如何讲更好的故事 | Matthew Dicks(Storyworthy)
How to tell better stories | Matthew Dicks (Storyworthy)
Matthew Dicks: 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.
The Five-Second Moment
Lenny: 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.
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.
Also, it is seriously delicious. Not at all gamey and easy to cook. My wife and I made stew and steaks and all kinds of grilled goodies with the meat. We also feel great about it as a protein from an ethical standpoint. I highly recommend trying their all-natural venison jerky sticks for an optimal protein snack, as well as a wide variety of fresh cuts all available in their online butcher shop. There are limited memberships available, but you can sign up and get 20% off your first order at mauinuivenison.com/lenny. That’s MauiNuiVenison.com/Lenny.
Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Matthew Dicks: It’s my pleasure. I’m excited to be here.
Defining the Story’s Start and End
Lenny: 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.
The Power of Storytelling
Matthew Dicks: 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.
Why Change Is Crucial
Lenny: 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: 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.
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.
The Dinner Test
Lenny: 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: Sure. Well, I’ll tell you one that happened actually today. How about that?
Stories Must Be About You
Lenny: Amazing.
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
The Vacation Story
Lenny: 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: 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.
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?
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.
Storytelling in a Business Context
Lenny: 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: 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.
Merging Surprise and Inevitability
Lenny: Why is something changing so important? Why is that so critical to a good story, someone having a change or transforming?
Summary of Stakes Techniques
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
Never Frontload Story Stakes
Lenny: 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: Well, the dinner test is probably one that you’re thinking of.
Example: The Charity Thief
Lenny: Yeah, that’s right.
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
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.
When Extra Stakes Are Unnecessary
Lenny: 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.
Storytelling Power in Business
Matthew Dicks: Slightly elevated. Exactly.
Lenny: 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?
Transforming Business With Stories
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
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: Just as a tangent, you also have this funny, useful checklist for how to tell vacation stories?
The Slack vs. Microsoft Teams Story
Matthew Dicks: Well, first try not to, right?
Weaving Personal Info Into Daily Q&As
Lenny: I think that’s step one. Do not tell vacation stories.
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
Four Ways to Keep People Listening
Lenny: 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: Exactly.
Using Nostalgia to Create Humor
Lenny: 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.
Examples of Nostalgic Narratives
Matthew Dicks: 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.
”One of These Is Different”
Lenny: 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: 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.
Stories in Research and Sales
Lenny: 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: 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.
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.
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.
Two Storytelling Strategies
Lenny: 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?
The Adjacent Storytelling Method
Matthew Dicks: 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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Homework for Life
Lenny: 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: 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.
Prompts for Self-Questioning
Lenny: Easier said than done.
Seeing Patterns in Life
Matthew Dicks: 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: I feel that’s a whole other hour of podcast conversation to figure that out.
Spotting Unexpected Stories
Matthew Dicks: 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.
Storytelling Core: Decisions and Practice
Lenny: 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: And then the elephant at the beginning.
How to Overcome Stage Fright
Lenny: Oh, the elephant, just like the big ol’, here’s the steak. I wish-
Matthew Dicks: You got to have something.
Different Types of Learners
Lenny: 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: 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.
The Power of Speaking Aloud
Lenny: 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: 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.
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.
Lightning Q&A Session
Lenny: 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: True.
Guiding Life Principles
Lenny: 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?
Nailing the Beginning of Every Story
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
So Slack had to find a way to combat that, and Marsha was the one in charge of doing it. That’s why we connected. She found me and said, “I need to tell a good story. Please help me tell a good story.” So she crafted a brilliant narrative that worked fantastically. We worked really closely together, and it came out great. The way she came up with that narrative was a Tuesday night. She had broken up with her boyfriend, she was alone. She was feeling pretty lonely. It was in the midst of the pandemic. She had two glasses of wine in her, sitting alone on a Tuesday night, she suddenly had an inspiration. She wrote three words down on a napkin, and those three words become the story that we develop that allows Slack to compete against Microsoft.
When it comes time to her present that 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.
She said to me later, “I can’t believe the difference that that 30 second anecdote meant to the narrative. Because suddenly when I reached the end of the narrative, people wanted to talk to me. People came up to me, and the first thing they said was,” “Oh God, I remember I was feeling the same way during the pandemic.”
People connected to her because instead of being a corporate monolith, sort of like Slack 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: 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: 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.
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.
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: 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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:
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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: This is awesome. This list you’re talking about, is this going to be in your new book that you’re writing?
Matthew Dicks: 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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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: 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: I think sometimes you will. I have a company that calls me metaphor man. They call me essentially and say-
Lenny: I get that.
Matthew Dicks: ”… 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.
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.
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?
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: 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: Yeah. Usually one of those. Yeah.
Lenny: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
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.
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: 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: No. Yeah. That’s what I would do. Although ideally, as you go through…
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.
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: And just very practically, you recommend like Google Sheets, I imagine is what you use?
Matthew Dicks: 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: 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: Yeah, that’s true. I’m like,-
Lenny: Okay.
Matthew Dicks: I can remember the two times. It was yeah, it was PTSD related and Seth Meyers cost of ticket related.
Lenny: Oh, I remember that story.
Matthew Dicks: Yeah.
Lenny: 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: 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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: Yes.
Lenny: And looking at it,-
Matthew Dicks: 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: 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: Really?
Lenny: Yeah, it’s in his Masterclass talk,-
Matthew Dicks: And I just finished Sedaris’s Happy-Go-Lucky, which is a great book. I love him.
Lenny: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: There was a quote I often come back to around this, which is, “The cave you fear contains the treasure you seek.”
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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: 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: No, I’ve said enough. They’ve heard enough from me. Let’s go to the lightning round.
Lenny: We’ve covered a lot. Let’s do it. Well, welcome to our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Matthew Dicks: Yes.
Lenny: What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?
Matthew Dicks: 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: Amazing. What’s a favorite recent movie or TV show that you’ve really enjoyed?
Matthew Dicks: 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: 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: 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: You have a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really like, whether it’s an app or something you bought?
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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: These are amazing selections. There’s also call back to our nostalgia trick for getting to be funny.
Matthew Dicks: Right. That’s true. Yes. Unintended, but I’ll take credit for it.
Lenny: Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself, share with friends, either in work or in life?
Matthew Dicks: 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.
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: What’s interesting about that is it’s not even like that well, cleverly put. It sounds like a fortune cookie,
Matthew Dicks: Yeah.
Lenny: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
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: I love it. What a beautiful way to end it. Matt, thank you so much for being here.
Matthew Dicks: Thanks so much, Lenny. I really appreciate it.
Lenny: 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.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Alfred Hitchcock | Alfred Hitchcock(英国电影导演,保留原文) |
| all hands | 全员大会 |
| Aruba | Aruba(加勒比海岛国,保留原文) |
| backpack | 背包(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指提前告知听众计划以制造代入感) |
| Barbie | 《芭比》(2023年电影,使用公认中文译名) |
| Boris Levin | Boris Levin(工厂老板,Matthew Dicks 的商业合作伙伴,保留原文) |
| bottle episode | bottle episode(电视剧术语,指限定场景的单集,保留原文) |
| breadcrumbs | 面包屑(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指沿途给出暗示性信息) |
| Charity Thief | Charity Thief(Matthew Dicks 的故事名称,保留原文) |
| Chattanooga | Chattanooga(美国田纳西州城市,保留原文) |
| Clara | Clara(Matthew Dicks 的女儿名,保留原文) |
| crystal balls | 水晶球(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指预测可能的未来以制造筹码) |
| David Mamet | David Mamet(美国剧作家、导演,保留原文) |
| David Sedaris | David Sedaris(美国幽默作家,保留原文) |
| Eileen | Eileen(学生名,保留原文) |
| elephant | 大象(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指故事开头抛出的引起悬念的要素) |
| Essex | Essex(捕鲸船名,保留原文) |
| Florida State Legislature | 佛罗里达州立法机构 |
| Gala | Gala(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| Grand Slam | Grand Slam(Moth 比赛的冠军赛,保留原文) |
| Happy-Go-Lucky | Happy-Go-Lucky(David Sedaris 的书名,保留原文) |
| Heart of the Sea | Heart of the Sea(Nathaniel Philbrick 的纪实作品,保留原文) |
| Homework for Life | Homework for Life(Matthew Dicks 的故事挖掘框架名,保留原文) |
| Honeycrisp | Honeycrisp(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| hourglasses | 沙漏(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指在关键时刻放慢节奏以延长悬念) |
| Javits Center | Javits Center(纽约大型会展中心,保留原文) |
| Jessie Klein | Jessie Klein(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Kate DiCamillo | Kate DiCamillo(美国儿童文学作家,保留原文) |
| Krinner Tree Genie | Krinner Tree Genie(圣诞树底座品牌/产品名,保留原文) |
| Kurt Vonnegut | Kurt Vonnegut(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Lenny | Lenny(播客主持人,保留原文) |
| Little League | 小联盟(美国少年棒球联盟) |
| Luke Skywalker | Luke Skywalker(《星球大战》角色名,保留原文) |
| Maria Bamford | Maria Bamford(美国喜剧演员,保留原文) |
| Marsha Rakofsky | Marsha Rakofsky(Slack 前企业传播总监,保留原文) |
| Masterclass | Masterclass(在线课程平台名,保留原文) |
| Matthew Dicks | Matthew Dicks(美国故事讲述者、作家,保留原文) |
| McIntosh | McIntosh(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| Melville | Melville(《白鲸》作者,保留原文) |
| metaphor man | 比喻侠 |
| Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams(微软产品名,保留原文) |
| Moby Dick | 《白鲸》(经典文学名著,使用公认中文译名) |
| Moth Story Slam | Moth Story Slam(纽约知名讲故事比赛,保留原文) |
| Nathaniel Philbrick | Nathaniel Philbrick(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Nostalgia Hot Dog Toaster | Nostalgia 热狗烤面包机(厨房小家电产品) |
| Obi-Wan Kenobi | Obi-Wan Kenobi(《星球大战》角色名,保留原文) |
| Ocean’s 11 | 《十一罗汉》(经典抢劫电影,使用公认中文译名) |
| Orlando | Orlando(美国佛罗里达州城市,保留原文) |
| personal interest inventory | 个人兴趣清单 |
| Power POD | Power POD(便携充电设备品牌,保留原文) |
| Pulp Fiction | 《低俗小说》(经典犯罪电影,使用公认中文译名) |
| Red Delicious | Red Delicious(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| Schwinn | Schwinn(美国经典自行车品牌,保留原文) |
| Sesame Street | 《芝麻街》(美国经典儿童教育节目,使用公认中文译名) |
| Seth Meyers | Seth Meyers(美国脱口秀主持人,保留原文) |
| Slack | Slack(企业通讯平台,保留原文) |
| SOC 2 | SOC 2(安全合规框架,保留原文) |
| Speak Up | Speak Up(Matthew Dicks 的培训公司名,保留原文) |
| speaking with adjacency | 邻近讲述 |
| Steve Jobs | Steve Jobs(科技界知名人物,但无统一公认中文译名,保留原文) |
| Storyworthy | Storyworthy(Matthew Dicks 的著作/品牌名,保留原文) |
| Stranger Things | 《怪奇物语》(Netflix 热门剧集,使用公认中文译名) |
| Tarantino | Tarantino(美国电影导演,保留原文) |
| Taylor Swift | Taylor Swift(美国歌手,保留原文) |
| TED talk | TED 演讲 |
| The Force | The Force(《星球大战》中的力量/信仰概念,保留原文) |
| The Last of Us | The Last of Us(HBO 剧集名,保留原文) |
| The Tale of Despereaux | The Tale of Despereaux(Kate DiCamillo 的小说,保留原文) |
| total addressable market | 可触达市场 |
| VCR | 录像机 |
| West Cow | West Cow(播客嘉宾,保留原文) |
| When Harry Met Sally | 《当哈利遇到莎莉》(经典爱情喜剧电影,使用公认中文译名) |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
如何讲更好的故事 | Matthew Dicks(Storyworthy)
如何讲更好的故事 | Matthew Dicks(Storyworthy)
文字记录
Matthew Dicks: 每个人都喜欢在商业语境中使用”讲故事”这个词。这是一个巨大的流行语。他们喜欢把自己看作讲故事的人,但当他们来找我时,他们其实并不真的想成为讲故事的人。因为成为讲故事的人意味着你必须从群体中脱颖而出,而在他们的意识里,这就有可能被猎食者盯上,对吧?被某个捕食者叼走。但另一种选择是留在群体里,而那意味着你会被遗忘。你参加过多少次会议,听了某个人演讲,等你开车回到家门口的时候,真的已经记不起他们说了什么了?因为如果我们不用故事的方式去讲述,结果就是这样。我们的大脑天生就不是用来记住饼图、事实、数据、老生常谈或脱离意象的抽象概念的。所以如果你不讲故事,你承担的风险就是被遗忘。百分之百,你会被遗忘。
Lenny: 今天的嘉宾是 Matthew Dicks。Matthew 是我个人有史以来最喜爱的讲故事书籍 Storyworthy 的作者,这本书是播客的一位往期嘉宾推荐给我的,我读起来简直放不下。所以我联系了 Matthew,请他上了播客。Matthew 是 59 次 Moth Story Slam 冠军,9 次 Grand Slam 冠军。他还写了另外九本书,包括小说、摇滚歌剧,甚至还有一本漫画书。
他的本职是小学教师,同时通过他的公司 Speak Up 为个人和团队——包括 Slack、Amazon、Lego、Salesforce 等公司的团队——教授讲故事和公众演讲的技巧。在我们的对话中,我们会非常具体地讨论如何在生活和工作中讲更好的故事,如何在舞台上更加自如,如何在需要的时候找到可以随时调用故事素材,为什么每一个好故事都围绕着一个五秒钟的转变时刻,以及更多内容。Matt 是一个非常了不起的人,我很高兴能让更多人了解他的理念。如果你对这个话题感兴趣,一定要去读他的书 Storyworthy,它会改变你的人生。好了,接下来就是我对 Matthew Dicks 的访谈。
五秒钟的转变时刻
Lenny: Matt,非常感谢你能来。欢迎来到播客。
Matthew Dicks: 这是我的荣幸,很高兴来到这里。
Lenny: 我甚至更高兴你能来。我了解到你的方式,是一位往期嘉宾提到了你的书,说这本书真正改变了他们对讲故事甚至营销的看法。我完全同意。这是最具体、最实用,同时也是最有趣的一本关于如何讲好故事的书。我读的时候就想着:“要不让联系一下这本书的作者,看他愿不愿意来做客?“然后我们就在这里了。
Matthew Dicks: 我很高兴来到这里,也很感谢你说的那些话。我试图让我的书尽可能地具有可操作性。我认为我之所以能在自己做的事情上取得成功,唯一的原因就是我已经当了 25 年的老师,同时也是一个讲故事的人。这两件事在我身上结合得还算不错。
Lenny: 好,我想从一个可能最让我脑洞大开的收获开始聊,就是书中这个观点:所有好故事都根植于一个人生命中的某个五秒钟时刻。你能谈谈这个洞见,也许再分享一两个例子让我们更直观地感受一下吗?
Matthew Dicks: 当然。你刚才说的没错,本质上每个故事都围绕一个特定时刻。我称它为五秒钟,说实话也可以是一秒钟。它是一个转变的时刻——意思是说,我在讲一个关于我曾经是某种人、而现在我变成了另一种人的故事。或者更常见的是领悟——我过去认为某件事是这样的,然后经历了一些事情,现在我的看法变了。这些变化看起来是随着时间发生的。或者说,实际上是事件、感受和思想的累积,最终导致了一个特定的时刻,那个翻转真正发生了。我认为对几乎所有人来说都是如此。感觉上它花了很长时间,但其实真的有那么一秒钟,你想的是一件事,下一秒钟你想的就是另一件事了。
而故事的目的,本质上就是把那个时刻尽可能清晰地呈现给观众。让观众在某种程度上,能够和讲故事的人一起经历那个翻转、那个转变或领悟。所以故事中 98% 的内容都是为那个特定时刻的呈现提供语境。这对于我们口头讲述的故事、写在纸上的故事、我写的小说、我看的电影、我看的电视节目都适用——世界上所有值得听的故事,真正称得上故事的故事,都有这样一个时刻。
Lenny: 这个论断很大胆。你能不能举个例子?可以是我们都知道的故事,也可以直接讲一个短故事,哪种都行,让大家觉得”哇,你说得太对了”?
Matthew Dicks: 好。那我讲一个今天刚发生的事,怎么样?
Lenny: 太好了。
Matthew Dicks: 今天我在教数学。我是一名小学老师,当时正在教数学课,我班上有一个学生,叫 Eileen。她是我有点担心的那种孩子,因为她有些焦虑,不是世界上最自信的人。九月份我就注意到了这一点,所以一直很努力地在帮她建立自信。今天我们做数学练习,我叫学生到黑板前做题,我看着 Eileen,心里琢磨,今天是时候了吗?要不要叫 Eileen 到黑板前?因为这样做有风险,她可能会难过,可能会在全班同学面前出丑,而这对她来说是很在意的。
我没把握,所以没有叫她上去。数学课结束时,我走到她桌旁,说:“Eileen,我今天本来想叫你到黑板前的,但我不确定你是不是准备好了。你觉得呢?“她对我说:“首先,我不喜欢你脸上那副得意的笑。“这就够了,这就是我需要的全部。那就是我的五秒钟时刻,那个顿悟的瞬间——我明白了 Eileen 信任我,在我的课堂上有足够的自信做她自己,敢对老师来一句俏皮话,拿我开涮。我知道从那一刻起,我可以叫她到黑板前了,她会没事的。所以本质上这是一个非常简短的故事,但我完全可以把它扩展成一个更有深度的故事。
我可以把它变成一个五六分钟的故事,讲述我和这个学生一路走来的历程。在更长的版本中,我会加入我一步步了解她这个人的过程,以及我帮她走到今天所采取的步骤。我可能还会引入一些背景,讲讲那些我没能成功的学生的故事,那些在我学会成为更好的老师之前的失败经历。然后我会把故事推进到她说”首先,我不喜欢你那副得意的笑”的那一刻,那就是我需要听到的全部。所以这对我来说就是一个五秒钟时刻。但它和其他任何五秒钟时刻本质上是一样的。想想《星球大战》这样的电影,第一部《星球大战》其实本质上是一个关于宗教的电影,大家不一定总能看出来,但确实如此。
一个男孩住在一颗星球上,他梦想有一天能进入太空,驾驶飞船,用爆能枪击败帝国。在这个过程中,他遇到了一位宗教人物——Obi-Wan Kenobi,后者向他介绍了一种叫 The Force 的信仰。当最终 Luke Skywalker 要击败帝国的时刻到来时,他原本设想的用技术——飞船和爆能枪——来摧毁帝国的那一切全都抛开了,他在飞船里关掉了自己的技术装备,转而依靠 The Force 来引导武器击败敌人。
这就是一个男孩从不信教到信教的故事。有些事发生了,最后他有了信仰。这也是为什么这样的故事能以一种其他故事可能做不到的方式引起我们的共鸣,因为我们都理解从不相信某件事到开始相信某件事是什么感受。不管是宗教信仰,还是我以前觉得芝士汉堡不好吃、现在觉得好吃了——不管哪种,我们都理解这个过程,也因此能真正与 Luke Skywalker 产生共鸣。所以每个故事本质上都有这样的时刻,包括”我不喜欢你那副得意的笑”。
五秒钟时刻决定故事的起点和终点
Lenny: 关于这个时刻,还有一个有趣的地方——你谈到,知道了这个改变的时刻,也就知道了故事将如何收尾。作为讲故事的人,你会因为知道这个时刻是什么而知道结局,而这反过来也大致告诉你故事该如何开头。你能谈谈这个发现吗?因为对我来说,现在每次看电影我都会想,哇,我从开头就知道它要怎么收场了。
Matthew Dicks: 所以我们讲故事的人是从结尾开始的。当然,如果我们讲的是关于自己、自己的公司或产品的真实故事,那些我们已经知道的事情,我们是从结尾开始的。我也是小说作家,所以当我开始写小说时,更多是一个自我发现的过程,我真的不知道结局。但在我们讨论的这种讲故事的方式中,你必须知道结局,因为你亲身经历了那个时刻,而结局决定了一切。你知道自己要说什么,你找到了一个值得讲述的时刻,那个五秒钟时刻。不管那个时刻是什么——在我这个例子中,我发现 Eileen 比我意识到的更自信,准备好迈出一大步了——那么它的对立面是什么?是 Eileen 没有自信,而我要帮她找到那份自信。
这就是故事中起作用的对立关系。本质上,一个故事就是关于时间中的两个时刻——一个开头和一个结尾——它们彼此对立。有时对立更强,有时恰好就是正反对立。但你说得对,如果你看电影时注意前十到十五分钟,你最终就能知道那部电影会如何收场。你会看到一个角色,发现这个角色需要什么、有什么缺陷、渴望什么,你就知道结尾一定会与这些相关。最简单的例子是爱情喜剧。电影开头两个人并不相爱,你知道结尾他们一定会相爱。即使知道了也不意味着故事就被毁了,我们可以用一种非常有趣的方式抵达那个结局。《当哈利遇到莎莉》那部电影,开头的时候,Harry 和 Sally 实际上说了他们讨厌对方——“我恨你,Harry”,对吧?
“我太恨那个男人了。“我们知道他们最后会在一起,而这个旅程本身是值得的,哪怕我们已经知道结局。这确实会破坏一些和我一样思维的人的观影体验,你会说:“哦,我知道这要往哪走了。“但你必须用一种充满趣味的方式来讲,装满我们在讲故事中讨论的所有其他要素。但没错,每个故事本质上都应该是一个开头和一个结尾彼此对立,你应该从结尾开始,这能保证你有重要的东西要说,而不是像大多数人那样——他们只是在复述自己的生活,按时间顺序告诉你一段时间里发生的事情,最终却什么都没指向。你始终应该说的是有意义的内容。所以我们从结尾开始,从那个有意义的时刻开始。
Lenny: 有意思,我刚好在你说的时候想到了《当哈利遇到莎莉》,作为一个例子——我老婆基本上每晚都想看那部电影,那是她看多少遍都不嫌多的一部电影。
故事的力量
Matthew Dicks: 这就是故事的力量。我一直在跟人说这个道理。我们为什么要讲故事?你从不会想再看一遍 PowerPoint 演示文稿。你从不会做梦梦到 PowerPoint。你也从不会在听完一个主题演讲后心想,希望明天还能再看一遍。但电影,你会看一百遍,因为那是故事,我们的大脑天生就被设定为可以一遍又一遍地享受故事。你有小孩子对吧?等你的孩子大到可以听你读书的时候,你会发现孩子们想把你同一本书读五十遍。他们和大人其实没什么区别,只不过儿童书太短了,你可以无休止地读下去。一部电影要两个小时,所以你不能像自己想的那样频繁地去看。但《当哈利遇到莎莉》播到一半你正好看到,你很可能就坐下来接着看了。哪怕每一个场景你大概都能背出台词。我们天生就是为故事而生的。这就是为什么故事如此重要。
为什么”改变”如此关键
Lenny: 为什么”改变”这么重要?为什么一个人发生改变或转变对一个好故事来说这么关键?
Matthew Dicks: 我认为,转变真正发生的那一刻赋予了故事重要性,也让观众能够与之产生共鸣。如果我向你复述我的一天——我在教室里教书的一天——我很可能无法与你产生连接,除非你也是一位老师,经历过和我相似的事情。我妻子是幼儿园老师,我是五年级老师。如果我们俩各自复述自己的一天,奇怪的是,我们其实不会真正产生多少共鸣。她在教孩子们写字母 C,我在教他们乘法的标准算法。这两件事天差地远。
所以,复述你一天中经历的那些时刻,并不是与人连接的方式。但当我们谈论改变的时候,改变具有极大的普遍吸引力。你可能不是一个正努力帮助他人找到自信的老师,但你可能是一个曾经缺乏自信、后来像 Eileen 那样找到自信的人。或者你可能是一位家长,或是一位正试图给自己的孩子、员工、销售人员带来自信的上司——无论什么角色都好。当我们聚焦于改变的时候,故事的普遍吸引力和我们与观众建立连接的能力会呈指数级增长。即使我们讲述的内容与观众毫无关系,情感上的共鸣也会让人们与我们产生连接。
晚餐测试
Lenny: 太有意思了。沿着”改变”这个思路继续,你还有一个关于好故事标准的清单。什么是一个好故事?我记得只有三个要点。第一个是发生了改变。你能谈谈另外两个吗?应该只有另外两个。
Matthew Dicks: 你想到的应该是”晚餐测试”。
Lenny: 对,就是那个。
Matthew Dicks: 晚餐测试的意思是,当你以正式的方式讲故事时——不管你是在舞台上表演、做主题演讲,还是向创业者做路演或销售推介——你讲的那个故事,应该和你与别人共进晚餐时讲的故事非常接近。你的故事或演讲中不应该包含任何表演艺术的成分。那些人们做的奇怪的事情就不应该做。比如用一个没有归属的对话来开场——你站在台上,用一句”Jim,该进来吃晚饭了”来开头,“我妻子说”——这就很奇怪。我们普通人不是这么说话的,所以你永远不应该那样说话。从古至今,你都不应该那样说话。但人们一直在这样做。
这大概是一种从童年遗留下来的怪习惯,因为糟糕的写作老师觉得这样做是个好主意。或者你用一个声音效果开场,这在一年级非常流行。你教孩子们用声音效果开头,主要因为老师们自己不是作家,所以他们并不真正理解写作是什么。于是他们用类似”砰!门开了”这样的方式来开头。但如果你我正在吃晚餐,你问我:“嘿,Matt,今天怎么样?“我回答:“好吧,让我告诉你,Lenny。砰!门开了。“你再也不会和我一起吃晚饭了。
所以你要把它想象成晚餐故事的略微提升版。也就是说,你在讲故事的过程中大概不会被中途打断。你希望给它稍微多一点的形状,也想避免那些充斥我们日常生活的语言碎屑。你不想满口”你知道的""就像我说的”之类的废话,这些都应该被清理掉。但本质上,人们应该感觉你在以一种非常自然的方式说话。所以在这一点上,晚餐测试是相当重要的。
Lenny: 很好。所以这里的启示就是,当你讲故事的时候,确保它是那种你可以在晚宴上讲出来的东西。你用的说法是”略微提升版”。
Matthew Dicks: 略微提升版。没错。
故事必须关于你自己
Lenny: 我想你提到的第三个要点是,故事必须是关于你自己的。你不能替别人讲故事。也许可以简单聊聊这一点?
Matthew Dicks: 如果你在讲别人的故事,本质上,那和讲虚构故事没什么区别。因为那个人不在场,对观众来说,他们并不真正存在。既然观众看不到那个人,那个人就只是另一个据称住在世界上某个地方、或曾经活在世界上的普通人而已。正因如此,你几乎无法在故事中表达任何脆弱。你不能揭示关于你自己的任何东西。而讲故事的一个关键要素就是向观众展现脆弱——意味着我要以有意义的方式说出一些话。我可能会说出大多数人在公开场合不愿意分享的东西,但至少我要献出一点点自己的内心和思想。如果我献出的是别人的内心和思想,那其实不需要任何脆弱。
唯一的脆弱仅仅是我需要站在人们面前说话——我知道这对某些人来说是挑战——但这对观众来说不算什么。我们不在乎你演讲是否吃力,是否让你紧张。这对观众来说意义不大。我们真正想要的是有人敞开自己的内心和思想。所以故事在某种程度上必须是关于你自己的。当然有一些技巧可以让你讲别人的故事——方法是把你自己的经历置于中心。
举一个例子,我与大屠杀幸存者的子女和孙辈一起工作。过去,他们的做法就是直接讲述那位大屠杀幸存者的故事——而那个人往往在此时已经去世——这真的感觉就像虚构一样。很久以前,在一个不是这里的地方,发生了一件可怕的事。你可能会产生某种程度的共情和同情。但我教他们做的是讲述关于自己的故事。然后在讲自己故事的过程中,到了某个时刻,他们会谈到自己的父母或祖父母在大屠杀中的经历是如何影响或改变了他们自己的生活的。这样他们仍然可以触及那段历史,但那段历史与讲故事的人本人是相关的。它不再是历史了,而是”因为我的父母或祖辈经历了某种可怕的事情,所以我发生了改变”。
度假故事
Lenny: 顺便提一下,你还有一个关于如何讲度假故事的有趣且实用的清单?
Matthew Dicks: 首先,尽量别讲,对吧?
Lenny: 我觉得那就是第一步——不要讲度假故事。
Matthew Dicks: 大多数度假故事只不过是拿别人的时间来复述自己的假期而已。所以,除非你在度假中经历了那种五秒钟的本质性转变时刻,否则没人在乎你的假期。如果确实发生了什么,那就只讲发生的那个时刻。所以,如果我的转变时刻发生在周四晚上的晚餐时,那这个故事就只发生在周四晚上的晚餐时,至于我在 Aruba 这件事就无关紧要了。
我在度假这个事实对故事几乎完全无关紧要,除非我想交代一下地点。但我不会谈前一天的沙滩、不会谈潜水、不会谈飞机。这些统统删掉。我们讲的是生命中的时刻,发生在哪里并不重要。如果你的地点对故事至关重要,因为你就是想让别人知道你在 Aruba,那你得明白——没人在乎你在 Aruba,你只是在浪费别人的时间来重温自己的假期,顺便炫耀你玩得多开心,这么做真的很糟糕。
Lenny: 这段很适合发给那些爱讲度假故事的朋友看。顺便也能告诉他们怎么讲得更好。
Matthew Dicks: 没错。
Lenny: 所以建议就是——要理解为什么故事必须锚定在那个周四晚餐的时刻?保持极度聚焦和微小,除非有非常必要的理由才去交代晚餐的背景。
Matthew Dicks: 对,完全正确。每个故事最短的版本就是最好的版本。尽可能靠近结尾处开始讲故事,永远是最好的起点。所以,如果我在 Aruba 一家餐厅吃甜点时有了一个顿悟时刻,我可能压根不会告诉听众我在 Aruba。我可能这样开头:“甜点端上来了,我妻子说了句话,让我开始思考——“这就是故事的开头。至于我在加勒比的一个岛上这件事,可能在整段故事里都不会出现,因为它对故事并不重要。
Lenny: 另一位嘉宾 West Cow 分享过一个经验——她管这叫”当熊开始吃你的帐篷”。直接跳到熊在吃你帐篷的那一刻。不要铺垫你是怎么、为什么来到这个帐篷的。就是:熊在吃我们的帐篷。故事应该从这里开始。
Matthew Dicks: 对,Kurt Vonnegut 说过这句话。他说:“尽可能靠近结尾处开始。“他当时说的是纸面上的短篇小说,但这个道理在口头讲故事中同样成立。而且在我帮别人修改故事的所有工作中,我最常提出的修改建议就是——你的故事起点选错了。
商业语境中的讲故事
Lenny: 我想转到商业语境的建议。不过在此之前,讲故事还有一个非常重要的元素——要有筹码(stakes),而且是重要的筹码。你能谈谈什么是筹码,为什么必须要有筹码吗?然后再举一些在故事中加入筹码让故事更有吸引力的例子?
Matthew Dicks: 好的。筹码本质上就是你的听众应该担心的东西、应该期待的东西、应该关切的东西、应该好奇的东西。如果听众不再好奇你接下来要说什么,他们就不再在听了。你必须深刻地、从根本上认识到这一点。我在商业领域与人合作时,他们普遍存在一个误解——认为人们想听他们说话。某位市场营销副总裁觉得,因为自己是副总裁,所有人都坐在椅子上看着自己,就自然而然拥有了这个听众的注意力。而我始终假设——百分之百地假设——没有人想听我说任何话。所以我坚持不懈地想办法让听众时刻好奇下一句话是什么。
筹码就是其中的重要部分。筹码就是——“我好奇接下来会发生什么""我替这个人担心""他能得到他想要的吗?""他会得到应有的报应吗?因为他在这故事里看起来有点混蛋”。所有这些都是筹码。故事讲述者、公司、产品——不管是什么——面临的风险是什么,以及由此引发的听众的担忧。
这就是为什么《星球大战》开头是一艘大飞船在射击一艘小飞船。我们甚至不知道上面坐着谁,但我们已经站在小飞船那边了。我们已经开始担心——一艘小飞船正被大飞船追着打,对吧?故事就是这样开场的。Alfred Hitchcock 有一部电影,开场就是一个警察在屋顶上追一个男人。我们不知道该为谁加油,但显然有什么东西处于危险之中。于是我们开始好奇接下来会发生什么。我们在日常真实生活的普通故事中也必须这样做——我们必须把筹码放进故事里。
Lenny: 你还教过一个关于”惊喜”的东西——惊喜作为筹码的一部分的力量。我记不太清具体内容了,你还有印象吗?
Matthew Dicks: 嗯,我把它们分开来讲。关于筹码,有很多种插入方式。我常说,故事开头应该有一个我所说的”大象”(elephant)——其实就是那艘大飞船射击小飞船,或者一个警察在屋顶上追人。我们必须立刻知道有东西处于危险之中,必须立刻开始为某件事担心。在我刚才讲的那个 Eileen 的小故事里,我说:“我在教数学,班上有个学生,我很担心她,因为我想叫她上黑板做题,但我又知道她可能缺乏信心。“——就这样,我必须立刻让人明白这是怎样一个故事。看电影时,你会先看到预告片。你很少会在对即将发生什么毫不知情的情况下走进电影院。但当你张嘴开始讲故事时,没有人知道你要说什么。你需要立刻抛出一个东西……
没有人知道你要说什么。你需要立刻抛出一个东西,让听众产生”哦,好吧,接下来会发生什么?“的反应。这就是”大象”——在故事开头种下一个大东西。它甚至不必是故事真正要讲的内容。有时候需要一点时间才能进入故事的核心,但你要先种下一个东西,至少让听众开始担心。然后你还可以用其他技巧。我管其中一个叫”背包”(backpack)——就是在执行计划之前,先告诉听众你的计划是什么,这样他们就仿佛把你的希望和梦想也一起背在了身上。如果你看过《十一罗汉》,你知道他们在进入赌场之前就知道计划是什么。所以当计划出了岔子,你就会”糟了”,因为你清楚计划本来是什么。
Matthew Dicks: 如果你不知道计划是什么,你就不会发出”糟了”的感叹。所以这就是把你的希望和梦想加载到听众身上,让他们也能感受到那些筹码,让他们也能替你期盼。还有一种叫”面包屑”(breadcrumbs)——就是你透露一点正在发生的事,但不给出完整的想法,像是抛出一个暗示。经典例子就是那把枪。房间里有把枪,房间里有把枪,看起来好像不会有什么关系,但既然房间里有把枪,它最终一定会走火。那里正在酝酿着什么。这就好比面包屑——最终我们会讲到那把枪的,别急,它一定会出现。还有”沙漏”(hourglasses),就是当你来到所有人都即将发现会发生什么的那个时刻,这时候就是要让时间慢下来。你在故事里塞满细节,因为忽然之间你的听众已经坐在椅子边缘了,而你想让他们在椅子边缘待得越久越好。当我知道听众想听下一句话时,恰恰是我推迟下一句话到来的时候——我会翻转一个沙漏,让沙子流上一会儿,让他们等着。还有”水晶球”(crystal balls),你可以预测一个未来。不必预测一个准确的未来,你可以预测任何未来。比如在 Eileen 的故事里,我本可以这样说:“如果我搞砸了,Eileen 就会哭起来。她会在二十二个孩子面前哭。这二十二个孩子在接下来整整一年里都会继续盯着这个女孩看,记住她哭泣的那一刻。“这就是一个水晶球。
那就是我在预测一个可怕的未来。因为我把那个可怕的未来放进了听众的脑海中,现在他们开始担心了。这就是一个筹码。我植入了一个虚假的筹码,一个虚假的未来,但他们会为此担心,因为这也是一个现实的未来。所有这些技巧都是为了不断让听众好奇接下来会发生什么,这和”惊喜”略有不同。惊喜就是那个美妙的、令人愉悦的、惊人的瞬间——观众完全没有预料到某件事的发生,而事后回想又觉得几乎是必然的。惊喜发生了,他们理解了为什么会发生。我认为你能给观众的最好的东西,就是一个惊喜的瞬间。每个故事都有一个惊喜,至少一个。因为每当我们第一次突然意识到某件事——我讨厌”突然”这个词——但实际发生的是,我们过去不认为某件事,然后我们有了一个新的想法,如果我们把它也变成观众的惊喜,那就是一件令人愉悦的事。所以惊喜如此强大,如此美妙,却总是被讲故事的人毁掉。
惊喜与必然性的统一
Lenny: 我刚才在听一个访谈,嘉宾好像叫 David Mamet,他也提到过一个观点:书籍和电影的结局必须同时既是必然的,又是完全出人意料的。
Matthew Dicks: 没错,两者兼而有之。所谓”必然”,意味着故事前半段必须铺垫足够的信息,这样当惊喜发生时,观众会发出”对!“的反应。但同时你又要足够巧妙,把这些信息以观众看不出惊喜即将到来的方式埋进去。你在观众的大脑中植入信息,让惊喜以一种既必然又令人惊讶的方式落地。这是你能给别人的最好的惊喜。
Lenny: 说起来容易做起来难。
Matthew Dicks: 是啊,当然有很多技巧可以实现这一点,但需要时间。本质上你做的事情是——你把他们需要知道的信息以各种方式隐藏起来,这样当它落地时,他们会想,“天哪,ABCD。“他们不会把这些点连起来,直到惊喜降临的那一刻,然后他们说,“当然了,ABCD。“所以你把 ABCD 放进故事里,但不是以他们能提前连上点的方式,直到你希望他们连上点的那个时刻。
Lenny: 我觉得这足够再聊一个小时了。
筹码技巧总结
Matthew Dicks: 那就是忍者级别的进阶讲故事技巧了,不过它是非常可教的。我说的所有东西都非常、非常可教,任何人都能做到,只是它确实更难实现一些。
Lenny: 好,那就留给第二期播客吧。总结一下,你分享了五种添加筹码的方法。简要回顾一下:一是水晶球,基本上就是预测如果你不做某件事会发生什么坏事。沙漏,就是某件事即将发生时让时间慢下来。我会想到《低俗小说》(Pulp Fiction)和 Tarantino,他经常这样做——你知道某种暴力即将发生,他们却走到隔壁,说”我们先吃个芝士汉堡”,拖上一阵。还有背包,就是他们完全知道你在试图做什么,整个过程中都挂在你身上。面包屑,就是你一路上给他们一点信息。我想大概就这些,也许还有一个。
Matthew Dicks: 还有开头的大象。
Lenny: 哦,大象,就是那个大家伙,筹码就摆在那里。我希望——
Matthew Dicks: 你必须得有个东西。
不要在故事开头堆砌筹码
Lenny: 我在你的书里还是另一本书里听到过一个建议:添加筹码的方法就是丢一具尸体。每多一具新尸体就是给故事增加的额外筹码。我不知道人们在普通故事里能多频繁地这样做。
Matthew Dicks: 但你可以从中借鉴的是——很多人把所有筹码都堆在故事的前端,因为他们担心观众不会关注自己。所以他们想,我把所有东西一股脑儿抛到前面,这样就能抓住观众一直听下去——这是一个错误。我们真正需要的是筹码在故事中持续不断地累积。所以”丢一具尸体”的真正含义是:丢一个新的筹码,不要一股脑儿全堆上去,不要前置堆砌,给我们一个要好奇的东西,然后判断什么时候需要下一个让人好奇的东西,把这些筹码铺展开来。我们需要大部分筹码在故事的前半段出现。理想情况下,故事的后半段就是一路冲向终点的过山车。所以我们可能在那里面适当时机再丢一个筹码,或者仅仅通过情节自然发生——有时候它们恰好就需要在某个地方。但我经常听到人们把筹码前置堆砌,因为他们担心失去观众的注意力。
实例:Charity Thief
Lenny: 为了让大家在思考这个问题时有一个具体的参考——你有没有一个线上的故事可以推荐给大家,让人看到筹码运作的优秀范例?
Matthew Dicks: 我在书里引用的那个故事叫 Charity Thief,你可以在网上看到。这个故事需要大量的筹码,因为故事的三分之二其实没有发生什么特别的事。三分之二的内容是在解释我是怎么走到一个门廊上的。所以如果不在沿途构建大量筹码,这并不是特别有趣。我没有编造任何东西,我只是把真实发生的事件以一种让你好奇”接下来会发生什么”的方式呈现出来。故事开头有一个大象,虽然它其实并不是故事真正要讲的东西——我说过大象可以沿途变换颜色——但它给了你一个沿途可以好奇的东西。我知道我在那个故事里用了背包、面包屑、沙漏和水晶球。我全用上了,主要因为故事本身不是那么有趣。
有些故事不需要额外筹码
有些故事你不用太操心。我 19 岁的时候在一家麦当劳的休息室里为一个单身女子派对表演脱衣舞。那个故事本身就有筹码,但我根本不需要额外加入任何筹码,因为每个人都已经迫不及待想知道接下来会发生什么了。有时候你拥有的故事,筹码是预先就建好的,因为那个场景本身就足够荒诞。但我们大多数的故事不是这样的。大多数故事要平淡得多,我们必须用一些技巧来提升筹码,把听众带到我们希望他们所处的状态。
Lenny: 那个脱衣舞的故事我也看过了,我会附上链接。我很喜欢那个故事,它还关联到你经常分享的另一条建议——人们要多说 yes,就是”yes 的力量”。我不想现在就展开谈这个,我想后面再回来聊。
Matthew Dicks: 没错。
Lenny: 我们在这里留下面包屑,我很喜欢这个点。好,那我们转到另一个话题——如何帮助商界人士学习这些技能,并将它们转化为工作中的优势。也许为了增加一些筹码,我们可以聊聊:不擅长讲故事的人会遇到什么问题,学会了这项技能并在工作中应用的人又会获得什么好处?会发生什么,有什么好的结果?
商业中的故事力
Matthew Dicks: 如果你在商业中不讲故事——无论你是在寻求投资、对员工讲话、面对客户还是面对任何对象——好消息是,你和所有人一样。坏消息是,你和所有人一样平庸。你所在的那条车道上挤满了人,这意味着你会被人遗忘。我经常说,商业中的大多数沟通都是圆的、白的、没有味道的,而且是有意为之的,因为很多人害怕脱颖而出。当我试图让人们讲故事时,每个人都喜欢”商业中的故事力”这个词,它是一个巨大的流行词。人们喜欢把自己想象成故事讲述者,但当他们来找我时,他们其实并不真的想成为故事讲述者,因为成为故事讲述者意味着你必须从群体中分离出来,而在他们心目中,这会让他们面临被某个捕食者叼走的风险。
但另一种选择是,你留在群体里,这意味着你会被遗忘。你有多少次去参加一个会议,听了某个人演讲,等把车开进自家车道的时候,已经真的想不起来他说的任何内容了?我和我妻子最近参加了一个教育会议。她是老师,我也是老师。有很多演讲者。第一个人上台时带着他小时候的饭盒,把它放在桌上,然后讲了一个故事,说他小时候父母一无所有,但不知怎么的,他们每年都能让他穿上新鞋、背上新背包,每天送他上学时带着午餐。他讲述了这一切对他意味着什么,以及作为一名教育工作者,他今天如何把班上每一个孩子都当作曾经的自己来对待——一个一无所有、只拥有父母全部希望与梦想的孩子。
我永远不会忘记那个故事。那是一个故事,一个包含脆弱、幽默和意义的故事。另一个人也发了言,大概是一位高管之类的。就流畅度、呈现观点、口才和自信而言,他表现得很好。会议结束 15 分钟后,我问我妻子——她是一位老师,也理解讲故事,因为我们一直在一起做这件事。
我说:“你觉得怎么样?“她说:“我永远不会忘记那个带饭盒的人。“我说:“我也不会。“我又问:“你觉得另一个人怎么样?“她说:“他很棒。“我说:“那他说了什么?“才过了 15 分钟,她愣了一下说:“我真的说不出他讲了任何一件事。“这是一个身为老师、投入于故事讲述和沟通的女性。她的印象是:他很流畅,他挺有趣,他说了一些数字,说了一些看似有意义的话。但这一切都被遗忘了,因为如果我们不用故事来表达,结果就是如此。我们的大脑天生就不是用来记住饼图、事实、统计数据、陈词滥调或没有附着在图像上的观点的。所以,如果你不讲故事,你要承担的风险就是被遗忘——百分之百会被遗忘。
Lenny: 人们听到这些可能会想:“天哪,我办公室就有这么一个人,他总是在讲故事。“我们会说:“闭嘴吧。“能不能让它更实际一些——在职场中,不招人烦的讲故事到底是什么样的?不是那种”好了大家,围过来,让我给你们讲讲我们愿景的故事”。有没有一些更简单、不那么招人烦的方式来看待职场中的故事讲述,不是那种公开演讲式的——“嘿大家,我要给你们讲一个……”
用故事改变商业
Matthew Dicks: 让我举几个例子。我明年会出一本关于商业中讲故事的书。那本书里有几位主角,其中一位叫 Boris。他全名是 Boris Levin,是康涅狄格州的一位工厂老板。正是他说服了我,让我相信自己可以开始跟企业合作。我之前觉得自己只是一个在台上讲自己故事的说书人。有一天,Boris 在某个筹款活动上看到了我,说:“听着,我想请你来帮帮我。“我说:“我做不了那个。我只是讲故事,我用的都是我自己的故事。“他说:“不不不,你可以帮到我。“结果他完全说对了。Boris 走对了路。Boris 决定先成为一名故事讲述者,然后再把他的故事转化到商业中去。
举一个很好的例子。Boris 早期有一个故事,他来找我,说:“我儿子在小联盟冠军赛上场打击。满垒,如果我儿子打出安打,球队就能赢得冠军。如果我儿子被三振,球队就会输掉冠军。“三坏两好,这简直是棒球中最极致的时刻——然后他儿子被三振出局了。他看着儿子拖着球棒走回选手席。他崩溃了,他儿子崩溃了,Boris 也崩溃了。所以他努力平复自己的情绪,想找到一个恰当的话对一个刚刚让球队输掉冠军的男孩说。等他绕到球场另一边追上儿子的时候,他看到儿子正和朋友们跑上一座小山,他们已经在笑了。
他们正朝汽车跑去,准备去吃冰淇淋、好好玩一番。Boris 还沉浸在崩溃中,他仍然心碎不已,但他儿子已经走出了失败的阴影。Boris 把这个故事拿过来,精心打磨成一个美丽的故事——他可以在舞台上表演,让听众又笑又哭。故事完成后,他问我:“那我们用它做什么?怎么把它应用到商业中?“最终的结论是这样的:他有一个销售团队。销售人员经常无法拿下他们渴望的大单。Boris 知道,当他的销售人员没能达成目标时,他们经常会消沉好几天。他们会在办公室里游荡,毫无用处,因为他们还没走出刚刚丢掉百万美元合同的事实。
Matthew Dicks: 于是他讲了儿子的那个故事,说:“听着,难过没有错,对失败感到沮丧也没有错,但不能让它像现在这样把我们拖慢。我们要想想我儿子。我儿子拖着球棒走回选手席,坐下来,叹了口气,队友们拍了拍他的背,他调整好了自己,然后继续前进了。这就是我们需要做的。当我们失败时,我们要给自己一点时间调整,想想自己犯了什么错,决定下次要怎么做不同,然后继续前进。“这成为了他公司里一个非常重要的时刻。
这比他站在员工面前说”听着,每次你们拿不下大单,就像行尸走肉一样在办公室里晃来晃去,浪费大家的时间。从今天开始到此为止。从现在起,失败了就给我继续前进”要好得多。这个故事对每个人都变得有意义,因为它展现了 Boris 的一些东西。他是一个父亲,一个关心儿子的父亲。他是我们大多数人生活中那种父亲。他与员工分享自己,并为销售团队创造了一个具体可见的行动愿景。他一直在这样做。他来找我的时候,不是想通过故事来解决问题。他是在积累故事,然后把这些故事运用到商业中去。所以我会打一个比方——创可贴还是砖头。如果你在”造砖”,你就是一个不断捕捉故事、积累素材的故事讲述者,日后可以把这些素材运用到商业中。如果你是一个”创可贴”型的人,这也没问题,确实会有这种情况——“Matt,我有个问题,我需要一个故事来解决它。”
本质上我在做的就是给问题贴一块创可贴,但你并没有成为一个更好的故事讲述者。你只是在把我当顾问用,让我帮你生成一个解决问题的故事。这没问题,但下次你还会需要我。你会一直需要我,因为你并没有真正成为一个故事讲述者。Boris 在造砖。他在建立一个故事库,随时可以运用到商业中去。他知道怎么讲这些故事,也知道怎么把它们与商业联系起来。这是你很容易就能做到的事情。
Slack 对抗 Microsoft Teams 的故事
另一个例子,我书里的另一位主角是一位名叫 Marsha Rakofsky 的女性。她以前是 Slack 的企业传播总监,现在开始独立做一些工作。她在 Slack 的时候,我们合作得很密切,她需要构建一个叙事来对抗 Microsoft Teams。当时微软出来说:“嘿,我们抄了你们的产品,而且免费,每个人已经有了。”
Slack 必须找到办法应对,Marsha 就是负责这件事的人。这就是我们建立联系的原因。她找到我说:“我需要讲一个好故事。请帮我讲一个好故事。“于是她构思了一个精彩的叙事,效果非常好。我们密切合作,最终成果非常出色。她想到那个叙事的过程是这样的:一个周二晚上,她刚和男朋友分手,独自一人,感觉很孤独,正处于疫情期间。她喝了两杯酒,周二晚上独自坐着,突然来了灵感。她在一张餐巾纸上写下了三个词,这三个词后来成为我们共同开发的故事,帮助 Slack 对抗微软。
到了她要呈现那个叙事的时候,我说:“你会把周二晚上、两杯酒那些都放进去,对吧?“她说:“不,我不会。企业界不这么做事。我们不会把自己放进叙事里。“说实话,她确实没放,但效果依然很好。她没问题。但大约一个月后,她要把同一个叙事呈现给一个更小的群体,风险也更低。我说:“这次放进去试试看。“令人钦佩的是,她真的照做了。她加了一段 30 秒的小故事,讲的是周二晚上、两杯酒、疫情期间的孤独。
她后来对我说:“我真不敢相信那 30 秒的小故事对整个叙事产生了多大的差别。因为当我讲到叙事结尾的时候,人们想跟我交流。人们走过来对我说的第一句话就是,‘天哪,我记得疫情期间我也有同样的感受。’”
人们与她产生了连接,因为她不再是一个没有个性的企业巨人、一个 Slack 的传声筒——这正是我们在商业中往往变成的样子——而是一个真实的人,一个在周二晚上获得灵感,然后以有意义的方式将其呈现给听众的人。从那以后,她在讲故事时一直坚持这样做。她总是在叙事中寻找机会把自己融入进去;如果是为客户工作,就想办法把客户也编织进故事里。因为人们不想听代言人陈述信息。人们想听到的是真实的人与你产生连接,然后提供一些也许对你有价值的东西。
Lenny: 这真是一个很有意思的启示。那么你的建议就是,在商业场合讲故事时,尽量找到方法让它变得个人化,让它与讲故事的你本人相关?
Matthew Dicks: 是的。我有一个面向企业人士的工具,叫做”个人兴趣清单”。这是一份清单,列出你应该以巧妙而策略性的方式说出来的关于自己的所有事情,这些我都会教。每一项都有一个”可触达市场”——也就是这些信息可能触及多少人——以及连接的强度。比如,如果你结婚了,你应该始终让人们知道你已婚,尤其是男性。因为如果你是一个已婚男性,你在世界上就更安全,因为男性天生就是危险的人类。我们就是这样的。如果你听说发生了一起枪击案,你绝不会想”嗯,会不会是一个 23 岁的金发女性干的”。你几乎总能猜到是谁干的。所以如果你结婚了,你本质上是在告诉别人:有人同意理论上把一生都交给我。
这就像是一种验证,说明我至少有基本的卫生习惯和一定的品行。大多数人都在一段稳定的关系中,所以可触达市场很大。如果我说我结婚了,你要么也结婚了,要么在一段稳定关系中。所以连接面会很大。可触达市场很大,可能的连接强度大概是中等。就像”还行”那种程度。但有些冷门的就不一样了,比如跑步者。我不是跑步的人,世界上跑步的人也不多。但如果你跑过马拉松,你的可触达市场就很小。跑马拉松的人没那么多。但如果你碰巧遇到了一个跑过马拉松的人,那种连接的强度是巨大的。我发现马拉松跑者几乎一见面就自动成为朋友。只要一句”哦,你跑过马拉松?我也跑过”,他们就已经是最好的朋友了。
所以如果你跑过马拉松,在一个房间里发现另一个人也跑过马拉松,你一定要想办法把这个信息带出来,因为那种连接的可能性极其强烈。所以作为企业界的人,你不应该追求做一个圆滑、白色、没有味道的人。你应该追求色彩丰富、棱角分明、滋味十足。你要成为一个被人们记住的个体,而不是大多数人努力成为的那种——“我只是在这个企业或商业领域中运转,我不想引人注目”——这其实是一种愚蠢的追求。
在日常问答中植入个人信息
Lenny: 我能理解为什么人们不会自然而然地这么做。如果我是一家公司的传播负责人,我最不想做的事情就是把话题引到自己身上。而你的意思是,其实你应该这么做,因为人们会觉得这有趣得多。
Matthew Dicks: 是的,你不想让一切都在谈你自己,但有一些小技巧。最简单的技巧是——如果有人问你:“你今天过得怎么样?“如果你回答”我挺好的”,那你就真的搞砸了。这是你能给出的最蠢的回答。如果你问我”我今天过得怎么样”,我会立刻想到:小学老师可能是我个人兴趣清单里最好的一项。因为如果我是一名小学老师,所有人都喜欢我。他们觉得我在做上帝的工作,尽管他们不想为此付给我一分钱。所以如果你问”你今天过得怎么样?“我会对你说:“还不错。我那帮五年级学生今天总算像个人样了。他们没想杀我。”
这样一来,我在回答你问题的同时,就悄悄植入了我是小学老师这个事实,过程中还展示了一点有趣的内容,也许还带了一点自嘲。但每当有人问我一个问题,我都会努力在回答问题的同时,加入一项关于我个性、我生活的内容——一些可能引起别人兴趣的东西。你不想走进一个场合就说:“你好,我是一个已婚的小学老师,有两个孩子和两只猫。“但这恰恰是我想做的,因为我知道这会让人们感到与我有连接。所以我必须找到策略性的方式把它自然地编织进去。我教人们一直这样做。但起点是:了解你身上的什么东西可能对别人有意义,以及如何在不让人觉得你只在谈论自己的情况下把它带出来。
让人持续听你说话的四种方式
Lenny: 还有什么?我们现在讨论的其实是如何在商业场景中成为更好的沟通者和故事讲述者。你已经分享了几个小技巧。一个是,想清楚关于你自己的那份个人兴趣清单,让自己变得容易引起共鸣。尝试在你讲述的故事中、演示中、类似场景中分享它。还有什么可以让人成为更好的商业故事讲述者?我知道这是一个很大的问题,但我们看看能聊到哪里。
Matthew Dicks: 让我们回到那个观点:在商业场景中,你必须接受一个事实——没人想听你要说的任何东西。这一点大多数人都不接受,即使我说了之后他们也不接受。所以一旦你理解了这一点,一旦你真正相信了它,基本上有四种方式可以在任何故事中让人持续听你说话,尤其是在商业场景中,因为在商业场景中真的没人想听你说话。
第一种是筹码,这个我们其实已经讨论过了。你必须要有筹码。每一个好的产品故事,每一个好的 PPT……所有东西里都要有筹码,而且设置的方式跟我描述的一模一样。我跟你讲过的那个 Charity Thief 故事中用到的全部五种筹码,同样可以用在每一个商业故事、每一份 PPT、每一次创业路演、所有场景中。所以筹码是其中之一。
另一个我们讨论过的是——惊喜。在你做的每一次演讲中,我都应该被惊喜到。Steve Jobs 是这方面的大师。我们可以拿出他的一场演讲,我可以向你展示他是如何完美地设计它的。其他还包括悬念。也就是让观众处于悬念之中,而悬念往往会引向惊喜。所以掌握制造悬念的能力很重要。然后是幽默——敢于搞笑,这在企业界几乎没人能做到。每个人都想变得幽默。我合作过的每一个人,每一位商业人士,在某种程度上都想变得幽默。但他们真正想要的其实不是变得幽默,而是”已经幽默过了”。因为变幽默意味着你必须承担风险。你必须说出一句你自己觉得好笑的话,并期望观众也觉得好笑,如果没做到,那会很受伤。
所以人们经常告诉我他们想变得幽默,但当我告诉他们怎么才能变幽默时,他们说:“那个我不能说。“然后我就说:“嗯,恰恰就是那部分才好笑。“我曾经跟一个人合作,算是你每天都在打交道的那家公司的某位高管。他要在 Javits Center 做一场演讲,他打算表现得很幽默。我们设计好了演讲,加入了很多笑话。他准备就绪。他去了 Javits Center,四个小时后他给我打电话,我问:“怎么样?“他说:“我把所有笑话都删了。“我问:“为什么要把笑话都删了?“他说:“前两个演讲者一点也不幽默。我觉得如果我上台并且很幽默的话,我会显得格格不入。”
我说:“不,你将成为一只从灰烬中升起的凤凰,是所有人一整天都在等待听到的那种人。“世界上最棒的事情莫过于在两个糟糕的演讲者之后登场,然后上去抖几个包袱。但他又觉得,我必须留在羊群的框架内,而不是做点不一样的事。但幽默是一种出色的、美妙的、简单的方式来让自己从人群中脱颖而出,但你必须愿意去尝试。这对很多人来说是件可怕的事。但我说了——筹码、惊喜、悬念、幽默。这就是你能抓住人们、让他们持续听你说话的方式。如果你在讲话时没有在做这四件事中的任何一件,人们就已经不在听你说话了。
用怀旧制造幽默
Lenny: 顺着幽默这个话题——我本来就想问——你怎么告诉人们才能变得更幽默?有哪些技巧?
Matthew Dicks: 嗯,我目前有 26 种变幽默的策略。有些比其他的更适合商业场景。我给你两个在商业场景中随时都能用的。第一个你能用的是怀旧,因为怀旧永远是好笑的。我的第一台录像机重 22 磅,遥控器通过一根粗到能把走过客厅的兄弟绊倒的线连着——这本身就很好笑。我成长的时代,没有人对任何东西过敏,我们都吃面包——塞满麸质、在石棉工厂里烘焙出来的——骑自行车从来没人戴过头盔。所有这些都可以变得好笑。而在商业场景中这特别容易,因为你经常在推出新产品或新服务,或者在更新产品或服务,这天然就让你可以怀旧地谈论过去。
怀旧叙事的案例
Matthew Dicks: 我曾和一家公司合作,他们没有采纳我的建议,这是个错误。他们类似于 Indeed 那样的公司,帮企业招人的。我想把他们的叙事开头设定在 1983 年——当时最主要的就业信息来源,是一个 16 岁的孩子骑着 Schwinn 自行车,把报纸扔到各家门口。而那份报纸,基本上就是纸版的互联网,你翻到最后一页,上面是招聘广告。这就是 1983 年你找工作所能依赖的全部。一切都受地理限制,意味着你只能在周边三四个镇子里找。信息必须登在报纸上,你还必须拥有一部连着墙的电话,才能在工作时间内打电话给公司,期盼能争取到一个面试机会。
1983 年,所有的权力都在雇主手里,以及一个每天往你家门廊丢报纸的 16 岁孩子手里。这本身就很好笑。我甚至没刻意去搞笑,只是陈述事实。我们本可以再打磨一下,让它真的非常好笑。然后我们再来一个反转——故事中的对立。开头是雇主拥有全部权力,今天则反过来,员工拥有全部权力。因为今天你可以住在 Orlando,同时在 Singapore 或 Chattanooga 工作。你不再需要等一个 16 岁的孩子送来载有你所有就业机会的报纸。地球上每一个工作机会现在都能在互联网上被你找到。你基本上可以在任何地方为任何地方工作。所以我们需要像 Indeed 或我合作的这家公司这样的企业,因为它们实际上要为雇主夺回一些权力。
这就是我们打算讲的叙事,开头会很好笑。结果这家公司的 CEO 说,“我不喜欢。“他说,“没人在乎 1980 年代。“这大概是他说出的最蠢的话了,因为当时《怪奇物语》是电视上最火的剧——整个背景就设在 1980 年代。如果他稍微环顾四周,就会看到 1980 年代的时尚正在回潮,1980 年代的音乐重新流行,我们一直在翻新 1980 年代的音乐。Taylor Swift 出了一张专辑就叫《1989》。且不论 1980 年代本身是否相关,作为一家公司谈论过去本身是相关的——它展示你在自己领域的专业度,表明我们了解过去 50 年市场的来龙去脉,我们拥有专业积累,可以通过讲故事来证明这一点。这就是怀旧的力量,我们在商业中随时可以用它来让人发笑。
“其中一个不一样”
另一个我要给你的技巧——其实有一整套,但先说一个简单的——就是《芝麻街》里常玩的一个游戏:哪个不一样。基本上就是三样东西,两个是意料之中的,一个是出乎意料的,那个出乎意料的就是笑点。比如你可以说,我的竞争对手,他们有这个。我那条街上的硬件竞争对手,他确实跟我一样卖铲子,没错。他也确实跟我一样提供各种型号的钉子,没错。但是他的店门口有一台无名无姓、没有人脸的机器,你得自己把东西刷过去、刷信用卡——店里根本没有一个活人。我们通过展示第三个与前两个的不同来制造笑料。所以本质上这是一个简单的游戏,一旦我告诉你,你会发现每个喜剧演员都在用。他们就是说出意料之中的事、意料之中的事、出乎意料的事,然后把它变得好笑。这是我们在商业中经常使用的一个简单技巧。
Lenny: 太棒了。你说的这个列表,会写进你在写的新书里吗?
Matthew Dicks: 不是全部 26 种都放进去,因为有些并不是最适合商业场景的,但会收录很大一部分。我想可能收录了在商业中最有效的 12 种幽默策略。不过你也可以直接上幽默课,我一直都在教幽默,26 种策略都会教。这是可以练习的东西。最妙的是,我在商业场景中提供的很多策略,即使最终没有制造出笑料,你仍然在讲一个故事。它不是那种”噔噔噔锵”的段子式笑话,我们不讲那种笑话。我们是在故事的框架内制造幽默,所以即使这个笑点没响,你仍然在讲一个故事。很多时候人们甚至没意识到你在试图搞笑。
故事在科研与销售中的应用
Lenny: 我想回到故事如何在工作中帮到你的话题。显然,做公开演讲是最经典的应用方式,也许还包括在会议上做 PowerPoint 演示。还有没有其他可能不那么明显的场景,你认为这项技能能帮到你——不只是那种”大家好,欢迎来到我的……”
Matthew Dicks: 嗯,我和很多科学家合作过,在生物技术公司之类的机构。我曾和一家生物技术公司合作,他们的五位科学家要去参加一个会议。简单来说,这家公司卖的是试管。他们所有的竞争对手都只卖一种试管用于实验,你得自己去改装来满足你的需求。而我和他们合作的这家公司,卖 12 种不同规格的试管,尺寸更贴合你的需求,不需要改装,价格也贵得多,但使用他们尺寸合适的试管能提高实验的可靠性。我给所有科学家做了准备,他们都做得不错,各自讲了某种形式的故事,然后去开会了。
但有一个人完全没有展示任何数据,他只讲了一个故事。他讲的是去杂货店买东西的故事——他去杂货店的时候,他家人对苹果的要求特别烦人,因为每个人喜欢不同的苹果。所以他得去买三个 Honeycrisp 给他妻子,两个 Gala 给他女儿。这周他们要烤派,所以还得买些 McIntosh,而他自己喜欢的是 Red Delicious。他说:“买这些苹果简直是噩梦。“他讲完这个买苹果的噩梦故事之后说:“这就是我们公司做的事。“有些公司会说:“我们提供 McIntosh,凑合用吧。你要烤派也好,要吃也好,苹果你想做的所有事,你只能拿到 McIntosh。祝你好运。而我们相信你应该能拿到所有的苹果。我们相信你有特定的需求和具体的要求,我们会确保你得到满足。就像我的家人能得到他们想要的所有苹果一样。”
他说的就是这些。当然实际是一个更长的版本,但核心就是这个。没有数据。他在会议上获得的潜在客户线索比其他四位科学家加起来还多。后来我和他们的市场副总裁见面时,她对此非常不满意。因为她自己是科学家,50 岁了,她一辈子都在派科学家去会议上展示数据。她对我说:“那我以后怎么办?派科学家去开会不展示数据?“我说:“嗯,也许可以,因为效果很好。“她说:“那数据呢?“我说:“现在他已经拿到了潜在客户,你觉得他们不会要数据吗?“他会打通电话,对方会说,跟我们讲讲数据吧。但他们已经建立起了连接。
Matthew Dicks: 这个故事最好的地方,她甚至都没有理解到的一点是:那个会议上的人,从此以后每次走进杂货店看到苹果,都会想起那家公司,而且会产生一种正面的感觉。如果他们忘了打电话但本来想打,当他们在杂货店里挑 Honeycrisp 的时候,就会提醒自己——哦对,我得给那家公司打电话,了解一下他们卖的试管。我们通过讲故事,在公司与世界上具体物品之间建立了正面的联系,这意味着我们把广告植入了人们的生活,而他们甚至没有意识到我们做到了这一点。所以把讲故事融入商业有无数种方式,这只是其中一种。
两种讲故事策略
Lenny: 你提到了两种路径。一种是:我遇到了一个问题,让我想一个故事来帮我解决它;另一种是:我要成为一个讲故事的人,积累一整堵故事墙,然后在需要的时候调用它们。你说你不推荐第一种。我猜大多数人可能属于第一种——我不想成为讲故事的人,我只是想解决我的问题,而故事有时候能帮上忙。那么对于这种人,你有什么建议吗?怎样才能在遇到问题时即兴找到一个相关的故事?还是说这根本行不通——你不可能每次遇到问题时都能想出一个故事来?
Matthew Dicks: 我觉得有时候是可以的。我有一家公司叫我”比喻侠”(metaphor man),他们基本上就是打电话给我说——
Lenny: 我能理解。
Matthew Dicks: ”……我们在我们无聊的平台上加了一个无聊的功能,需要让客户理解它的作用。你能帮我们想个比喻吗?“他们不明白,我其实不是在凭空生成比喻。我只是在从自己生活中的故事里提取,把自己从故事中抽离出来。当你把自己从故事中抽离出来之后,剩下的往往就是一个比喻、一个类比或者一个例子。然后我把这个提供给他们。我告诉他们,只要用一些我教的生成故事的技巧,他们自己也能做到同样的事。但他们是一家”创可贴”公司,只想让我帮他们临时修补一下。这我也能理解。
邻近讲述法
如果你要尝试自己动手,讲一个故事来帮助别人理解某件事,最好的方法是我所说的邻近讲述(speaking with adjacency),意思是我们不需要把内容一一对应,而是去匹配主题、意义或信息。
比如那位科学家,他讲的不是试管,他讲的是”人们值得得到他们想要的东西”。他的家人值得得到他们想要的苹果,而你作为一家企业也值得得到你想要的试管。但在商业中,人们往往想的是内容对内容——我得想办法谈论这些试管,让人们理解它们有多重要。而我说,我们别谈试管了,我们谈点别的,然后把我们谈的内容挪过来,扣到试管上。当人们意识到——你刚才在讲苹果,但其实你在讲试管——那个”扣合”的瞬间是非常有力的。我跟学生一直用这个方法。
一个学生犯傻了,惹了麻烦,坐在我办公桌前。我不谈他的行为。我给他讲一个故事,他完全不知道我为什么要讲这个故事。他会想:“我惹麻烦了,他为什么在跟我讲他的狗?他为什么在跟我讲他 12 岁时关于狗的故事?“因为我要把它扣上去。因为我不是在匹配内容,而是在匹配主题、意义或信息。所以他们来找我,说”我们有这么一个东西”的时候,我不会去想那个东西本身。我想的是:他们想传达的主题是什么?想传达的意义或信息是什么?而我有什么故事能与之匹配,或者我能从他们身上挖掘出什么故事?
那位科学家来找我的时候并没有带着苹果的故事。他带着的是试管,我说:“听起来你们是一家想给人们提供他们所需之物的公司。那我们来找一个你生活中关于满足他人需求的时刻吧。“然后我们一起头脑风暴。当我们想到苹果的时候,我就知道成了。因为他能够以此展现——我是一个父亲,我是一个丈夫,我是那个去杂货店之前要记下家人苹果订单的丈夫。他还能讲得很有趣,因为手忙脚乱的丈夫在杂货店里总是很搞笑的。所以并不是他带着一个故事来找我,而是我主动找他——我们来看主题、意义和信息,然后把它扣到试管上。这就是我们在做”创可贴”修补时要做的:不要想着你在说什么,而要想着你希望别人对你说的东西产生什么感觉。
Lenny: 太棒了。所以这里的建议本质上就是——当你想找一个故事来说服别人时,你要想的是:这个问题的主题是什么?背后的意义是什么?要传达的信息是什么?
Matthew Dicks: 对,通常是其中之一。
Lenny: 然后你还提到了让故事中包含一些跟你个人相关的元素,这样人们就会觉得——哦,我也跑步,我得注意听这家伙说的。或者——我也经常去超市买苹果。
Matthew Dicks: 没错。你看,这就是策略叠加,这是非常好的做法。我们把之前谈过的所有技巧叠加在一起,就能为听众创造一个非常有力、非常难忘的时刻。因为最关键的是我们要变得令人难忘。在一个满是科学家的会议上,我们是那个被记住的人。
Homework for Life
Lenny: 刚才说的是”创可贴”式的做法。然后还有你推荐的路径——就是积累一个故事库。我想这应该就是你推荐的 Homework for Life 框架的来源吧。我们来聊聊这个吧,因为我觉得它带来的好处远不止想出一堆故事点子那么简单。
Matthew Dicks: 对。这是我教的所有东西中最重要的。不管你这辈子是否打算在人前讲话,哪怕你打算当个隐士,跑到树林里去再也不跟任何人说话,你也应该做 Homework for Life。这是我大概 15 年前想出来的一个方法。当初我开始在台上讲故事的时候,我立刻就爱上了这件事,然后就开始担心自己会把故事讲完。我看到很多在台上表演的讲故事者,他们每次都讲同样的六七个故事,我不想变成那样的人。我希望每次上台都讲一个全新的故事。
于是在一阵恐慌中,我决定给自己布置作业——我本来就是小学老师嘛,这种倾向对我来说很自然。我就决定了,每天睡觉之前回顾这一天,找出一个值得当作故事来讲的时刻。即使它真的不太值得讲,我也要把它记下来。不过我不会把整个故事写下来,那太疯狂了,不现实。我的做法是建一个 Excel 表格,两列:一列是日期,然后把 B 列拉宽,差不多整个电脑屏幕那么宽,我就在那里面写我的故事。
Matthew Dicks: 我的目标是每个月找到一个新时刻,一年 12 个新故事。那已经很棒了。但实际上,发生了远比这更令人惊叹的事。我发现我的生活里充满了比我一辈子能讲完的还要多的故事。而且我不是什么独角兽。全世界有成千上万的人正在做同样的事情,并且发现自己的生活中充满了故事。像 Eileen 那样的时刻——二十年前,我几天之内就会把它忘掉,而现在我把它留住了,因为它会成为 Homework for Life 的一个时刻。
于是我开始把这些时刻写下来,然后我发现自己逐渐培养出了一种讲故事的视角。我看到了以前看不到的时刻。事实上,我刚刚为我的新书做了一些分析。在做 Homework for Life 的第一年,我每天能找到 1.8 个时刻。所以你可以找到不止一个。后来我也确实开始每天记录不止一个。一天 1.8 个时刻。而现在我每天能找到 7.6 个时刻。不是因为我的生活变得更有趣了,而是因为我有了更好的视角,我知道该去寻找什么,该去看什么,什么值得记住。所以我变成了一个像 Boris 一样拥有无穷无尽故事的人。
Boris 也在做 Homework for Life。这就是为什么每次我们见面,他都有三个新故事要讲给我听。然后我们一起打磨这些故事,再找出它们的商业应用场景。所以这件事极其重要,因为我们平时做的就是把生活随手扔掉。人们说时间飞逝,但其实并不是。真正发生的是时间在未被记录中流逝。如果你一年 365 天中只能记住 89 天,当然觉得时间飞逝。因为你有 365 天,却只记得 89 天。当然会觉得过得很快。时间并不是过得快,你只是没有把每一天都记录下来。而每一天都有值得记住的东西。Homework for Life 就是承认每一天都应该有值得记录的内容。
自问的提示语
我给自己用的提示是这样的。我会想:如果有人绑架了我的家人,然后说”除非你站到台上去讲一个关于今天发生的事情的故事,否则别想把人要回去”,你会讲什么?这就是我每天晚上在脑子里想的问题,然后把它写下来。说实话,现在我已经不是等到一天结束才坐下来把它们全写下来了。我会在一天当中随时记录。笔记本电脑就在身边,手机也在身边。当我听到什么的时候——我儿子说了一句我不敢相信他说出口的话;我第一次或最后一次看到某样东西;或者一个偶然的念头闪过脑海——我产生了一个以前从未有过的新想法,所有这些都成为 Homework for Life 的时刻。
不是每个都会变成故事。我也对此做过一些分析。我写下来的东西大约有 10% 最终要么变成了一个完整的故事,要么成为故事的一部分,但另外那 90% 同样有价值。因为我正在留住我的日子。另一件令人惊叹的事是,一旦你开始这样做,你会被打开。所有那些你过去遗漏的故事,那些你已经遗忘的,都会开始浮现出来。它们会冒出来。我也会把这些作为记忆纳入我的 Homework for Life。因为一旦你开始透过讲故事的视角去观察,你看到像 Eileen 找到自信这样的场景时,你的大脑会自动联想到其他学生,或者你生活中的其他时刻,或者你孩子生活中的时刻——凡是和自信有关的,你就会想,哦,对,就像那个孩子一样。于是我又从过去找回了一个时刻。一天又回到了我身边。它进入了我的 Homework for Life,突然之间我拥有的故事多到永远也讲不完。而且不只是我。就像我说的,全世界成千上万的人,包括我自己的孩子和我的学生,都在做 Homework for Life。他们所有人都会告诉你,这是你能做的最有价值的事情。
Lenny: 而且我想你之前也提到了,这不仅仅是为了收集一堆故事。这里面还有一个治疗性的层面,你也谈到过。
Matthew Dicks: 是的,绝对有。有很多治疗性的层面。首先是你在找回你的时间,让时间慢下来,这很美好。我的孩子现在 14 岁和 11 岁。谢天谢地,我差不多在 Clara 刚出生的时候就开始做 Homework for Life 了。因为他们在我的感受中就是 14 岁和 11 岁。他们不会给我一种仿佛昨天才刚出生的感觉,而对很多家长来说确实如此。很多家长会说”天哪,你不会相信我孩子刚才说了什么,我得把它记下来”。但没有人真的记下来。“你不会相信我孩子说了什么”——这就是我 Homework for Life 里的内容。所以我留住了那些时刻,把时间拉长了。
看到生活中的模式
你还会开始做一些事情,比如开始看到生活中那些你意识不到的模式——除非你真的去好好想想自己的生活。而我认为你应该这么做。讲故事的人往往有一点自我中心,但这是积极意义上的——意思是说,我们会给自己留出时间来思考自己。如果你开始这样做,你就会开始看到模式。
所以我在书里谈到的是——我总告诉别人,我妻子和我从来不吵架。我们从来没有对彼此提高过嗓门。我们真的从来不争吵。但我在 Homework for Life 里注意到了一个时刻:她让我去装空调——那时候我家里还没装中央空调——而我讨厌做这件事。我讨厌它因为我们约定过永远不买没有中央空调的房子。而且那些空调机每年不知道怎么回事都会变得更重。我不懂背后的物理学原理,但就是一年比一年费劲。而她总是在 98 度的那天才问:“嘿,能把空调装上吗?“有一天我就说了:“不,我不装。太热了。“她就说:“好吧,没关系。“然后十分钟后,我就跑到地下室把它们搬出来,一边抱怨、一边嘟囔、一边吵——只不过是在跟自己吵,还故意把空调机撞得砰砰响好让她听见。她问:“怎么了?“我说:“我在装空调。“于是这成了 Homework for Life 的一个时刻。
然后一个月后,她又让我去割草,又是一个 98 度的大热天。我说:“我不去割草。我很忙,而且太热了。“她说:“好吧,没关系。明天再说吧。“然后我坐了一会儿,越想越憋屈。接着我就去割草了,但用的是那种暴力的方式——在院子里跑着,愤怒地割草。当我看到这些模式时,我突然意识到:“哦,我确实在跟妻子吵架,只不过是一个人在吵。“我用一种她都没意识到的方式在跟她吵架。我通过做家务来冲她吼叫,而她甚至不知道这正在发生。这成了一个情侣们特别喜欢的故事。他们觉得太搞笑了。
看到意想不到的故事
你还会开始看到你本来绝不会注意到的故事。比如去年五月的一天,左边邻居和右边邻居都来了我们家,大家一起搞了个烧烤,那是那年第一次。那天我在这一天里没找到什么特别的东西,只找到了一个时刻,这对我来说很不寻常。我记得当时在想:“真的吗,你一整天就只找到了和邻居一起烧烤这一个时刻?这就是你能找到的最好的?“这甚至都算不上一个故事。但这是我能找到的最好的了,所以我把它记了下来,然后继续生活。大约四个月后,我们左边的邻居宣布他们要离婚了。这让我们非常震惊。因为他们有两个孩子。我们三家共用一个大后院,右边三个男孩,左边两个孩子,都是朋友。简直不敢相信他们要离婚。他们从高中就认识了。我们完全没想到。
一天之后,右边的邻居也宣布他们要离婚了。左右两家的消息前后只差了一天。这个故事就变成了:除非你身处那个家庭之中,否则你永远不可能真正了解一段婚姻里到底发生了什么。但如果我没有在五月份那个时刻——三对夫妻坐在门廊上,其中一对是幸福的——把它记录下来,我就不会有这个时刻。我当时以为三对都幸福。如果不是我在做 Homework for Life,如果不是我把它写下来,我现在就不会看到一条故事的发展轨迹。我恰好拥有了它的反面。我现在有了一个截然相反的时刻——我在给那些我以为很幸福的人热狗,但他们只是在为了我们而假装幸福。然后他们回到各自的家中,回到不和之中,最终回到婚姻的破灭。所以 Homework for Life 赋予了你所有那些你在日常生活中通常得不到的东西,因为我们倾向于过一天算一天,把昨天抛在身后。
Lenny: 听你讲这个故事我浑身起鸡皮疙瘩。对于那些现在被激发起来想试试的人,我知道有一个模板,我们会在节目简介里放链接,你给人们的那个模板,非常简单,但我觉得看到它会有帮助。不过,有什么是人们今晚就能做的事情来开始这个过程,也许还能养成一个习惯?你具体是怎么操作的?
Matthew Dicks: 首先得开始做 Homework for Life。我有一个关于它的 TED 演讲,讲了 17 分钟。我建议去看看,因为你会比我刚才说的了解到更多,我觉得这很重要。而且你得决定每天都要做,即使在你所能找到的最好东西不过是一次烧烤的那天。如果那就是你今天的全部,那就是你的全部,把它写下来。你还得有点信心,相信它会随着时间积累而生效。记住,我从 1.8 开始,现在涨到了 7.6。而这是用了超过 12 年才完成这个跳跃的。
所以一开始,你不会做得很好。你不会看到该看到的东西,事情就是这样。如果我回看我最早的 Homework for Life,我看到的是自己在”找故事”。但其实你并不是在找故事。你只是在找那些触动你的心、触动你的头脑的瞬间。你真正期望的仅此而已。而其中有一些会变成故事。所以你得立刻开始做 Homework for Life。然后,如果你能找到一些愿意倾听的人,开始给他们讲故事,那会非常有帮助,因为大多数人不情愿倾听。这个世界上好的倾听者并不多。每个人都说自己很会听,但积极倾听是一项大多数人根本不具备的技能。但如果你找到了愿意倾听的人,你就得开始讲故事。你得开始以有意义的方式练习。你最初的故事不会很精彩。但好消息是,大多数人的故事都很糟糕。世界上大多数的讲故事都不怎么样。所以只要你对你即将要说的话稍微花点心思,你就会比他们好。因为讲故事不在于语言功底或词汇量。它全在于决策。仅此而已。
讲故事的内核是决策与练习
讲故事的人是那些说话之前会思考的人。他们在开口之前做出战略性的、战术性的决策。最终,他们做出了足够多的好决策来打动人们。归根结底,无论你在做什么——不管我是在教一个五年级学生怎么更好地表现,还是在为一家大公司做新产品发布,又或者帮人准备一场全员大会——你必须做到的第一件、也是最重要的事情就是引人入胜。你必须让人觉得有意思,否则人们不会听你说话。所以你得练习,得多练。
Lenny: 我想谈谈公众演讲的技巧,但先把刚才这个话题收个尾。如果有人想尝试做这个 Homework for Life 练习,你会建议他们在晚上睡觉前打开手机上的 Google Sheets 记点什么吗?还是有其他建议?
Matthew Dicks: 对。我会这么做。不过理想情况下,随着你度过一天……
不,对,我会那么做。不过理想情况下,随着你度过一天,东西很快就会被遗忘。你儿子说了一句特别搞笑的话,到了晚上你就记不清是什么了。所以如果你能在白天就开始稍微跟踪一下,也许养成一个习惯——午餐时间问自己上午发生了什么?下班回家后问自己下午发生了什么?到了晚上再问自己之后又发生了什么?然后大概回顾一下整天,敞开那些记忆,让它们回来。我在 Homework for Life 里把它们记录为记忆,就是把 memory 的 M-E-M-O-R-Y 大写。因为当你积累的 Homework for Life 记忆越来越多的时候,你会开始混淆。
你会说:“什么?我什么时候看到过一只鹿?“然后我想起来,“哦,那是我 14 岁时的一个故事。“但你会搞混,因为它跟你 38 岁时的记忆排在了一起。所以你把它们标记为记忆,把它们留住,放进电子表格里,因为最终你会想要移动那些数据,用某种有意义的方式来管理它们。但没错,今天就动手开始,因为如果你不开始,你就会失去今天。你不做 Homework for Life 的每一天,都是将永远失去的一天。
Lenny: 非常实际地问一下,你推荐用 Google Sheets 吧,我猜你用的就是这个?
Matthew Dicks: 我实际上用的是老式的 Excel,但是的,Google Sheets 也可以,因为我开始做这件事太早了,那时候 Excel 就是我用的工具,而 Excel 也是我一直沿用的工具。我的意思是,它在 19 个地方都有备份,因为除了我的妻子、孩子和猫之外,这是我拥有的最珍贵的东西。但没错,那就是我建议使用的工具。
Lenny: 太好了。好的,在进入非常令人期待的快问快答环节之前,还有几个问题。你在书里说你上台讲故事只有两次感到紧张。大多数人——我不知道——这是不是——
Matthew Dicks: 对,这是真的。我就是——
Lenny: 好的。
Matthew Dicks: 我记得那两次。是的,一次跟创伤后应激障碍有关,另一次跟 Seth Meyers 的票价有关。
Lenny: 哦,我记得那个故事。
Matthew Dicks: 对。
如何克服上台紧张
Lenny: 好的。大多数人不像你。大多数人每次上台讲故事都会紧张,包括我。你对那些想克服上台讲故事时的紧张感的人有什么建议?众所周知,这是人们一生中最害怕的事情。
Matthew Dicks: 首先,你得明白你 98% 的紧张感其实出现在你开始说话之前。一旦你开始说话,几乎所有的紧张感都会消散,这是大多数人的体验。所以你真正承受的是开口前的紧张。当你了解到这一点,多少会松一口气,因为如果你做得足够多的话——有个人刚在荷兰做过一次演讲,我今天正在等消息看进展如何。他还在佛罗里达州立法机构做了同样主题的演讲,他在上台之前非常紧张。他在荷兰面对一群科学家演讲时也非常紧张。但我跟他说:“你在荷兰开始演讲之后,演讲开始以后,你有多紧张?“他说:“哦,实际上,当我开始说话以后,我还挺正常的。演讲之前我确实紧张得要命。“我说:“这就对了。”
Matthew Dicks: 所以如果你能认清这个事实——或者说相信这个事实——哦,我的大部分紧张感都出现在演讲之前,但一旦我开始说话,我就挺好的了。这对很多人来说会大大松一口气,因为我们总以为自己在说话的过程中一直在紧张,但事实往往并非如此,尤其是如果你做了一些准备,知道自己要讲什么的话。所以要意识到,你的大部分紧张感都发生在开口之前,这是很正常的,你只需要接受这一点,直到有一天——也许通过反复练习、通过持续登台——它开始消退。有些人永远都会紧张。我曾经和一个——我不说她的名字——但一个你在电视上见过的人一起表演,我们都在后台,我在跟房间里的人聊天,她终于对我说,这位非常出名的人:“你能别说话了吗?因为我们其他人正努力把信息记在脑子里,保持冷静。“我在后台是个很讨厌的人,因为我总是很平静,从来不在乎。
所以我得主动跟这些人隔开,因为我折磨他们。但一旦她开始演讲,她所有的紧张感就消失了。所以这是一个值得了解的好事。另一件值得了解的非常好的事情是,每个人都会紧张,除了我。我是世界上唯一的怪物。所以如果你感到紧张,你和所有人都一样,包括你经常在电视上看到的那位名人。那个人紧张,你紧张,你们在同一阵营,对吧,你们在同一条船上。然后,准备会降低你的紧张程度。我告诉人们最有帮助的做法之一是,练习你的演讲或练习你的推介——不管你在做什么——这当然很好,但最好的准备方式之一是把它录下来,然后听。
被动地听,在超市购物的时候听,在叠衣服、洗碗的时候听。我的真实感受是,当你开始一遍又一遍地听的时候,它就会慢慢渗入你的灵魂,成为你的一部分。我用过这个技巧。十年前我讲过一个故事,之后再也没讲过。有人在 YouTube 上听到了,说:“你能在我们的活动上讲那个故事吗?“我说”好的”。我可以再听一遍,它就能直接讲出来,因为我让它沉入了我的记忆中,就像《当哈利遇到莎莉》沉入了你妻子的记忆一样。她大概可以在脑海中完美地回放那部电影。如果你把自己的演讲听得足够多,你就能达到轻松复述的程度。
另一件事是,你可以做一些主动聆听。大多数人不会忘记自己的演讲内容。他们忘记的是演讲中的过渡。我正在讲这个,但接下来我需要过渡到那个,然后又需要过渡到另一个。所以当我在听自己的故事或准备做的演讲时,我会跟自己玩一个游戏。
我在听的时候会说,哦,好的,这部分快结束了,接下来我需要讲的是这个,然后再接下来是这个。如果我不知道接下来是什么——如果我突然想,哎呀,接下来该讲什么了?——那就是我意识到,哦,我需要在那里创建一个记忆锚点。我需要在那里做一些记忆训练来帮自己记住那个过渡。一旦你进入了演讲的新段落,即使你稍微磕绊了一下,也没关系,因为你会想,哦,我要讲关于这个或那个的数据。即使说得不够完美,你还是知道自己要讲什么。
但当你讲完了关于这个或那个的数据,你就会想,糟糕,接下来该讲什么了?对吧。所以我们要着力构建那些过渡。在演讲或讲故事之前,我会做这样的事——我先在车里,然后下车走进商店,然后走到停车场,然后到了公园,然后三周后。我不用给自己讲这个故事。我只是在场景之间跳跃,因为一旦我知道了场景,知道——好的,一共七个场景,分别是这些,过渡在这里——同样地,如果每个场景我稍微磕绊一下,那也无所谓,因为信息总会出来的。可能不会像我希望的那样完美地呈现。另外,如果你能避免死记硬背,那会省去你大量的痛苦,因为死记硬背的人是世界上最受折磨的灵魂。所以尽可能避免死记硬背。记住你的演讲内容,但不要背诵你的演讲。
不同类型的学习者
Lenny: 这让我想起,我一个朋友做过一次 TED 演讲,他分享说他们会给你这样的建议——人们是不同类型的学习者。有些是听觉型学习者,有些是视觉型。如果你是听觉型学习者,听录音最有帮助。有些人则是看稿子。
Matthew Dicks: 对。
Lenny: 看着它——
Matthew Dicks: 我就是一个非常典型的听觉型学习者。不过关于听录音的另一件事是,你练习到后来真的会烦。练习变得非常令人沮丧。到了某个时候你根本不想再说了。所以与其说,你开始听。你听自己给自己讲故事,这大概是世界上最自恋的事情了。但即使你是一个视觉型学习者,因为练习最终实在太烦人了,我觉得听录音还是可以非常有帮助的。
说是的力量
Lenny: 好。最后一个问题——我想谈谈,我之前提到过的——说是的力量,你建议人们对事情说”是”而不是”不”。这让我想起 David Sedaris 在一个——我也不知道——一个什么 Masterclass 视频里,也说了同样的话。他就说:“我对一切都说是,因为这样能产生好故事。”
Matthew Dicks: 真的吗?
Lenny: 对,在他的 Masterclass 演讲里——
Matthew Dicks: 我刚读完 Sedaris 的《Happy-Go-Lucky》,一本很棒的书。我很喜欢他。
Lenny: 对对。所以我很想听听你对这个的建议,给大家一个最后的收获。
Matthew Dicks: 好。我打算稍微跟 Sedaris 持不同意见。不,我不会完全反对他——我同意,说”是”确实会让你得到一些好故事,但这并不是说”是”的目的。世界上确实有一本讲讲故事的书——我不会提它的名字——它讲如何找到好故事,说去做疯狂的事,你就会有好故事。我不同意。首先,这是一种愚蠢的生活方式。而且,我讲的一些最好的故事——我认为我讲得最好的那些——都是关于我们生活中那些微小的瞬间,没有什么非凡的事情发生,但我们脑海中一切都在翻涌,对吧?我讲的大多数故事,如果你当时亲眼目睹了那个转变或顿悟的瞬间,你根本不会知道正在发生什么,因为大多数发生在我们身上的事情都发生在我们的头脑中。
不是在我们挂在悬崖上、拼命求生的时候突然有了顿悟。通常是我们穿过一个停车场的时候,突然有什么东西击中了我们——那种东西已经积累了三周,但此刻在穿过停车场时击中了我们。所以我们凡事都说”是”的原因是——如果你不说”是”,你本质上是在说,我如此自以为是,以至于我相信自己已经了解那扇门的另一边是什么,即使我从未踏足过那扇门之后。我就是对这个世界了解得如此之多,以至于我知道那扇门后面的东西不属于我。我认为这是愚蠢的、傲慢的,充满了无益于任何人的狂妄。
Matthew Dicks: 所以我说,当有人给你一个机会时,不管它多么疯狂、多么荒谬、多么不想去做——我生命中很多次,我说的那些”是”,都是关于我本不想做、但因为我的信念体系而强迫自己去做的事情——它们恰恰带来了我生命中最好、最非凡的机会。“是”随时可以变成”不”,对吧?好的,我试试。我跨过那扇门,我试一下,花些时间体验。我四处看看,然后说,你知道吗?不适合我。我再退回来,把门关上。
但生活中,人们常常连门都不肯迈过去。他们太害怕了。他们已经以某种方式对机会做了预判。他们看不到其中的好处或价值,因为他们还没走过那扇门,所以看不到。然后世界上还有一种荒唐的观念,认为我们应该学会说”不”,这样可以把自己的时间封闭起来,让它尽可能有意义——这在我听来非常糟糕。问题是,你总有一天会活到一百岁,而当你一百岁的时候,不会再有人请你走过任何门了。到那时,你会回顾过去,你会说,有好多门我都没有迈过去,对吧?你不会想:太好了,幸好我没迈过去,因为我让自己留在了那条我确信对我好的唯一道路上。
我只是觉得,不存在什么唯一对你好的路径。我觉得路径有无数条,它们都很棒,少数几条很糟糕——但你只有走过那扇门,发现这不适合我,然后退回来,才能知道哪些是糟糕的。所以我认为,大多数时候人们说”不”,是因为害怕。而当有人让我做让我害怕的事情时,那恰恰是我会拼尽全力、用最快的速度奔向那件事的时候——尽管我恐惧到极点——因为我知道,那些让我恐惧的事情,往往是对我最好的事情。
所以我们说”是”,同时清楚自己最终可以说”不”。但一个”是”可以通向非凡的事物。如果你看过我关于说”是”的 TED 演讲,你会看到,“是”会导向这些非凡的链条——你对自己本不想答应的事情说了”是”,突然它促使你遇到一个你绝不可能遇到的人,而那个人又为你打开了另一扇门。我的意思是,你通过一个奇怪的”是”所能创造出来的因果链条,是非凡的。
Lenny: 有一句话我经常回想起,是关于这个的:“你害怕的洞穴里,藏着你寻找的宝藏。”
Matthew Dicks: 说得太好了。我举个例子——我现在经常做单口喜剧。我刚刚参加了纽约市喜剧节。我做单口喜剧,是因为六年前,我的一个朋友给我发邮件说:“嘿,我们应该去讲单口喜剧。“我回复他说:“不,我对这个没兴趣。“点了发送。然后我对自己说:“等等,你为什么那么做?“我对自己说:“因为我害怕这个。“我会讲有趣的故事,就算不好笑,那也还是在讲故事;但如果我在做单口喜剧而且不好笑,那我就是失败了。这是一件令人恐惧的事情。
于是我立刻发了第二封邮件:“好吧,我加入。什么时候开始?“到现在我已经做了很多、很多、很多次单口喜剧了。当初邀请我一起做单口喜剧的那个人,却一次都没有做过。他这辈子一次都没上过台。他想做,但他不敢迈过那扇门。他太害怕去做那件他挑战我的事情——而我现在却经常做这件事,因为是他挑战了我——而且这仍然是我最害怕的事情。因此,这也是我无时无刻不在拼命去做的事情,因为我知道,让我害怕的事情,是对我最好的事情。
闪电问答环节
Lenny: 太棒了。Matt,在我们进入非常精彩的闪电问答之前,还有什么想跟听众分享的吗?
Matthew Dicks: 没了,我说得够多了。他们已经听了够多了。我们来闪电问答吧。
Lenny: 我们聊了很多。开始吧。欢迎来到非常精彩的闪电问答环节。准备好了吗?
Matthew Dicks: 准备好了。
Lenny: 你最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么?
Matthew Dicks: 哦,首先是 Nathaniel Philbrick 的 Heart of the Sea,这是关于捕鲸船 Essex 的纪实作品——Essex 的沉没正是《白鲸》灵感的来源。Melville 正是因为 Essex 的沉没才有了写《白鲸》的想法。这是一部关于捕鲸船 Essex 的非凡纪实作品。这本书一定要读。如果你有孩子,甚至就算你没有——因为这是一种大人读起来也很棒的童书——Kate DiCamillo 的 The Tale of Despereaux。这是一本青少年小说,两小时就能读完。我已经读了二十遍。它优美、非凡、精彩极了。然后是 Jessie Klein 的所有作品,她有两本书。我对她唯一的不满就是她只有两本书。其实 Sedaris 也是一样,Jessie Klein 和 David Sedaris,去读这两位吧。实际上我现在正在读 Bamford 的书,那个喜剧演员——她叫什么名字来着?Bamford。我脑子里一直想着 Amy,其实是 Amy Sedaris 的 Amy。我现在在读 Maria Bamford 的回忆录,也非常棒。所以现在我有四本推荐。
Lenny: 太棒了。最近有没有一部你特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
Matthew Dicks: 电视剧的话,我喜欢 The Last of Us,它改编自我从没玩过的电子游戏。作为电视剧非常出色,一方面是因为充满了筹码——对,它是那种随时可能让任何角色死掉的剧。所以你始终坐在椅子边上。没有人是安全的,这太棒了。然后它在季中有一集精彩的 bottle episode——就是那种你身处一部僵尸题材的电视剧中,但奇怪的是它又跟我看过的任何僵尸剧都不一样。然后出现了一集精彩绝伦的单集。后面还有一集类似风格的。无论是从哪个角度来看,讲故事的方式都很出色。非常棒。电影的话,《芭比》比我预期的要好得多,坦白说,它有力地证明了你可以拍关于任何东西的故事,只要它有意义,它就会表现出色。
Lenny: 我的下一个问题——我不知道问你合不合适,这个问题通常是问产品人和创始人的——就是:你在招聘时最喜欢问的面试问题是什么?听到这个问题,你有什么想法吗?
Matthew Dicks: 我想说的是,也许是我在打高尔夫之类的时候最喜欢问别人的问题。我不喜欢问别人”你是做什么的”。我喜欢问:“你是怎么进入你现在这份工作的?“这是一个危险的问题,因为偶尔我问别人这个问题时,他们会突然意识到自己做这份工作只是因为一些奇怪的偶然,跟他们梦想做的事情毫无关系。我生命中遇到过两个人在回答这个问题时哭了,因为他们突然明白了:我做这个,是因为我姐姐十六年前把我带进了这家公司。我说:“哦,那挺好的。这是你一直想做的吗?“他们说:“不,其实这仍然不是我想做的事。“但我确实认为,大多数时候,你是如何得到一份工作的,比你实际在做的工作本身更有趣。那个问题的答案更有意思。
Lenny: 你最近有没有发现一个特别喜欢的产品?可以是 app,也可以是买到的什么东西?
Matthew Dicks: 嗯,如果你过圣诞节的话——多年来,我一直有一个想法,关于如何设计最好的圣诞树底座,后来我终于想,肯定有人已经做出来了。果然有人做了。所以我把它记下来给你。就是 Krinner 树座。Krinner Tree Genie 非常出色。它完全就是如果我有设计能力的话会设计出来的东西。它固定树的能力无与伦比。安装只需要两秒钟。它做到了我所有调研中说的每一项功能。太棒了。如果你不过圣诞节,那我告诉你 Power POD,一个小东西,挂在钥匙链上,能给手机充两次电,就一直挂在钥匙链上。所以我从来不会是那种”糟了,手机没电了”的人。我的钥匙链上挂着 Power POD,备着两次充电。
你甚至会忘了它的存在。然后有一天你突然需要它,感觉太好了。它是同类产品中最好的。市面上有很多类似的版本,Power POD 是你想要的那个。另外我刚买了一个热狗烤面包机,可以同时烤热狗和面包。叫 Nostalgia 热狗烤面包机。看起来像上世纪五十年代的东西。实际上真的很漂亮。它是那种你想放在台面上的东西,因为外观就很好看。我儿子和我特别喜欢它,因为我们都爱吃热狗,它可以同时放两个面包和两根热狗。按下去,三分钟后热狗就准备好了。不需要弄脏任何东西。虽然不是世界上最好的热狗,但热狗不管怎么做都很好吃。所以我完全推荐 Nostalgia 热狗烤面包机。
Lenny: 这些推荐太棒了。而且这还呼应了我们之前说的怀旧技巧来变得有趣。
Matthew Dicks: 对,确实如此。没错。虽然不是故意的,但我愿意把这算作我的功劳。
人生信条
Lenny: 你有没有一个最喜欢的人生座右铭,经常对自己重复,或与朋友分享的?不管是工作中还是生活中的?
Matthew Dicks: 有,它真的改变了我的人生。我四年级的时候,一位老师——我不记得是哪位老师了,这让我很遗憾——我当时过得很糟糕,表现也像大多数人那个时候会表现的那样。老师对我说:“听着,积极的心态将是你成功的关键。“我不知道为什么这句话就刻在了我脑子里,但它确实刻进去了。我已经对自己说了十万遍这句话了。
到现在,全世界只有一个人比我还积极,我只遇到过一个人比我更有正能量。我是一个几乎不知疲倦的乐观主义者——我妻子说我是积极到令人反感的那种。她会说:“你知道吗?有时候你是可以心情不好的。“而我说:“我就是心情不好不起来。因为积极的心态是我成功的关键。“这确实是我构建生活中很多事物的方式——寻找积极的、好的那一面。我也尽可能地为别人这样做。有时候这会让别人感到沮丧。但我真的相信,生活中的大部分取决于你带什么样的心态去面对。对我而言,四年级时那句”积极的心态将是你成功的关键”,因为某种原因,在恰当的时刻以恰当的方式击中了我,从此一直伴随我。
Lenny: 有趣的是,这句话甚至算不上多么巧妙。听起来像签语饼里那种话——你看到了会想,嗯,是吧。但我很喜欢这句话对你产生了如此深远的影响,一直留在了你心里。
Matthew Dicks: 对,我觉得可能真的是时机的问题。我当时确实过得很艰难,我记得那时候我的两个朋友不理我了,而他们基本上是我当时仅有的两个朋友。我觉得我那时正处于一种开放和准备好的状态,想要听到一些能改善我生活的东西。而那句话就是了。而且我本身可能就有乐观的倾向,所以它恰好在最合适的时机落在了最合适的地方。
Lenny: “积极的心态将是你成功的关键。“太棒了。最后一个问题,也许就是给听众留下一个具体的、可以立刻去做的事情,来成为更好的讲故事的人。你会给什么建议?
讲好每一个故事的开头
Matthew Dicks: 有两样东西应该成为你余生中每一个故事的开头。首先,以地点开头——你在哪里?地点能激活想象力。如果我说我站在厨房里,你已经自动为我的故事附加了一千个形容词。你非常清晰地看到了那个厨房。你很可能是把你自己的厨房、你父母的厨房、或者你在电视上看到的某个厨房放到了故事里。但如果厨房的具体细节对故事来说是相关的,这正是我希望你做的。我不追求以某种视觉上的精确性在你的大脑中还原地点。我希望你看到一个完整、充实的场景。所以我特别喜欢用地点,因为一个词就能自带一千个形容词。
所以,以地点开头,然后以行动开头——意味着立刻就要有事情正在发生。字面意思就是:我在一个地方,我正在做一件事。这向听众传达了你确实要讲一个有推进感的东西。这就是为什么《星球大战》开头是一艘大飞船在射击一艘小飞船。这就是为什么开场是一个警察在屋顶上追一个人。事情已经在发生了。
我们没有从废话开始。我们从事发的一刻开始,立刻抓住了注意力。这就是人们想从故事中得到的东西。另外,如果你和我不同——也就是说,如果你不是那种像我一样的白人异性恋美国男性,没有身体或精神上的障碍,像我这样一直觉得走进任何房间都有发言的权利——如果你在这些方面和我不同,你往往会发现——我知道这是事实——如果你属于任何被边缘化或受歧视的群体,就更难争取到空间,让别人听到你的声音。但很多女性、有色人种和 LGBTQ 群体的成员告诉我,当他们用”我在一个地方做一件事”来开始一个故事时,这是在向人们发出一个信号:我现在开始讲故事了。
而当你能向人们发出信号——“我现在开始讲故事了”——他们会为你安静下来,会给你说话的机会。我一开始并不知道会是这样,但我教过的很多人后来回来跟我说:“天哪,人们真的会听我说话了。“他们原以为别人听是因为故事讲得好,但后来他们发现,是因为用地点和行动开头的这种方式,就是在告诉人们:电影开始了。看电影的时候没人说话。你可以吃爆米花,但不许开口。它能让整个房间安静下来,为你争取到空间,然后你就可以开始做优秀讲故事的人该做的事情——抓住那些人的注意力。所以,用这两样东西开始你余生中讲的每一个故事,你就已经比听到这些之前好了百分之五十。
Lenny: 哇。精彩的内容源源不断。Matt,你比我们开始这次对话时我想象的要有哲理得多。我学到了非常多。我真的非常期待大家能从你这里学到东西。人们可以在网上哪里找到你,如果想了解更多、继续向你学习、甚至和你合作,尤其是公司合作?最后,听众怎样能帮到你?
Matthew Dicks: 当然。你可以通过 matthewdicks.com 找到我,或者如果你是商业人士或想学习的人,我还有 storyworthymd.com,MD 是我的名字首字母缩写,那里有我的课程、在线培训之类的东西。这两个地方都能找到我、联系我。关于你问题的第二部分,不是出于私心的回答是:如果你去讲故事,但更重要的是,如果你请别人给你讲故事——再次创造那样的空间——留意那些说”哦,类似的事情我也遇到过”的人。他们真正在说的是:我希望有人愿意听我讲那件事。
所以,我总是那个愿意说”哦,给我讲讲那个故事”的人。给别人五分钟你的时间,让他们终于能说出一直等着想对某人说的话。如果你这样做,世界上就会多出更多讲故事的机会,最终,也许这些人会找到我,想买我的书、访问我的网站或参加我的培训,但仅仅是为讲故事创造空间就好。我觉得那会是一件很美好的事。
Lenny: 我喜欢这个回答。多么美好的结尾方式。Matt,非常感谢你来到这里。
Matthew Dicks: 非常感谢,Lenny。我真的很感激。
Lenny: 大家再见。非常感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅节目。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评价,这真的能帮助其他听众找到这档播客。你可以在 Lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Alfred Hitchcock | Alfred Hitchcock(英国电影导演,保留原文) |
| all hands | 全员大会 |
| Aruba | Aruba(加勒比海岛国,保留原文) |
| backpack | 背包(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指提前告知听众计划以制造代入感) |
| Barbie | 《芭比》(2023年电影,使用公认中文译名) |
| Boris Levin | Boris Levin(工厂老板,Matthew Dicks 的商业合作伙伴,保留原文) |
| bottle episode | bottle episode(电视剧术语,指限定场景的单集,保留原文) |
| breadcrumbs | 面包屑(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指沿途给出暗示性信息) |
| Charity Thief | Charity Thief(Matthew Dicks 的故事名称,保留原文) |
| Chattanooga | Chattanooga(美国田纳西州城市,保留原文) |
| Clara | Clara(Matthew Dicks 的女儿名,保留原文) |
| crystal balls | 水晶球(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指预测可能的未来以制造筹码) |
| David Mamet | David Mamet(美国剧作家、导演,保留原文) |
| David Sedaris | David Sedaris(美国幽默作家,保留原文) |
| Eileen | Eileen(学生名,保留原文) |
| elephant | 大象(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指故事开头抛出的引起悬念的要素) |
| Essex | Essex(捕鲸船名,保留原文) |
| Florida State Legislature | 佛罗里达州立法机构 |
| Gala | Gala(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| Grand Slam | Grand Slam(Moth 比赛的冠军赛,保留原文) |
| Happy-Go-Lucky | Happy-Go-Lucky(David Sedaris 的书名,保留原文) |
| Heart of the Sea | Heart of the Sea(Nathaniel Philbrick 的纪实作品,保留原文) |
| Homework for Life | Homework for Life(Matthew Dicks 的故事挖掘框架名,保留原文) |
| Honeycrisp | Honeycrisp(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| hourglasses | 沙漏(Matthew Dicks 的讲故事术语,指在关键时刻放慢节奏以延长悬念) |
| Javits Center | Javits Center(纽约大型会展中心,保留原文) |
| Jessie Klein | Jessie Klein(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Kate DiCamillo | Kate DiCamillo(美国儿童文学作家,保留原文) |
| Krinner Tree Genie | Krinner Tree Genie(圣诞树底座品牌/产品名,保留原文) |
| Kurt Vonnegut | Kurt Vonnegut(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Lenny | Lenny(播客主持人,保留原文) |
| Little League | 小联盟(美国少年棒球联盟) |
| Luke Skywalker | Luke Skywalker(《星球大战》角色名,保留原文) |
| Maria Bamford | Maria Bamford(美国喜剧演员,保留原文) |
| Marsha Rakofsky | Marsha Rakofsky(Slack 前企业传播总监,保留原文) |
| Masterclass | Masterclass(在线课程平台名,保留原文) |
| Matthew Dicks | Matthew Dicks(美国故事讲述者、作家,保留原文) |
| McIntosh | McIntosh(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| Melville | Melville(《白鲸》作者,保留原文) |
| metaphor man | 比喻侠 |
| Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams(微软产品名,保留原文) |
| Moby Dick | 《白鲸》(经典文学名著,使用公认中文译名) |
| Moth Story Slam | Moth Story Slam(纽约知名讲故事比赛,保留原文) |
| Nathaniel Philbrick | Nathaniel Philbrick(美国作家,保留原文) |
| Nostalgia Hot Dog Toaster | Nostalgia 热狗烤面包机(厨房小家电产品) |
| Obi-Wan Kenobi | Obi-Wan Kenobi(《星球大战》角色名,保留原文) |
| Ocean’s 11 | 《十一罗汉》(经典抢劫电影,使用公认中文译名) |
| Orlando | Orlando(美国佛罗里达州城市,保留原文) |
| personal interest inventory | 个人兴趣清单 |
| Power POD | Power POD(便携充电设备品牌,保留原文) |
| Pulp Fiction | 《低俗小说》(经典犯罪电影,使用公认中文译名) |
| Red Delicious | Red Delicious(苹果品种,保留原文) |
| Schwinn | Schwinn(美国经典自行车品牌,保留原文) |
| Sesame Street | 《芝麻街》(美国经典儿童教育节目,使用公认中文译名) |
| Seth Meyers | Seth Meyers(美国脱口秀主持人,保留原文) |
| Slack | Slack(企业通讯平台,保留原文) |
| SOC 2 | SOC 2(安全合规框架,保留原文) |
| Speak Up | Speak Up(Matthew Dicks 的培训公司名,保留原文) |
| speaking with adjacency | 邻近讲述 |
| Steve Jobs | Steve Jobs(科技界知名人物,但无统一公认中文译名,保留原文) |
| Storyworthy | Storyworthy(Matthew Dicks 的著作/品牌名,保留原文) |
| Stranger Things | 《怪奇物语》(Netflix 热门剧集,使用公认中文译名) |
| Tarantino | Tarantino(美国电影导演,保留原文) |
| Taylor Swift | Taylor Swift(美国歌手,保留原文) |
| TED talk | TED 演讲 |
| The Force | The Force(《星球大战》中的力量/信仰概念,保留原文) |
| The Last of Us | The Last of Us(HBO 剧集名,保留原文) |
| The Tale of Despereaux | The Tale of Despereaux(Kate DiCamillo 的小说,保留原文) |
| total addressable market | 可触达市场 |
| VCR | 录像机 |
| West Cow | West Cow(播客嘉宾,保留原文) |
| When Harry Met Sally | 《当哈利遇到莎莉》(经典爱情喜剧电影,使用公认中文译名) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)