philbrick's, Heart of the Sea, which is a non-fiction account of the whale ship Essex, which is the origin of the idea for Moby Dick. The sinking of the Essex is what gave Melville the idea for Moby Dick. It's an extraordinary non-fiction account of the whale ship Essex. So that book for sure. If you have children, but even if you don't, because this is one of those children's books that reads well for adults as Kate DiCamillo's, The Tale of Despereaux. It's a young adult novel. It'll take you two hours to read. I've read it 20 times. It is beautiful and extraordinary and fantastic. And then anything by Jessie Klein, she has two books. The only thing I don't like about her is she only has two books. Actually, Sedaris too, Jessie Klein and David Sedaris. Go read those two people too. I'm actually right now reading Bamford's book, the comedian, what's her first name? Bamford. I have Amy stuck in my head for Amy Sedaris. Maria Bamford's memoir right now I'm reading. Also, extraordinary. So there's four that I am now recommending.

Lenny (01:32:26):
Amazing. What's a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?

Matthew Dicks (01:32:32):
Well, for TV shows I enjoyed The Last of Us, which is based on a video game I've never played in my life. Pretty extraordinary as a TV show, both because filled with stakes. Yeah, it's one of those shows they'll kill anyone at any time. And so you're on the edge of your seat. No one is safe, which is fantastic. And then it has this beautiful bottle episode in the middle of the season, which is one of those things where you're in a zombie TV show, which oddly is unlike any zombie TV show I've ever seen. And then there's a beautiful, fantastic episode. There's another one later on that's sort of very similar. It's just great storytelling in a multitude of ways. It's great. And for a movie, the Barbie movie is better than I ever expected it to be, quite frankly, and is proof positive that you can make stories about just about anything, and if they mean something, it's going to do extraordinarily well.

Lenny (01:33:35):
My next question, I don't know if it makes sense to ask you, it's usually for product people and founders, but the question is, is do you have a favorite interview question you'd like to ask people when you're hiring? Is there anything that comes up when I ask that?

Matthew Dicks (01:33:44):
I guess I'll say it's the question I like to ask people most often maybe when I'm playing golf and things. I don't like to ask people what they do. I like to ask, how did you get into the job you currently have? It's a dangerous question because occasionally I ask people it and they realize they're in their job for weird happenstances that don't relate to what they dreamed of doing. So I've had two people in my life cry while they answered the question because they suddenly understand, I'm doing this because my sister got me into the company 16 years ago. And I go, "Oh, well that's great. Is that what you always wanted to do?" And they say, "No, it's actually still not what I want to do." But I do think that most of the time, how you get a job is more interesting than the actual job you're doing. The answer to that question is more interesting.

Lenny (01:34:33):
You have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like, whether it's an app or something you bought?

Matthew Dicks (01:34:38):
Well, if you celebrate Christmas for years, I have had an idea on how to design the best Christmas tree stand, and I finally said, someone must've done it. And they did. So I wrote it down for you. It's the Krinner tree stand. The Krinner Tree Genie is extraordinary. It's exactly what I would've designed if I had any ability to design it. It holds up the tree like none other. It takes two seconds. It is everything that the research told me it would do. It's fantastic. If you don't celebrate Christmas, I will tell you that a Power POD, which is a small, it attaches to your keychain and it will charge your phone twice and it just lives on your keychain. So I am never a person who's going, oh no, I don't have any charge left. I have two charges on a Power POD, which lives on my keychain.

(01:35:29):
You forget it's even there. And then one day you need it and it's fantastic. It's the best one. There's lots of versions of it. The Power POD is the one you want. And then I just bought a hot dog toaster that toasts the hot dogs and the buns at the same time. It's called the Nostalgia Hot Dog Toaster. It looks like it's from the 1950s. It's really beautiful actually. It's the kind of thing you want to put on your counter because it looks fantastic. My son and I love it because we like hot dogs and it'll put two buns and two hot dogs into the toaster. You pull it down, three minutes later you have a hot dog ready to go. You didn't dirty anything. It's not the best hot dog in the world, but hot dogs are pretty great no matter how they're cooked. So I fully support the Nostalgia Hot Dog Toaster.

Lenny (01:36:10):
These are amazing selections. There's also call back to our nostalgia trick for getting to be funny.

Matthew Dicks (01:36:15):
Right. That's true. Yes. Unintended, but I'll take credit for it.

Lenny (01:36:19):
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself, share with friends, either in work or in life?

Matthew Dicks (01:36:25):
Yeah, it changed my life really. When I was in fourth grade, a teacher who, and I don't remember which teacher it was, which kills me. I was having a bad day and I was being the way that most people are, frankly. And the teacher said to me, "Listen, a positive mental attitude will be your key to success." And I don't know why it's stuck in my head, but it did. I have said that to myself 100,000 times.

(01:36:48):
And today there's one human being in the world who I think is more positive than me, one human being who I've met, who has more positivity than me. I am a relentlessly positive almost, my wife says offensively positive person. She's like, "You know what? Some days you can have a bad day." And I said, "I just don't. Because a positive mental attitude is my key to success." And it's really the way I frame so much of my life, is looking to the positive, looking to the good. And I do it for people whenever I can. And sometimes it frustrates people. But I really believe that most of life is the mindset that you bring to it. And for me in fourth grade, "A positive mental attitude will be your key to success," for some reason, hit me at the right moment in the right way and has stayed with me ever since.

Lenny (01:37:30):
What's interesting about that is it's not even like that well, cleverly put. It sounds like a fortune cookie,

Matthew Dicks (01:37:36):
Yeah.

Lenny (01:37:36):
You get and you're like, yeah, sure. But I love that that really had so much impact on you, it stuck with you.

Matthew Dicks (01:37:41):
Yeah, I think it was probably timing really. I think I was really having a hard time, and I know at the time two of my friends were not being my friend anymore, and they were my only two friends sort of at the time. And I think I was just open and ready to hear something that I could do to make my life better. And that was the one, and I'm probably predisposed to being an optimist anyway, so it probably landed just right for me.

Lenny (01:38:05):
A positive mental attitude will be your key to success. Amazing. Final question, maybe just to leave listeners with one tactical thing they can do to become better storytellers. What would that be?

Matthew Dicks (01:38:17):
So two things should start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life. So you start with location, where are you? Location activates imagination, right? If I say I'm standing in the kitchen, you've already automatically applied 1000 adjectives to my story. You see the kitchen with great clarity. You probably put me in your own kitchen or your parents' kitchen or a kitchen you see on TV. But if the particularities of the kitchen are relevant to the story, that's what I want you to do. I'm not interested in reproducing locations with some kind of visual accuracy in your brain. I want you to see a fully realized location. So I love location because it's one word that comes imbued with 1000 adjectives.

(01:38:59):
So you start with location and you start with action, meaning something needs to be happening right away. Literally, I am in a place and I'm doing a thing. It indicates to the audience that you're actually going to tell something that's moving forward. It's why there's a big spaceship shooting of little spaceship in the opening of Star Wars. It's why there's a police officer chasing a guy across a roof. Something is already happening.

(01:39:27):
We didn't start with nonsense. We started with something happening that grabbed us right away. That's what people want from story. Also, if you're a person unlike me, which is to say anyone who isn't sort of a white straight American man with no physical or mental disabilities, who thinks, I've always thought every room I walk into, I have the right to speak. But if you are unlike me in those regards, you often find, and I know this is true, that it's harder to make space, to get people to hear you if you're from any marginalized or discriminated against group in any way. But what I've been told by women and people of color and members of the LGBTQ community, they've discovered that when I start a story by going, I'm in a place doing a thing, it's a signal to people that I am now telling a story.

(01:40:12):
And when you can signal to people, I'm now telling a story, they will get quiet for you and they will afford you the opportunity to speak. I didn't know this was going to be the case, but I have had many, many people who I teach this skill to come back to me and say, "My God, people listen to me." And they've said they think they listen because I tell a good story, but they've told me because I start with that location and action, it just tells people, the movie's on. Nobody talks during the movie. You can eat popcorn, but you're not allowed to talk. It silences the room for you and affords you some space to then start doing the work that a good storyteller does to hold those people's attention. So start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life with those two things, and you're already going to be like 50% better than you were before you heard this.

Lenny (01:40:57):
Wow. Well, the hits just keep on coming. Matt, you're much more of a philosopher than I imagined you were when we started this conversation. I learned a ton. I'm really excited for people to learn from you. Where can folks find you online if they want to learn more or continue learning from you and work with you potentially, especially companies? And then finally, how can listeners be useful to you?

Matthew Dicks (01:41:17):
Sure. So you can find me at matthewdicks.com or if you're a business oriented person or someone who wants to learn, I also have storyworthymd.com, my initials, MD, and that's where I sort of have courses and online training and things like that. So either place you'll be able to find me and contact me. In a non-self-serving sort of version of your second part of the question, I think if you just tell stories, but more importantly, if you ask people to tell you stories, again, creating that space, listen for people who say things like, oh, something like that happened to me once. What they're really saying is, I wish someone would want to hear what happened to me once.

(01:41:59):
And so I am always someone who's willing to say, oh, tell me that story. Offer someone five minutes of your time so they can finally speak the thing that they've been waiting to speak to someone. So if you just do that, there's going to be more opportunities for storytelling in the world, and ultimately, perhaps that will funnel down to me where they will want to buy my book or visit my website or take some training with me, but just create space for storytelling. I think that'd be a beautiful thing.

Lenny (01:42:25):
I love it. What a beautiful way to end it. Matt, thank you so much for being here.

Matthew Dicks (01:42:29):
Thanks so much, Lenny. I really appreciate it.

Lenny (01:42:31):
Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.