14 September 2025

Storyworthy – Matthew Dicks

Personal summary

Part I. Finding Your Story

• A story must show change, even minuscule.
• Tell your own story: if you tell a story about another person, it must be framed from your perspective, focusing on how their actions or the events impacted you.

• Small moments, big connection: the most resonant stories often come from tiny, relatable human moments, not grand, unrelatable events. Even big stories must be grounded in the little moments within them.
• The "Homework for Life" exercise: every day, ask yourself: "If I had to tell a 5-minute story from today, what would it be?" This practice helps you find story material; also slows down your perception of time, making you appreciate your life more.

• A brainstorming technique: start writing a list of simple things — colors, numbers (spelled out as words), countries — until one of them triggers a memory.

• First Last Best Worst: create a grid with the columns "First," "Last," "Best," and "Worst." The rows should be prompts like "Kiss," "Job," "Car," etc. Filling out the grid is a powerful way to generate story-worthy memories. This can also be played with others to get to know them better.

Part II. Crafting Your Story

• The five-second moment: a moment of realization, transformation, or discovery. This moment is the entire point of the story.

• Start with the end: your five-second moment of change is the destination. To craft your story, you must first know this ending.
• The beginning is the opposite: the beginning of your story should be the thematic opposite of your five-second moment. “I was once lost, but now I am found. I was once hopeful, but now I am not.”
• Oral vs. written Stories: an oral story is like a river (a written one is like a lake, where readers can step in and out, the water remains the same) – it flows continuously and listeners can't go back. Therefore, it must be simple and clear. Start as close to the end as possible to maintain clarity and momentum.
• How to open a story: start with forward movement; never set expectations.
• Five ways to keep your story compelling:

1. The elephant: this is the story's central want, need, problem, or mystery. It must be large, obvious, and stated clearly at the beginning (ideally within the first 60 seconds) so the audience knows where the story is headed. The initial goal can evolve into a deeper, more significant one. Don't switch Elephants; simply reveal a new, more profound layer of the original one.
2. Backpacks: increase anticipation by explaining a plan or a set of steps to the audience before the action occurs. This makes the audience wonder what will happen and feel the same suspense as the storyteller. This strategy is most effective when the plan goes wrong.
3. Breadcrumbs: hint at a future event without giving away too much information. Drop clues that create wonder and keep the audience guessing, but not so many that they guess correctly.
4. Hourglasses: when you reach a moment of high tension and the audience is desperate to know what happens next, slow down. Drag out the moment. Add a brief summary of what just happened to heighten the tension before delivering the crucial sentence.
5. Crystal balls: make a false prediction about the story's future to make the audience wonder if it will come true. This only works if the prediction is plausible, reasonable, and intriguing.

• Humour: it can maintain audience attention during slower parts of a story. Remember, the goal is to move the audience emotionally, not just to be funny.
• Five permissible lies of true storytelling:

1. Omission: leave out details, people, and events that are not essential.
2. Compression: condense time and space to make the narrative easier to follow.
3. Assumption: when a specific but unknown detail is vital, make the most reasonable and likely assumption.
4. Progression: reorder events to make the story more emotionally satisfying or comprehensible (e.g. make the audience laugh before you make them cry).
5. Conflation: compress a long-term change or a series of events into a single, representative moment.

• Always provide a physical location: for every moment of your story. If the audience can't see where the action is happening, the movie in their mind stops.

• Create causality: words of causality ("but," "therefore") rather than sequence ("and").
• The power of the negative: saying what something is not is often more powerful than saying what it is. It presents a binary of possibilities and implies a hidden "but," making the description richer (e.g. "I'm not smart" implies "I could have been smart, but...").

• Focus on the small: to tell a big story well (e.g., a story about war or a major life event), find and focus on the small, human, relatable moments within it.
• Brevity is better: Speak less.

• Surprise is everything: the key to eliciting any emotional response — laughter, tears, anger, sadness — is surprise.
• Avoid thesis statements: never tell your audience the point of the story upfront. Storytelling is the reverse of an essay.
• How to hide information to preserve surprise:

• Obscure it in a list of other details.
• Place it as far as possible from its eventual payoff.
• Camouflage its importance by building a laugh around it.

• How to be funny:

• Strategic laughter: want the audience to laugh at the right times.
• Early laugh: get a laugh in the first 30 seconds. It reassures the audience that you are okay now, no matter how dark the story gets.
• Contrast for impact: the contrast between laughter and horror makes the horror more shocking. Making people laugh before making them cry makes the sadness hit harder.
• End your story with an emotional, heartfelt moment. Never end on a laugh.
• Humour techniques:

• Juxtaposition: Combine two things that don't normally go together (e.g. "grandmother" and "sadist").
• The list of three: create a list where the third item is unexpectedly different (e.g. "Zimmers, pineapple-flavored ham, and despair").
• Exaggeration.

Part III. Telling Your Story

• Shift tenses purposefully: use the past tense for backstory. Shift to the present tense for moments of action, emotion, or gravity to bring the audience "in the now" with you.

• Failure is more engaging: audiences connect more with struggle than success.
• How to tell a success story:

1. Be the underdog: undermine yourself and the success. Don't be grandiose. Make the audience root for you by showing your vulnerability.
2. Focus on small steps: don't tell the story of a huge leap. Tell the story of one small, difficult step on the path to accomplishment.

• Maintain immersion: never ask rhetorical questions, acknowledge the audience, use props, use the word "story" or phrases like "to make a long story short."
• Accents: you may only imitate accents from your own region and racial background.

• What to memorise:

1. The first few sentences: to ensure a strong start.
2. The last few sentences: to ensure a strong ending.
3. The scenes: the physical locations where the action takes place.

Foreword

If I can recommend storytelling to you for any reason at all, it would be that storytelling helps you realize that the biggest, scariest, most painful or regretful things in your head get small and surmountable when you share them with two, or three, or twenty, or three thousand people. The other reason I can recommend storytelling, and learning about it with the book you’re holding, is that we’re all disappearing — you, me, everyone we know and love.

Telling stories about your life lets people know they’re not alone

Preface

More importantly, I also had a natural affinity for sharing my less-than-noble moments with others. I’ve always known that embarrassment could get a laugh. Telling about my most shameful and foolish moments had always brought me closer to listeners. Honesty is attractive.

“You’ve led such a horrible life!” they’d say. “Your life has really sucked. You’d be great at storytelling.”

She assumes that I’m capable of almost anything, which both undermines her appreciation for my abject terror and sets expectations far too high for my liking.

Part I. Finding Your Story

Chapter 2. What Is a Story?

Folktales and fables don’t require vulnerability. They do not demand honesty and transparency from the storyteller. They can never be self-deprecating or revealing, because the story is not about the storyteller. They are entertaining, possibly educational, and often insightful, but they do not bring people closer together. We tell stories to express our hardest, best, most authentic truths.

There are a few requirements to ensuring that you are telling a personal story: Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new. The change can be infinitesimal.

Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes. Romps. Drinking stories. Vacation stories. They recount humorous, harrowing, and even heartfelt moments from our lives that burned brightly but left no lasting mark on our souls.

You must tell your own story and not the stories of others.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t tell someone else’s story. It simply means you must make the story about yourself. You must tell your side of the story.

Storytelling is not theater. It is not poetry. It should be a slightly more crafted version of the story you would tell your buddies over beers.

While most storytellers don’t memorize their stories (and I strongly advise against it), they are prepared to tell them. They have memorized specific beats in a story. They know their beginning and ending lines. They have memorized certain laugh lines. They have a plan in place before they begin speaking.

This is what the audience wants. They want to feel that they are being told a story. They don’t want to see someone perform a story.

Chapter 3. Homework for Life

There’s nothing in the horror of a car accident for an audience to connect to. Nothing that rings true in the minds of listeners. Nothing that evokes memories of the past. Nothing that changes the way audience members see themselves or the world around them. But if I tell you about my secret childhood hunger, that story is much more likely to resonate with you.

This is why tiny moments like the one at my dining-room table with my wife and children often make the best stories. These are the moments that connect with people. These are the stories that touch people’s hearts.

This is not to say that the big moments, like the time I died on the side of a snow-covered road two days before Christmas (I tell this story in chapter 13), can’t make a great story, but it turns out even these big stories need to be more about the little moments than the big ones.

I decided that at the end of every day, I’d reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question: If I had to tell a story from today — a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day — what would it be?

I also allowed myself to record any meaningful memories that came to mind over the course of the day, in response either to something I added to the spreadsheet or something that came to mind organically.

There’s an added bonus to Homework for Life. It’s unrelated to storytelling, but it’s worth mentioning. It might just be the most important reason to do the exercise. As you begin to take stock of your days, find those moments — see them and record them — time will begin to slow down for you. The pace of your life will relax.

Chapter 4. Dreaming at the End of Your Pen (Crash & Burn)

When I have no other thought in my mind, I begin listing colors on the page until one of them triggers a thought or memory.

Writing down numbers is also a popular strategy utilized by my workshop students, though I recommend that the numbers be listed in word form.

I’ve known frequent travelers to list countries.

Chapter 5. First Last Best Worst: Great for Long Car Rides, First Dates, and Finding Stories

It’s called First Last Best Worst. All you need to play is pen and paper. As you can see from the worksheet that follows, the top row of the page (the x-axis) is labeled with the words “First,” “Last,” “Best,” and “Worst,” along with a column labeled “Prompts.” Along the left side of the page (the y-axis), the prompts are listed. The prompts are the possible triggers for memories.

What was your first kiss?
What was your last kiss?
What was your best kiss?
What was your worst kiss?

For each of these prompts, you fill in the word or words that indicate the answers to those questions. That’s it.

First Last Best Worst is also an excellent game for long car rides, first dates, or other moments of potential awkwardness and silence, or simply as a means of getting to know a person better.

I’ve given you three tools to find stories.

• Homework for Life
• Crash & Burn
• First Last Best Worst

Part II. Crafting Your Story

Chapter 7. Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to Tell

Understanding that stories are about tiny moments is the bedrock upon which all storytelling is built, and yet this is what people fail to understand most when thinking about a story. Instead they believe that if something interesting or incredible or unbelievable has happened to them, they have a great story to tell. Not true.

The producer explained that this man had more of a romp than a story. A romp is an entertaining and amusing anecdote — often longer than you might imagine an anecdote to be — but not something that will move an audience emotionally. There was no resonance to his story. No lasting effect. Nothing for the audience to connect to. It was fun and exciting and surprising, but it was unlikely to remain in the hearts of the audience in the way a good story can. He had no five-second moment, so the story could never be great.

Chapter 8. Finding Your Beginning

Your five-second moment is the most important thing that you will say. It is the purpose and pinnacle of your story. It’s the reason you opened your mouth in the first place. Therefore it must come as close to the end of your story as possible. Sometimes it will be the very last thing you say.

When telling true stories about our lives, we always start with the ending, because we’re not making stuff up.

Everything must serve our five-second moment.

Once you’ve distilled your five-second moment down to its essence, ask yourself: What is the opposite of your five-second moment?

Simply put, the beginning of the story should be the opposite of the end. Find the opposite of your transformation, revelation, or realization, and this is where your story should start. This is what creates an arc in your story. This is how a story shows change over time.

Stories must reflect change of some kind. It need not always be positive change, and the change need not be monumental. In fact, stories about failure, embarrassment, and shame are fantastic.

This is not the case in every story that I tell, but it’s true for most.

I was once hopeful, but now I am not.
I was once lost, but now I am found.
I was once happy, but now I am sad.
I was once uncertain, but now I know.

More often, the beginning is much harder to find because the opposite of your five-second moment does not happen on the same day or even in the same week as any possible beginning.

Simplification is even more important because of the difference between oral storytelling and written storytelling. A written story is like a lake. Readers can step in and out of the water at their leisure, and the water always remains the same. This stillness and permanence allow for pausing, rereading, contemplation, and the use of outside sources to help with meaning. It also allows the reader to control the speed at which the story is received. An oral story is like a river. It is a constantly flowing torrent of words. When listeners need to step outside of the river to ponder a detail, wonder about something that confuses them, or attempt to make meaning, the river continues to flow. When the listener finally steps back into the river, he or she is behind. The water that has flowed by will never be seen again, and as a result, the listener is constantly chasing the story, trying to catch up. To keep your listener from stepping out of your river of words to make meaning, simplification is essential. Starting as close to the end as possible helps to make this happen.

Here are a couple more practical tips for choosing an opening:

1. Try to start your story with forward movement whenever possible.

2. Don’t start by setting expectations.

Listen to people in the world tell you stories. Often they start with a sentence like, “This is hilarious,” or “You need to hear this,” or “You’re not going to believe this.” This is always a mistake, for three reasons. First, it establishes potentially unrealistic expectations.

Second, starting your story with a thesis statement reduces your chances of surprising your audience.

Third, these are simply not interesting ways to start a story.

Pay attention to the opening scenes of movies. So many of them use this strategy as well. We open on the protagonist or someone similarly important to the story. That person will be moving.

Many movies open with simple overhead views passing over an ocean, a cityscape, or a mountain pass. Many movies based in New York City open with an overhead approach of the island over water. This has nothing to do with the film but allows the director to open with momentum. Forward movement. We’re headed somewhere important.

Chapter 9. Stakes: Five Ways to Keep Your Story Compelling

I use five different strategies to infuse this story with stakes.

These strategies are both easy to apply and almost always effective.

The Elephant

Every story must have an Elephant. The Elephant is the thing that everyone in the room can see. It is large and obvious. It is a clear statement of the need, the want, the problem, the peril, or the mystery. It signifies where the story is headed, and it makes it clear to your audience that this is in fact a story and not a simple musing on a subject.

The Elephant should appear as early in the story as possible. Ideally, it should appear within the first minute, and if you can say it within the first thirty seconds, even better.

Pay attention to the way that people tell stories. More often than not, you will find yourself two or three minutes into a story, unsure of where the story is going and why you should continue to listen.

Elephants can also change color. That is, the need, want, problem, peril, or mystery stated in the beginning of the story can change along the way. You may be offered one expectation only to have it pulled away in favor of another.

Note that I’m not actually changing the path that the audience is on. It’s the same path we’ve been walking since the start of the story. The audience just didn’t realize that it’s a much deeper, more interesting path than first expected.

Don’t switch Elephants. Simply change the color.

This method of storytelling is especially effective when the end of your story is heavy, emotional, sorrowful, or heartrending. To keep an entire story from being filled with weight and emotion, I try to find a way to make the beginning light and fun, hilarious and joyous.

Backpacks

A Backpack is a strategy that increases the stakes of the story by increasing the audience’s anticipation about a coming event.

It’s an attempt to do two things:

• Make the audience wonder what will happen next.
• Make your audience experience the same emotion, or something like the same emotion, that the storyteller experienced in the moment about to be described.

This is why heist movies like the Ocean’s Eleven franchise explain almost every part of the robbers’ plan before they ever make a move.

Backpacks are most effective when a plan does not work.

[The audience wants] to see their characters ultimately triumph, but they want suffering first. They don’t want anything to be easy.

Breadcrumbs

Storytellers use Breadcrumbs when we hint at a future event but only reveal enough to keep the audience guessing.

The trick is to choose the Breadcrumbs that create the most wonder in the minds of your audience without giving them enough to guess correctly.

Hourglasses

The sentence your audience has been waiting to hear. This is the moment to use an Hourglass. It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible. When you know the audience is hanging on your every word, let them hang. Drag out the wait as long as possible.

All I’ve done here is summarize what has just happened. It’s unnecessary. It’s redundant. Under any other circumstances, I would argue that this section needs to be cut. But this is not any other circumstance. I have my audience dying for the next sentence, and I know it. This unnecessary bit of summary slows things down and raises the tension even further. It’s the final delay before the sentence that everyone is waiting for.

Crystal Balls

A Crystal Ball is a false prediction made by a storyteller to cause the audience to wonder if the prediction will prove to be true.

By predicting my future arrest, I’ve established wonder in their minds about a future event.

In storytelling, deploy Crystal Balls strategically: Only when your prediction seems possible. Only when your guess is reasonable. And only when your prediction presents an intriguing or exciting possibility. The idea that the police might be coming to arrest me in “Charity Thief” meets these requirements well.

If you’re not sure about the level of stakes in your story, simply ask yourself:

• Would the audience want to hear my next sentence?
• If I stopped speaking right now, would anyone care?
• Am I more compelling than video games and pizza and sex at this moment?

Humor

Humor doesn’t actually add to or raise the stakes of a story. It doesn’t give your audience a reason to listen for the next sentence. It doesn’t increase the level of suspense or peril or mystery. But it’s a way of keeping your audience’s attention through a section of your story that you think might be less than compelling.

Remember that the goal of a storyteller is not to tell a funny story. The goal is to tell a story that moves an audience emotionally.

Chapter 10. The Five Permissible Lies of True Storytelling

#1: Omission

Audiences don’t want redemption. Redemption cleanses the palate. It ties up all loose ends. It makes the world whole again. It allows your audience to sleep well at night. I want my audience tossing and turning over my story.

Lie #2: Compression

Compression is used when storytellers want to push time and space together in order to make the story easier to comprehend, visualize, and tell.

Lie #3: Assumption

Storytellers use assumption when there is a detail so important to the story that it must be stated with specificity, so the storyteller makes a reasonable assumption about what the specifics may be.

Since it’s the 1970s, I declare that the car was a station wagon, because that was a common vehicle on the roads in the seventies. I’d love to say it was a cherry-red Corvette instead of a station wagon, because it would make the story more interesting, but when I assume (and I don’t very often), I always make the most reasonable and likely assumption.

Lie #4: Progression

A lie of progression is when a storyteller changes the order of events in a story to make it more emotionally satisfying or comprehensible to the listener.

It’s always better to make people laugh before they cry. It hurts more that way.

Lie #5: Conflation

Storytellers use conflation to push all the emotion of an event into a single time frame, because stories are more entertaining this way. Rather than describing change over a long period, we compress all the intellectual and emotional transformation into a smaller bit of time, because this is what audiences expect from stories.

Chapter 11. Cinema of the Mind

The goal of every storyteller should be to create a cinematic experience in the minds of every listener. This is important. You may think it’s obvious, but if it were, storytellers would do this all the time. They would obsess about the idea of maintaining an unrelenting, uninterrupted movie in the minds of their listeners. But they don’t. Often, instead of making the story the center of their performance, storytellers make themselves the center of the show. They crack jokes. Insert amusing or observational non sequiturs. Step outside the story’s time line. Ask rhetorical questions of the audience. These are all terrible ways to start stories. Rather than presenting a fully realized cinematic experience, they present bits of the movie. They give a scene here or a scene there, intersected by unnecessary or poorly formatted exposition that ruins the flow. Even worse, they open stories by pontificating and proselytizing:

Love is a beautiful thing when it isn’t killing you. There are two kinds of toddlers in this world: those who raise your hopes for humanity and those who belong in a cage. I used to think that I understood my mother better than anyone in the world, but now I know that mothers are like oceans: deep, dark, and full of secrets.

These are not the beginnings to stories. These are sentences that supposedly state some universal truth that the story will then illustrate. But this is not how stories work.

Always provide a physical location for every moment of your story.

If you’re making the audience laugh, it might be more akin to stand-up comedy. You may even sound as if you’re reciting an essay. Whatever you are doing, if the movie has stopped in the mind of your audience, it’s no longer a story.

Chapter 12. The Principle of But and Therefore

A clear majority of human beings tend to connect their sentences, paragraphs, and scenes together with the word and. This is a mistake. The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.

One other aspect to the but-and-therefore principle: the power of the negative. Oddly, the negative is almost always better than the positive.

Saying what something or someone is not is almost always better than saying what something or someone is. For example:

I am dumb, ugly, and unpopular.

I’m not smart, I’m not at all good-looking, and no one likes me.

The second sentence is better, isn’t it? Here’s why: it contains a hidden but. It presents both possibilities. Unlike the first sentence, which only offers single descriptors, the second sentence offers a binary. It presents the potential of being smart and not smart, good-looking and not good-looking, popular and unpopular. The second sentence really says this: I could be smart, but I’m dumb. I could be good-looking, but I’m ugly. I could be popular, but no one likes me. By saying what I am not, I am also saying what I could have been, and that is a hidden but.

This isn’t always true, of course. A short, positive statement at the end of a paragraph of description can often serve as an amusing button to a scene.

Chapter 14. The Secret to the Big Story: Make It Little

Little moments hidden inside big moments. That’s what we need to find to tell a big story well.

One of my favorite church signs that I’ve ever seen says: “Come hear our pastor. He’s not very good, but he’s quick.”

As Blaise Pascal first said, “If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” Brevity takes time, because brevity is always better.

The longer you speak, the more perfect and precise you must be. The longer you stand in front of an audience — whether it be a theater or a boardroom — the more entertaining and engaging your words must be. So speak less. Make time your ally.

Chapter 15. There Is Only One Way to Make Someone Cry

When it comes to storytelling, I believe that surprise is the only way to elicit an emotional reaction from your audience. Whether it’s laughter, tears, anger, sadness, outrage, or any other emotional response, the key is surprise. This is unlike real life, where many things can give rise to an emotional reaction, and surprise is not always required.

Common mistakes that storytellers make that ruin surprise include:

Presenting a thesis statement prior to the surprise.

This often takes the form of an opening sentence that gives away all that is surprising about the story.

But storytelling is the reverse of the five-paragraph essay. Instead of opening with a thesis statement and then supporting it with evidence, storytellers provide the evidence first and then sometimes offer the thesis statement later only when necessary. This is how we allow for surprise. The same holds true for smaller moments of surprise within stories

Thesis statements ruin the surprise every time. In storytelling, our job is to describe action, dialogue, and thought. It is never our job to summarize these things.

Failing to take advantage of the power of stakes to enhance and accentuate surprise.

Failing to hide critical information in a story.

We hide these important moments by making them seem unimportant. We do this by hiding critical information among other details. We make the important information seem no more important than the rest of the information by pushing it all together.

Laughter is the best camouflage, because it is also an emotional response, and audience members assume that the laugh is the result of the storyteller’s wanting to be funny. This is never the case. Comedians want to be funny. Great storytellers want to be remembered. For this reason, they deploy laughter strategically.

To review, the strategies for preserving and enhancing surprise in a story:

1. Avoid thesis statements in storytelling.

2. Heighten the contrast between the surprise and the moment just before the surprise.

3. Use stakes to increase surprise.

4. Avoid giving away the surprise in your story by hiding important information that will pay off later (planting bombs). This is done by:

• Obscuring them in a list of other details or examples.
• Placing them as far away from the surprise as possible.
• When possible, building a laugh around them to further camouflage their importance.

Chapter 16. Simple, Effective Ways to Be Funny in Storytelling

Stand-ups want the audience to laugh at all times. Storytellers want the audience to laugh at the right times.

It’s always good to get your audience to laugh in the first thirty seconds of a story.

An early laugh lets the audience know that regardless of how serious, intense, or disturbing the story I am telling may be, I’m okay now.

The contrast between their laughter and the approaching horror heightens the shocking and visceral nature of what is about to happen. I often say that I like to make people laugh before making them cry, because it hurts more that way.

You must end your story on heart. Far too often I hear storytellers attempt to end their story on a laugh. A pun. A joke. A play on words. This is not why we listen to stories. We like to laugh; we want to laugh. But we listen to stories to be moved.

When two things that rarely or never go together are pushed together, humor often results.

Three-year-old boys are rarely described as assholes, especially after being described as sweet, angelic, and little. In the story about the way that my grandmother pulled my loose teeth, I refer to her as a sadist. Grandmother and sadist are rarely seen together, so it’s funny.

Creating a list of three descriptors, with the third being nothing like the other two (...) e.g. the Zimmer family barbecue, which features “Zimmers, pineapple-flavored ham, and despair.”

Exaggeration is another form.

Chapter 17. Finding the Frayed Ending of Your Story

Reimmersing myself in the moment and telling as much of the story as possible, and ignoring all my storytelling strategies in favor of telling everything that I remember, has been exceptionally useful in finding the meaning behind those nagging moments from my life.

The other way of discovering the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do.

Part III. Telling Your Story

Chapter 18. The Present Tense Is King

I hit a moment of heightened emotion or increased gravity, so I instinctually shift to the present tense if I’m not already there, because this is when I want my audience “in the now.” Similarly, when I launch into backstory, I almost always instinctually shift into the past tense.

Chapter 19. The Two Ways of Telling a Hero Story

There is nothing wrong with sharing your success stories, but they are hard stories to tell well. The truth is this: failure is more engaging than success.

Rather than attempting to be grandiose about yourself or your success, you must undermine both you and it.

If you cast yourself as the underdog, your audience will enjoy your success. They will root for you. They will expect you to lose and hope for you to win.

Human beings prefer stories of small steps over large leaps. Most accomplishments, both great and small, are not composed of singular moments but are the culmination of many small steps. Overnight success stories are rare. They can also be disheartening to those who dream of similar success. The step-by-step nature of accomplishment is what people understand best. This is how to tell a success story: Rather than telling a story of your full and complete accomplishment, tell the story of a small part of the success. Tell about a small step. Feel free to allude to the better days that may lie ahead, but don’t try to tell everything.

Chapter 20. Words to Say, Words to Avoid

Don’t ask rhetorical questions.

Don’t address the audience or acknowledge their existence whatsoever.

No props. Ever.

Don’t mention the word story in your story. Phrases like, “But that’s a story for another day,” or “Long story short” serve to remind our audience that we are telling a story. If your audience knows that you’re telling a story, then they’re not time traveling.

Downplay your physical presence as much as possible.

Chapter 21. Words to Say, Words to Avoid

I’m a big believer in the words of novelist Anne Lamott: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

There is never a reason to imitate the accent of a person from another country or another culture. A white man imitating the accent of the Mexican cabdriver (as I once heard a storyteller do) only runs the risk of making the white man sound insensitive and racist (which it did).

You can imitate the accents from the region where you grew up, particularly if you share a race with the people who you are imitating.

Chapter 22. Time to Perform

Don’t memorize your story.

Instead of memorizing your story word-for-word, memorize three parts to a story: 1. The first few sentences. Always start strong. 2. The last few sentences. Always end strong. 3. The scenes of your story. If you’re following my advice and placing every moment of your story in a physical location (chapter 11), then your story will be composed of scenes: places where the action, dialogue, and internal monologues are taking place.

Chapter 23. Why Did You Read This Book? To Become a Superhero!

I have attended thousands of meetings, training sessions, conferences over my lifetime where the person delivering the content made no effort to engage the audience in an entertaining and memorable way. I will never understand this. Not only do you have an obligation to be entertaining, you have an opportunity to be entertaining. You have the chance to set yourself apart from the ever-present drone of the masses. You have the opportunity to make people smile. Laugh. Engage. Learn. Feel better about the time spent.