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- [00:00]
Matthew Dix
You've probably been telling not so good stories all your life, and you've probably heard people who tell amazing stories all the time. It turns out that's not actually something that people are born with. It's just strategic. And if you become a little more strategic, you can be one of those people. Right now we want to know. Now we're curious. We're not giving anything away. We're not indicating the end, but we're finding something that's going to appeal to people in a real emotional way. We're going to identify a need they have. And if we identify an appropriate need, then we're going to grab our audience and they're going to pay attention.
- [00:54]
Shane Parrish
Welcome to the Knowledge Project, the bi weekly podcast exploring the powerful ideas, practical methods, and mental models of others in a world where knowledge is power. This podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Before we dive in, I have a quick favor to ask. If you're enjoying the show and listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other platform, please take a moment and hit the follow button now. The more followers we have, the better guests we can bring on to share their knowledge with you. Thank you. If you want to take your learning to the next level, consider joining our membership program at FS Blog Membership. As a member, you'll get my personal reflections at the end of every episode, early access to episodes, no ads, including this exclusive content, hand edited transcripts, and so much more. Check out the link in the show notes for more. My guest today is Matthew Dix, who is perhaps the world's best storyteller. I'm not kidding. He's won nearly every major storytelling competition. If anyone has a recipe for telling better stories, it's him. And I wanted to learn from the master. In this episode, you will discover lessons on finding, crafting, and telling stories that connect you to other people. Stories that will make them believe in you and trust you and compel them to want to know more about you and the things that you care about. Steve Jobs said, the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. But most of us make common mistakes that are easily correctable. At the end of listening to this episode, I guarantee you be more effective, entertaining and thoughtful about the stories you tell. It's time to listen and learn. There are too many podcasts and not enough time. What if you could skip the noise and get just the insightful moments, even from shows you didn't know existed? That's what Overlap does. Overlap is an AI driven podcast app that uses large language models to curate the best moments from episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every transcript, finds just the best parts, and serves them up based on whatever topic you're interested in. I use Overlap every day to research guests, explore and learn. Give it a try and start discovering the best moments from the best podcasts. Go to join overlap.com that's joinoverlap.com what's the difference between a good story and a bad story?
- [03:24]
Matthew Dix
I think we can start by thinking about what is a story and what isn't a story. Because most people don't tell stories. Most people think of a story as some stuff happened over the course of time, and now I'm going to tell you about that, usually chronologically, and that will amount to a story. And that really is just reporting on your life. And no one actually wants you to report on your life, you know, other than maybe your mother and your spouse might be required to listen. It's just a simple accounting of your day or your week or your month. And that's not interesting and it's not a story. So a story is about change over time. Usually it's sort of a realization like I used to think one thing and now I think another thing. That's most stories, sometimes they're transformational. Meaning I once was one kind of person and then some stuff happened and now I'm actually an authentically different kind of person. But if you're just doing that, you're better than most people. That sort of is the difference between a bad story and a good story is what is a story and what is not a story. Once we get to the difference between sort of a well told story, a well crafted story, and a one that is not as well crafted, we get into things like the acknowledgment that no one wants to hear anything you ever have to say unless you give them a reason to listen. And there are people who tell stories that don't sort of have that fundamental belief as part of their bone marrow. And the more you believe that, the more you believe that I must entertain while speaking, delivering content, showing data, delivering a keynote. The more you believe that no one wants to hear anything I have to say unless I'm relentlessly giving them a reason to listen. That's really the difference between someone who is gonna be appreciated and remembered and impactful, and someone who will sort of get lost in the crowd.
- [05:02]
Shane Parrish
How much of the difference boils down to thinking about the story you're gonna tell beforehand. And then there's like this game where you're pretending to sort of like ad lib it on the spot. And the listener's like pretending that you're ad libbing it on the spot because they want that too. They wanna believe that, right? Versus I haven't thought about this before and I'm just gonna spew the first thing out of my mouth, right?
- [05:20]
Matthew Dix
You're the first person other than me I heard refer to it as a game. I say we play a game with our audience. They pretend that we're making it up and we pretend that we're making it up. When the truth, I think, for the best storytellers, lies somewhere in the middle. Which is to say you probably should never memorize anything that you say. I've never memorized a story or a speech that I'm going to deliver. But what I say is we remember them, meaning we understand the beats, we understand what's going to happen. But if I was to tell you a story now and then tell you a story five minutes later, the sentences are absolutely going to be different, even though the events, the dialogue, the descriptions will all be there in some way. But I think that's sort of the game we play, the best game. Players stand in the middle and say, I know what I'm going to say, but I don't know exactly how I'm going to say it. And that allows you to read the audience and figure out is this landing. Do I need to pivot right now? Do I need to pull an anecdote out of my pocket? I always walk around with what I say is five anecdotes that if I feel like I'm losing the audience, I can throw that out and grab them back and hold them for a while. If you're overly prepared, you're sort of trapped in your content and you're just going to be delivering it. I often call them word callers. If you've memorized a story, really you're just a word caller. You've just memorized a series of words and hopefully they'll come out properly. And maybe you can artfully do it in a pretend acting way. But the best performers sort of know what they're going to say, but not exactly how. And that's. You can always tell that. You can tell it because their talk feels like it's just for you. Because you can look at someone and you can sort of riff on what is happening in the room. You know, I was recently speaking somewhere and Someone picked up their phone and started looking at their phone. And in the middle of my speech, I stopped and I said, I really hope your kid is like on the way to the hospital right now. And he was like, didn't get to school. I'm just making sure that. And I. And it was a big laugh, you know, But I wouldn't have been able to do that if I was a word caller. You don't want to be overly prepared.
- [07:08]
Shane Parrish
What's the difference between a story and an anecdote then?
- [07:11]
Matthew Dix
So an anecdote doesn't have to have change over time. It's essentially one of those, hey, this funny thing happened to me. Isn't this crazy? But it tends not to linger. You know, a story ideally is the kind of thing that when I tell it to you, you're thinking about it for days, weeks, months, or maybe for the rest of your life. Whereas an anecdote is you sit down and you have beers with your buddies and something crazy happened on the golf course, you know, something happened in the airport, and you tell them it and they all laugh. But it's not the kind of thing they want to go and repeat to someone. They're not going to remember it. I often think of anecdotes as cotton candy. It's like delicious in the moment and lovely, but you don't really remember your cotton candies. But you remember the best meals of your life. Stories are the best meals of your life. The ones you reflect back and go, I remember the restaurant. I remember who I was with, I remember what I ordered. That's the story.
- [07:58]
Shane Parrish
Because you're connecting to an emotion, ideally.
- [08:01]
Matthew Dix
Touching their hearts and their minds. If I tell you an anecdote about my son, we're going to laugh, we're going to understand his humanity even a little bit. You might even reflect on my humanity. But you're not going to be sort of thinking about it later on. Because I'm not looking to land something in your heart and mind. I'm not looking to connect to your life experiences. When I tell a story, I'm not hoping that you are thinking that once happened to me. What I'm hoping is you're thinking, I once felt that way, I once thought that way, or maybe someday I could feel or think that way. That's the goal. That's sort of that understory that we're always looking to tell.
- [08:36]
Shane Parrish
So before we get into more of a crafting a story, maybe it would help to have an example of a story.
- [08:40]
Matthew Dix
Oh, sure. So tell you A story? Yeah, well, the one I like to tell, I mean, for business people. I'm standing behind my school where I teach. I'm a fifth grade teacher. I'm standing in front of this enormous pile of fall leaves and they're quivering. There's a little boy inside the leaves and his hand emerges and he's got a metal object in his hand. And he looks at me, his head pops out. His name is Jamie. He says, look what I found. And he's shaking this metal object and I say, wow, look at it. And he says, yeah, it's a spoon. And it is, it's just a. It's a kitchen spoon. It fell out of a lunchbox yesterday or 10 years, it's migrated to the bottom of this pile. And now Jamie, this little redheaded boy, has it in his hand. But I tell Jamie, I say, that's not just a spoon, Jamie, that's the spoon of power. And the moment that I declare it to be the spoon of power, Jamie knows I must have it. And I know Jamie knows this because he just starts running. He doesn't say a word, he just sprints. Because he knows his crazy teacher will now chase him down for the spoon. And he's not wrong. I'm responsible for like 100 kids. I have to keep them safe, keep them secure. I don't care about any of them anymore. It's a redheaded boy and a spoon that I must now have. And for 18 minutes over the course, course of this recess, I hunt this boy down. I chase him across a field, up a slide, you know, down the other slide, through the woods. Eighteen minutes later, he still has the spoon in his hand. I can't believe it. I legitimately tried to catch a 10 year old and I could not. But he's in my class, so it's fine. I'll get him eventually. He's a 10 year old boy. He's focused now on the spoon, but he has the attention span of like a mulberry bush. He's going to forget it in a minute and I'm going to grab it. So I'm teaching math, I'm writing equations on the board. This kid, he's put the spoon on the corner of his desk, like to dare me to get it, you know, it's just out of my reach. So I've got one eye on the board, one eye on him and the spoon. He's got one eye on his journal, one eye on the spoon. We're in this like standoff and then I'm reading Sitting on a stool. I'm reading a book. He's still got the spoon right there. I've got one eye on the book, one eye on the spoon. He's got one on me, one eye on the spoon. If he'd ever been this focused in his life, he'd, like, cure cancer. I've never seen him so focused. But he's like me. He's a writer. He loves to write. So at the end of the day, when we write, his head always falls onto his arm. You know, the strokes of his pen get long. He's going to get lost in his story. And that's the moment I'll strike. I watch it happen. I just wait. See the little redhead go down, lands on his arm. I sneak up the front aisle, I reach over to grab the spoon, and it's not there. And he turns to me and he says, did you really think I was just going to leave it there for you? And I lose my mind. Like, I start threatening the class. I turn to the right, like, where's the spoon? The girl says, leave us alone. We're trying to get our work done. Turn to the left. Where's the spoon? A boy says, why are you bothering me? I'm trying to be a good. They all know where it is. They're all conspiring against me. Then the bell rings. Jamie's out of his seat. He runs to get his coat, and he swings by and he pulls the box of books out in the library marked S. He reaches inside and he says, I filed it under S for spoon. And he's out the door. I can't believe it. I legitimately tried to get a spoon from a 10 year old kid and I could not do it. So the next day, he comes in. He has the spoon on a chain around his neck, and he's swinging it around. And I say, how did you. And he said, my dad drilled the hole. My mom gave me the chain. And he's walking around going, oh, it's a spoon of power, Mr. Dix. The spoon of power. And as bad as I like, I'm a terrible person. Sometimes even I can't tear it from the neck of a 10 year old. So all week he tortures me with this. And then Thursday comes. It's time for our weekly math test. It's time for Mackenzie to lose her mind. Because someday Mackenzie might get a problem wrong. And that will be the end of the world for Mackenzie. So every Thursday, I have to, like, build her up. Mistakes are valuable. It's okay, Mackenzie. You Might get one wrong. And she's sort of falling apart as she does. And then Jamie's there, and he takes the spoon off, and he says, maybe this will help. And he puts it around Mackenzie's neck. And it's the best math test Mackenzie has ever taken in her life. Somehow this spoon on her neck calms her down. Three days later, David's grandfather passes away. When David comes back to school, Jamie's by the door waiting for David, when he walks in, puts the spoon on David's neck and says, I think you need this today. And he did. For the rest of the year, every single time a kid is in trouble in any way whatsoever, that spoon finds their way on their neck. They forget their homework. They have to walk over to me. Face the music, we call it. They walk over with that damn spoon on their neck. They get in trouble with the principal. They gotta make the long walk down the linoleum hallway. They make the long walk with the spoon. They get bullied on the bus on the way to school. When they go home that day, they go home with the spoon every single time. It makes the kids days better. So the last day of school, I gather all my kids on the floor in front of me. It's the last time we're gonna be together as a family. And they really are a family. They. We get to know each other in really meaningful ways. And so I tell them, say whatever you want. Tell us what you're feeling. You know, we're gonna have to say goodbye now. So Jamie stands up and he walks over to me. He takes the spoon off and he tries to give it to me. And I say to Jamie, no. I say, there was a day back in October when I wanted that spoon badly. And had I caught you, I would have pried it from your little fingers. But you managed to keep it and do this amazing thing with it. I just can't believe what you've done. It's your spoon. And Jamie says no. Jamie says the magic of the spoon only works in my classroom. He tells me I need to take it so that next year when kids are in trouble, I can give them the spoon like he has this year. And then he pulls this little orange chair up alongside me so he can get up to eye level. And he takes the spoon off. And for the first time, I get to wear the spoon of power. The 2020, 2021 school year was the hardest I've ever taught in my 26 years of teaching the pandemic. We went right back to school in September and masks and social distancing and everyone was afraid. And lots and lots of people got sick. Kids got sick, parents got sick, we lost grandparents. My wife, who's a kindergarten teacher, got very sick. My own children got sick. And I used that spoon more often that year than I've ever used it in my life. Every day people were wearing that spoon. And for the first time in my life, my colleagues were wearing a spoon of power to get through the day. And as hard as it was, there's the best year of teaching I've ever had, the most important year I will ever teach. But I've always felt like I was the luckiest teacher in America because I have that spoon. I've had it for 16 years. It's literally in that bag right there. I carry with it. I carry it with me everywhere I go. It's weirdly the most powerful teaching tool I have had and will ever have. It is this thing that I put on a kid's neck or an adult's neck, and suddenly they feel better. It's magic. It really is the spoon of power. And so I like to tell that story to especially business people because essentially what I do is I take something that they have at least 8 to 12 of in their kitchen, a simple spoon that they don't see as very valuable, and suddenly it becomes something incredibly meaningful. You know, I. The first time I gave that talk, that story, I did it as a series of stories during the pandemic, actually, at a college in western Massachusetts. And it was still during the pandemic, everyone's masks, except for me, and everyone social, distanced. And at the end of the event, you know, I'm a novelist and I write books. So I often have a table and there's books and there's a bookstore and I sign the books and things like that. But we weren't going to do it because of the pandemic. So after I finished speaking, that line formed in the. In the aisle. And I had to get back on the microphone and say, I'm sorry, we're not going to sign books tonight. Go home. And most of the people in the line, they weren't there to buy a book. They wanted to touch the spoon. Grown ass adults who had Doritos and Netflix and pillows at home in the middle of a pandemic wearing a mask, chose to line up and touch a spoon that they definitely have 8 to 12 of in their kitchen. And that's what we have to do when we tell a story about something like a spoon, something as simple as that. It suddenly becomes not a spoon anymore. And the better we are at telling stories about ourselves, the people we love, the products we make, the services we offer, you know, all of those things, the more we are able to tell excellent stories about those things, the more we're able to infuse those things with. With whatever we want them to be infused with. That's a great story.
- [16:34]
Shane Parrish
And I feel the emotional like roller coaster as you're telling it. And I remember reading it in your book too, and I feel sort of like the ups and downs and I'm like running there with you. And one of the words that used earlier was beat. So I'm wondering, like, walk me through the architecture of that story and what makes so effective.
- [16:51]
Matthew Dix
Sure. I mean, the first thing before I sort of talk about the structure is the idea that it doesn't contain very many adjectives. People often think of stories as an attempt to describe something when actually nobody ever wants to know what anything looked like unless it's relevant to a story. What people really want is to know what you felt, what you said and what you did. And so if you're going to describe something, you better make sure that there's a reason for it to be described. What I believe is leveraging the imagination of audiences. So I said to you, I'm standing behind my school, the school where I teach. But that's all I said. I know that you know what that looks like. You don't know what my version of it looks like, but that doesn't matter to me. Weirdly, some people get interested in that, but you should not. You know, nobody cares about what anything looks like. Verisimilitude is not relevant in storytelling. When I say we go into our my classroom to teach, right, I say classroom. And I know you have a classroom in your mind. Now, my classroom definitely doesn't look like yours because my classroom has a stage with lighting and sets. Because I built a theater into my classroom because I've been there for 23 years. It doesn't look like any classroom you've ever seen. But I don't want you to see that classroom. I want you to see the one that you can already see in your mind. So when people say to me, how do you make the stories seem so real to me? I tell them I don't describe anything. Instead, I choose words that I know already exist in your mind. I choose those images and I just extract them and make use of them. So that's important always, because I think people over describe and the Tricky thing is we don't have a lot of bandwidth to work with. If you say, in the beginning of a story, this beautiful woman walks in the room and her eyes are a piercing blue, those blue eyes had better be relevant in the story at some point, because you've just stolen some of my bandwidth so that I have to track those blue eyes and remember them throughout the story. And I've never heard of a story where eye color is relevant, except for Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye. And yet we describe eye color all the damn time, which really is just sort of degrading the audience's ability to hear the rest of the story, because we're giving them a job to do. Remember this, remember this, remember this. I'm leveraging imagination throughout that entire story. But in terms of what I'm thinking about for the architecture, I'm always thinking about the scenes that I'm going to tell. So scenes are predicated on location. So if I think about that story, if I'm going to remember it rather than memorize it, I'm going to know I'm going to be on the playground, and I'm going to chase Jamie, and I'm going to rock and down the playscape and through the woods, but he's going to keep the spoon. That's the first scene, and that's what I have to get out. And it might come out better one time than the other, but that's essentially the goal. And then my second scene is I'm in the classroom, and I know I'm going to teach math, and then I'm going to teach reading, and then I'm going to teach writing, because that's what I do. And I know each time he's going to be daring me to grab the spoon, but I'm not going to get it. So that's sort of scene two. Scene three is the next day. He comes in with the spoon of power on his neck. Makes me crazy, right? Scene four is Thursday MacKenzie, the math test. Scene five is David. His grandfather passed away. Scene six is a montage of three things. I know I'm gonna say kids who forget their homework, kids who go to the principal, and kids who ride the bus. That's specifically structured to give you three different locations and three different kinds of problems that kids have. All were real, but I could have chosen from a thousand different times that Jamie gave that spoon out. I strategically chose for that reason. The next scene is the last day of school. Jamie tries to give me the spoon. Actually, what I tell you, because I'm preserving surprise. Jamie tries to give me the spoon. I use the word tries really specifically because I don't want you to think I'm going to get the spoon. I don't think I'm going to get the spoon either. I'm rejecting the spoon, thinking there's no way I'm taking this spoon from your kid. And then he forces it upon me because I want you to be as surprised as I am. And then the last scene is sort of that pandemic, you know, that pandemic explanation about what that year was like. But that's what I'm thinking about in terms of remembering the story and then to maintain entertainment throughout it. I'm always thinking stakes, suspense, surprise and humor. Those are sort of the four Mount Rushmore ways to maintain interest regardless of what you're doing, whether you're telling a story like what I've just done, or I'm working with a marketing team on a deck that they're building. And it is completely absent of stakes. Suspense, surprise and humor. Which is why nobody ever pays attention to anything anyone ever does. Because and instead of being entertaining, we're trying to be informative when informative is important, but only if people are actually listening. And that first part, how are we going to get people to listen? Is the one nobody ever pays any attention to. They somehow think that their information is going to be interesting to people. The world is filled with information. The Internet exists. You're competing against every bit of information that has ever existed on the planet. So you'd better give me a reason to listen. So I'm always thinking of that throughout that story, constantly asking myself, do I have stakes? Is there suspense? Am I preparing for a surprise? And is there a place where I can drop in some humor?
- [21:37]
Shane Parrish
So you mentioned keeping it storyteller compelling is sort of like there's elephants, backpacks, breadcrumbs, hourglasses, crystal balls and humor.
- [21:44]
Matthew Dix
You're well versed. Yeah, that's pretty good.
- [21:46]
Shane Parrish
Let's go through each of those individually and sort of like, what are they? And why are they important for the architecture of a story in terms of keeping people listening, like almost on the edge of their seat.
- [21:56]
Matthew Dix
What you've identified is sort of what I call Want to shop Walmart? Black Friday deals first Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart plus see terms@walmartplus.com okay, I have to tell you, I Was just looking on ebay, where I go for all kinds of things I love. And there it was, that hologram trading card. One of the rarest, the last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. Ebay had it. And now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wipers? Ebay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful. Whatever you love, find it on eBay. EBay. Things people love. Different versions of steaks In a story, the elephant is sort of the most important one. It's essentially what has grabbed the audience's attention. Initially. It doesn't actually have to be what the story's about, but oftentimes people begin a story without anything interesting that's going to grab the audience. A stake is essentially, what are we worried about? What are we wondering about? Why are we rooting for the protagonist? Why are we not rooting for the protagonist? It's the thing that makes us want to hear the next sentence. An elephant is the idea of here's a thing that you should care about in the story I just told you. The here's a thing is there's a boy with a spoon, and Matt wants it. The stake is, will he get the spoon? We know that's not what the story is actually about, but it gives the audience an initial thing to be thinking about. In movies, we often get a trailer. So if you see the movie trailer, the stakes are already laid out. And oftentimes they're laid out anyway. If I say, let's go to a romantic comedy, we know what the stake is. Two people are not in love, and eventually they will be in love. So we know what those stakes are. But when I open my mouth and I start telling a story in any context, nobody really knows what I'm there for. You know, no one knows what's about to be said. No one knows why I'm speaking. So we have to give them a reason, something interesting that grabs them, and it doesn't have to be much. You know, when Jobs introduces the iPhone in 2007, his first sentence on stage is, I've been waiting two and a half years to share this with you today. That's a stake. That's the CEO of Apple has been sitting on something for two and a half years, and today's the day we get to see it. That makes you wonder what he's going to say next. So the elephant is that constant need that there has to be something big. I call it an elephant, because we should all know what it is. It shouldn't be a mystery. It should be large and present. And it can change over time. So eventually, I don't get the spoon, but the new elephant becomes, what's Jamie going to do with this spoon? It seems to be changing the lives of kids. And then the elephant becomes, is Matt really going to get this spoon, or is Jamie going to keep the spoon? And then the steak becomes the pandemic, which is just a, you know, that enormous elephant of the pandemic is enough. So that's an elephant. Backpacks are the idea that oftentimes we're telling an audience what our plan is, and then we're going to tell them the results of the plan. But we want them to sort of be loaded up with our hopes and dreams along the way. So when I tell you in that story and when I say it's okay, because eventually we're going to be writing. And Jamie always gets lost in his writing. He's like me. His little head falls on his arm, starts writing away, and that's the moment I'm going to strike. I just put a backpack on you. I told you what my plan is. I told you what my hope is. My goal is when I reach for that spoon and it's not there, you're surprised because I've loaded you with my hopes and dreams, and then I've shown you that they failed. When I tell that story to a live audience, they often gasp or laugh when I tell you the spoon's not there. Because in their mind, I have mentally placed the spoon on the corner. I've really reinforced it, too, specifically so that when I say I reach for it, they see it there. And when I say it's not there, it's like I pop it away like magic. And they gasp. They go. Because it really is in their mind's eye, like it suddenly disappeared. So a backpack works especially well when a plan is not going to go well. You know, the Ocean's eleven movies, they tell you how they're going to rob the casino before they start robbing the casino. Because things are going to go wrong, and you have to know what's going wrong in order to feel the pressure and the tension of the moment. And that goes for whether we're doing business or telling personal stories. There's oftentimes. I was working with a scientist. He put a backpack on his audience. He was trying to cure a disease. The backpack he gave to the audience was, we're going to cure the disease. Here was my plan. We went forward. You know, I did the experiment, I looked at the results, and the results weren't there. And your heart drops. Because it's a great story about a man trying to do something great. And the result of it is when they look back on the results, they discover they've actually found something even more interesting. It didn't cure the disease they were hoping to cure, but it created some molecule that changed the nature of the company and ended up curing, like, 12 diseases instead. But it's so much better for that scientist to say, here's what I wanted to do. Here was my plan. I invested all of my life in it. I didn't spend time with my children on the weekends. Really built up our emotion in the same way. That spoon. It's exactly the same as the spoon. Not there. The cure wasn't there. Right. But something else instead happened that was fantastic. Oftentimes when something isn't going to work, or it might work in a surprising way, we want to put backpacks on people.
- [27:01]
Shane Parrish
The next one is breadcrumbs.
- [27:03]
Matthew Dix
So breadcrumbs are just sort of clues along the way, a little hint to something. The reason why we might wonder about something. I don't know if I use a breadcrumb in the spoon story.
- [27:14]
Shane Parrish
It's almost like foreshadowing, right?
- [27:16]
Matthew Dix
Yeah, it is. It's sort of like, you say some of the thing, but not all of the thing. It's a little bit like suspense, actually. It's sort of suspense. In the same way, if I tell you that mackenzie is falling apart during her math test. Right. A certain portion of the audience will see that as a breadcrumb, thinking, well, this has to do with the spoon, doesn't it? A lot of the audience actually doesn't even think that they sort of forget about the spoon for a minute because they get so invested in mackenzie. You can tell people who are empathetic in an audience just by how much they forget about the spoon, and they start caring about a little girl who's struggling with math. But that idea that there's a girl here and she's falling apart. But this is a story about a spoon, right. That is sort of a breadcrumb, hoping the audience will be thinking, how are these two things going to connect? Like, what is going on here? But oftentimes in a story, we just say, we mention an object, we mention a thought, we mention something that someone says to us, but we don't allow the audience to understand why it was said. And that's a breadcrumb, meaning it leads them to be wondering about something later on.
- [28:18]
Shane Parrish
The next one is hourglasses.
- [28:19]
Matthew Dix
So in hourglasses, the idea that once you know you have the audience's attention and they're dying for the next sentence, you make them wait as long as possible. You flip the hourglass over and let the sand run. Like a great example of that is the Matrix. Bullet time in the Matrix is an hourglass. Meaning we're going to change the way a gunfight happens in this movie. Meaning we're going to watch the bullet move through space and time so that you will wonder more if someone is going to be hit by the bullet. Because before bullet time, gunfights were a lot less entertaining because it was just a matter of whether the person got hit or not. Now we get to wonder where, what the course of this bullet is. Any moment where I know the audience wants to hear the next thing, I will slow things down. And that's the one time I will start describing stuff for no reason whatsoever. Right? So that orange chair. I simply use the word orange as a means of making you wait one more second to find out what's going to happen. If you pay attention to the way I tell that story, I start speaking slower. The closer we get to the moment where Jamie's going to hand me the spoon, I just know that if I say these words with a reduced pace, your anticipation increases. And therefore when I get the spoon, it's more likely that you will have an emotional reaction to it. And that's just a matter of judging. Now I have them. Let's make them wait as long as possible to hear it. Crystal balls and crystal balls are something we use in life all the time. It's essentially just a prediction. It's an out loud prediction about something that's going to happen. Because human beings are prediction machines. That's why gambling is so difficult for people. I it's not really the money as much as it is. I think the cowboys are going to win this week and I'm going to put money down on it to prove that I'm right. Those people don't like wait till Monday and open the newspaper to see if they won, right. They're watching it at the moment the game's playing because we're prediction machines. So when I say to you it's okay because I'm going to get that spoon in a little while, right. I'm making a prediction about the future. And now you're going to want to hear as an audience whether that prediction is going to come true. Earnings calls are just like that. When they give guidance, right? Their attempt to give guidance is both to make sure shareholders sort of know the direction of the company, but when they give guidance, you know those people are going to come back at the next earnings call to see if that guidance played out, or they're going to pay attention over the course of the quarter to see what the results are. So guidance is nothing but a crystal ball saying, here's what we think is going to happen, and then you wait three months to find out if it actually happened. The more we can do that, the more we get our audience to want us to continue to talk. I always say I want my audience happy that I'm talking. If you just think back on how many times you've heard people speak, how often have you thought, I'm so happy they're still speaking. If I can get that now, that's the platonic ideal. That's the sort of really difficult to achieve. But when the audience is happy that I'm talking because they can't wait to hear the next thing that I'm saying, then I'm winning every time. And humor, the tricky thing about humor is I do stand up comedy. And there are certain people that can just make lots of things funny. And in that spoon of power story, I could have had you laughing the whole way through. That's not useful to me in terms of a storyteller. Now, if I do stand up, it's very useful for me. But humor is a really powerful tool that gets underused completely in business all the time. Humor changes brain chemistry in really meaningful ways. You know, causes you to feel closer to me, causes you to perceive me as intelligent even if I'm not intelligent. Makes you feel better about the world, actually improves your cognition. All of those chemicals get released due to humor, which primes your brain and gets you ready to hear me better. But it also does things like if I make you laugh in the first 30 to 60 seconds of a story, you now feel at ease. Because an audience always has that concern, this concern that this is going to get awkward for us because you're not going to do a good job. Many, many times I have sat in an audience and thought, buckle up, this guy's going to fall apart. And I don't want anyone to think that. So if you make someone laugh in the first 30 seconds of a story, or a talk, or a keynote, whatever you're doing, they relax. They go, oh, okay, she knows what she's doing. She made Me laugh, like, continue. It's also useful in the boring parts of stories or actually in the boring parts of data. You know, if you're. If you have to speak for 12 minutes about your data, you better be funny. You know, I'm always helping tech companies when they're doing the demo of their newly added feature to their platform, and they're just going to run through it, like, and show you what it is. And I'm always saying, like, why would you do it that way? That's awful. Like, let's create two characters. Why don't you pretend to be somebody? Let's make the data amusing. Let's make a fake company, and let's make the fake company that's going to access your new platform. Let's let that be amusing so that people are smiling while you're showing them what your new product does. So it takes the boring parts and makes them a lot less boring. You can also manipulate emotions with humor. Right. Before I'm going to tell you something terrible in a story, I like to make you laugh so that the terrible thing hurts more. It increases the contrast. If you're dating someone for three months and you discover you're dating a monster and you need to dump that person and you really want to, like, make them hurt because they've hurt you, the best thing you can do is to take them on the best date of their life. And at the very end of that date, that's the moment you dump them. And that's what I try to do in storytelling. I try to take my audience on the best date possible, and then I hit them with the thing that stabs them in the heart. You know, my wife says her favorite stories are. Mine are the laugh, laugh, laugh, cry, which is to say you think we're having a good time. But actually the understory is I'm providing you a story that's going to devastate you in about three minutes. You just don't see it coming yet. If you have to tell a part of a story that's really difficult for people to hear a laugh after that can afford a breath. It can allow people to go, okay, I just heard that bad thing. But he made me laugh. He must be okay. Now we can move on. So it's very, very powerful. It can be overused, you know, by certain people, and it's underused by most people.
- [34:12]
Shane Parrish
Two things about the Jamie story that I thought were really fascinating. One was the way you described the scene. So, like, I feel like I'm there with you. And it was vague enough that you get pulled into it. And I don't think a lot of storytellers do a really good job of that in terms of use location a lot to pull us in. It's almost like you're watching a movie in your head, like you're watching it play.
- [34:31]
Matthew Dix
Exactly what I'm looking for. Well, locations are great because almost all of them are imbued with a thousand adjectives. I don't have to say anything. If I tell you I dropped a bowl of blueberries on the kitchen floor, you see that perfectly, you know, and you in your mind's eye, you can tell me if the floor is wood, linoleum or tile. You know, you can tell me if the bowl was plastic, wooden or glass. You can tell me if the blueberries are happy summer blueberries or sad winter blueberries. And if I asked you to look around the kitchen, you could identify exactly what that kitchen looks like. Because I'm probably in your kitchen or your parents kitchen or a kitchen you've seen on television a million times. But either way, I don't want you to see my kitchen because that would mean I'd have to describe it. And the power of your imagination is always more powerful than any collection of words that I can assemble. I'm always leaning into location. Especially if you think about films, there's always a location in every scene. You never are wondering where someone is unless they're sort of locked in a trunk of a car, you know, and that creates lots of wonder. And you want to know what's going on. We open with location because you're right. It activates imagination. It forces the movie to continue to play in the minds of the audience.
- [35:35]
Shane Parrish
And it's almost like my brain starts doing the work for you. You don't have to describe sort of like what the floor is like or what the lighting is like or where the windows are. You know, you just instantly go there.
- [35:45]
Matthew Dix
Yeah.
- [35:46]
Shane Parrish
And the other thing I really that stuck out to me about Jamie was we basically time traveled 15 years in that story. So we started like at recess, and then we went to a day, and then we went to a week. And then all of a sudden we're in Covid and it's, you know, 10 years later and you're still talking about how powerful this spoon is and how it's helped people.
- [36:05]
Matthew Dix
And it's funny because I wouldn't normally advance a story so far ahead. I often tell people that that's sort of a mistake. Try to keep a story in the moment. And had Covid not happened, the story probably would have ended with Jamie giving me the spoon and me feeling the power of it for the first time and understanding that it's going to be something I use forever. It's only because of the weirdness and extraordinary nature of a pandemic that allows that story to jump ahead. But the other thing is, you don't know in that story that Jamie was my student 16 years ago. Now, you don't know that until the very end. And that works well for me because that story could be happening last year or two years ago. It's sort of a surprise to you that I've had the spoon for 16 years. And I know it's a surprise because when I've told it to audiences and I say, I've had that spoon for 16 years, I see the look on their faces because they suddenly understand that happened so long ago. And you still have that spoon. You know, and I'm often wearing the spoon. I have it under my shirt, and I take it out at the end of the story to surprise people. You know, I've had people say, is that really the spoon? And I say, like, do you really think I'm such a monster that I would lose Jamie Calvert spoon, that I couldn't keep track of a single spoon over the course of time? But, yeah, that time game I play with the audience allows that story to play out. Well, I would say that most of the time, maintaining stories within the moment is probably the better way to go, but that one is. That one operates a little differently.
- [37:28]
Shane Parrish
So what are the most common mistakes that people make when they're telling stories?
- [37:31]
Matthew Dix
Well, they describe too much, for sure. Actually, there's some really interesting research on comic books. They found that when you compare comic book characters, the comic book characters that have less visual detail are the ones people feel more connected to. So if I draw a circle with two dots for eyes and a, you know, a little mouth, you're going to be feel more emotionally connected to that than if I created a photorealistic version of a comic book character. Because if I give you the circle with the two dots and the smile, you fill in the rest with what you want it to be, and now you're connected to it. If I say, here's what Joe looks like and it's photorealistic, there's nothing you can do with that other than to accept it in your mind as Joe. Whereas you have a version of Joe in your head, the platonic version of Joe. And if I allow you to Place all of your background and need and understanding of the concept of Joe into my unrealized picture. You're more attached to it. So people make the mistake of overly describing. Either because they think an audience wants it, they've been taught to do it in school by people who don't write, but teach people how to write, or there are just people that get obsessed. I've met lots of people who say, like, I want them to see my mother the way I saw her. And I say, I hear what you're saying, but there's a difference between what you want and what the audience wants. And the storyteller that's doing what they want to do is making a mistake. It's the storyteller who says, what does the audience actually want from me? That's the one who's going to succeed. You can share the, like, what your mother looks like with your spouse, with, you know, your closest friend who's willing to put up with you, but the audience doesn't want to see your mother. They want to know what was said, what was felt, and what was done. Everything else let us fill in with our brains. So that's a mistake they make. The other problem people have is I just believe the beginnings of stories are essential to grabbing people's attention. And people waste the beginnings of stories explaining and teaching us things rather than launching stories in the proper place in the hands of a lesser storyteller. Let's say the Spoon of Power story begins with, I'm a fifth grade teacher. I'm working at a school in Connecticut. It's called Walk at School. I teach about 23 kids per year. We have recess in the middle of the school day. And so I'm teaching social studies. One day when the bell rings and I tell all my kids it's time to go out to recess. One of my students is named Jamie, Jamie Calvert. He's this little redheaded boy. He's very precocious. That's how most people start the story, which is, I need to teach you a whole bunch of stuff so that the story will make sense. That's the worst way to begin a story because no one has ever sat down and said, boy, I hope he teaches me a lot of stuff before he says something good. So that story starts in the right place, which is the actual moment the spoon makes an appearance. I'm going to teach you all the rest of the stuff along the way, but I'm not going to open my story by boring you. I'm going to open it with location Action. A little bit of wonder, right? There's a reason why I say it's a metal object, right? You never think spoon. Most people think knife. Some people think gun. And if you're not thinking those two things, you're wondering what the hell is in his hand? And either way, I'm winning. Because if you made a prediction that it's a knife or a gun, now you want to know if your prediction is going to come true, right? That's the crystal ball. Or you're just wondering, like, what is in his hand? What is in his hand? Right. And I want you to be thinking that because that means you want me to keep speaking. You're happy that I'm talking, because you want me to solve that little mystery that I've created for you. The beginnings are where people follow everything up. Because a story is like a plane ride to a beautiful place. You can land in a beautiful place, but no one's on your plane. Then you failed. Right? So the beginning of the story is the attempt to get everyone on your plane to make the journey with you. And I think that's where most stories fail because people disengage immediately. I just think there's too many opportunities for people to listen to 30 seconds and go, she has nothing to say. And they look at their phone, they think of their grocery list, they start looking around the room and saying, you know, who's that bust of? You know, they start doing that kind of thing and you're never going to get them back. So I would say most of the mistakes are made in the beginnings of stories where they fail to engage the audience and at the ends of stories where they fail to actually say anything.
- [41:30]
Shane Parrish
So the end being sort of the 5 second moment of change or things that are different for you and that the audience can relate to. Yeah, let's go deeper on that. How do we find those five second moments? How do we determine the beginning of this story? And those seem to be the two most critical points. Right? Where am I taking you? What's the destination that we're getting on? And like, how do we get on that plane together?
- [41:53]
Matthew Dix
Right. So we start at the end because we want to know what we're going to say. And I do this regardless of what speaking engagement you might be doing. If I'm helping someone with a keynote, I say, what's the thing you're trying to say? And oftentimes they say, well, we're trying to say a bunch of things. And I say, well, if you say a bunch of things, you're not saying anything. You have to have something that you're aiming at at the end. Even with a marketing deck, I always say, what are the last three slides? And they say, well, we don't know. We haven't gotten to those. And I said, that's where we start, though. We want to land somewhere. Otherwise we're just collecting slides and changing the order. Three days before the event, and then two days before the event, and then 2 hours before the event, we're going to say something or we're not going to say something. So in storytelling, regardless of what the story is, it's always, what am I trying to say at the end? Meaning, how did I change transformation or realization? How did my perception of the world, my perception of myself, my perception of a spoon, right? Or my. Or how I live as a human being? How has that changed over time? And if it's not a genuine change, it's just a thing that happened. It might be an amusing anecdote. I had a amusing moment in the airport yesterday. I got diverted by the customs agent. I sort of did a bad job with the first customs agent, and he put a red X on my form. And I thought, I've never seen that before. And so he said, move on. And I went to that place where they sort of release you. And I went right with everybody else, and the guy said, no, you go left. And I went into customs agent layer two, which I'd never been in before. And there was a harder questioning. They were essentially trying to figure out why I was here. Are you doing business here? And I'm like, no, I'm not getting paid. I'm just going to talk to a guy. I said it in a way that made them very suspicious of me. And in the end, the way they stopped being suspicious of me is they found my Wikipedia page and they said, oh, look, you're an American novelist and storyteller. And suddenly they all relaxed and everyone was like, okay, we understand why you're here. That was an amusing anecdote. It's not a story. Because when I left customs, I was not thinking, oh, I see the world in a different way. I see myself in a different way. I see customs in a different way. None of those things happened. It was the kind of thing I'll tell my wife, and she'll go, huh, that's funny. And three months from now, neither one of us will remember it because it's cotton candy. That's what so many people do, though. They think, oh, I have a story. Let me tell you about customs. I would never say I have a story. I said, something strange happened to me in customs the other day, right? But it's not a story. I might probe it and say, is there a story there? Is there something about me having a Wikipedia page? That's kind of weird, right? But I don't think there is, because I didn't feel, you know, that feeling you get. It's a feeling of something just happened, you know, and sometimes you don't know what it is. I have taken 25 years to figure out some of the things that have happened to me in my life. But I knew 25 years ago that it was something. And I knew it was something because I kept coming back to it in my life. You're like, that moment really sticks with me, you know? Sometimes it sticks with you because it was crazy. Sometimes it sticks with you because, like, in the heart, in the mind, it really hung with you. So you have to have something to say. You have to have a point. And we start at the end because we want to land in a place where people go, oh, my time was well spent. He's presented me with a new way to look at the world. He's made me reflect upon my position on this planet. That kind of a thing. That's what we're looking for. And that can be as simple as, I want you to see my product in a new and interesting way. So when you leave, you go, wow, that really is kind of an interesting broom. I've got a broom in my house. But I actually think they've upgraded the broom like I'm feeling. I gotta go get that broom now, because I don't have the right broom. That's actually a feeling. And that would be the end of a story, too. We gotta ask ourselves, what actually generates change over time. That's the end of the story.
- [45:27]
Shane Parrish
And then how does the end inform the beginning?
- [45:29]
Matthew Dix
Well, they're almost always in perfect contrast to each other. They have to be opposite of some way if you want change over time. For the end of my story, you know, I've learned a thing at the beginning of the story. I must not have that thing learned if at the end of the story, I say, this is a spoon of power. And it's really going to become the most powerful teaching tool I'll ever have. The beginning of the story is, it's just a spoon. And those are words I actually use in that story. Just an ordinary kitchen spoon. I tell you, in the beginning, this is a meaningless kitchen spoon. That because Lord of The rings was on the, you know, popular. I declared it the spoon of power for reasons that make no sense, except that's who I am, right? But essentially it was a nothing, and I made it a something. So we ask ourselves at the end, what's the change? What's the meaning? And then the beginning is always going to be the opposite of that. And now we have change over time. Now we create what I call an arc, right? It's going to go from one place to another. The customs agent story, you can feel it's flat, like there's no opening where Matt is nervous about going through customs. I've done it a million times. Even when I saw the red X, I'm in Canada. What are they going to do? You know, I guess if I was in another country, if I had just entered North Korea and I got a red X, maybe I have a story now, right? But in Canada, I was thinking the worst they're going to do is, like, make me wait a little bit longer before I enter Canada, right? So that's not a story because I didn't feel that thing, and therefore I can't have the opposite of that thing.
- [46:52]
Shane Parrish
It's hilarious to me, that story, because, I mean, everybody can get into Canada and yet we stop you.
- [46:58]
Matthew Dix
Right. Well, again, it was probably because I was communicating poorly. Like, what's the purpose of your visit? I'm here to see a guy. What does that mean? I'm going to talk to him. What are you going to talk to him about? Well, it's on a podcast and. What do you mean on a podcast? You know, I was like, I'm just not doing a good job here. And that's like, I got myself into trouble because I didn't tell a good story.
- [47:16]
Shane Parrish
So if the ending is the opposite and the beginning is the opposite. So, like, you have these two transformations. Walk me through some common movies and how you see them. And this might wreck movies for everybody listening going forward, but talk to me about how the opening scene of a movie often predicts the end and maybe use some examples.
- [47:33]
Matthew Dix
All of the openings of movies, or almost all of them, will predict the end of the movie, for sure. Romantic comedies are the easiest to play with in the beginning. If you see a movie like When Harry Met Sally, they actually say they hate each other at the beginning. I hate you, Harry. They do not get along. They travel cross country, and they can't stand each other the whole road trip. We know at the end they're going to end up together, Right? There's no way, you can't know that. It doesn't mean you're not going to enjoy the film. It just tells you this is how this movie is going to end, Right? If we think about the first Star wars, you know, a New Hope, we meet a boy on a planet who's dreaming with his friends about flying in space someday and using blasters and spaceships to defeat an empire. That's the beginning of it, right? So we have to know that that's not what's going to happen over the course of this movie. What happens is he meets Jesus in the form of Obi Wan Kenobi, because it's really a religion story. It's about a boy who thinks he's going to fly in a spaceship and defeat the Empire. And instead he finds religion, something called the Force. And at the end of the movie, when he's ready to use that spaceship to defeat the Empire, he turns off his targeting computer and he says, I don't need technology. I have religion. And religion will save the day. That's why when you leave that movie, you feel good. There's lots of space movies, and some of them, you leave and you go, ooh, that was a something. And then there are other movies. You leave and go, that was great. And you forget all about it. Because there's something about watching a character find a religion and then use that belief in the thing to defeat evil that means something to us. My favorite example is, like, not a great movie, but Independence Day, the Alien Invasion movie, I love that movie because that is so perfectly constructed. That is a movie about people. There's multiple protagonists in that movie, people who are all failing to get the respect of the people they value. Most. So, like Will Smith's character at the beginning of the movie is rejected by NASA. You don't get to be an astronaut. If you don't think Will Smith isn't going to space at some point in that movie, you're crazy. The President is being accused of being weak. He's soft on crime. He's a weakling. You know, he's not the strong man he once was. If you don't think at the end of that movie he's going to somehow be fighting an alien actually in his plane, right? You're crazy. It tells you exactly what's going to happen. Jeff Goldblum's character at the beginning of the movie, you're doing something with, like, satellites and television, right? His father doesn't thinks he's wasting his time. His wife, who's sort of estranged from him is doing big work and he's doing nothing. He's like just sending cable television up to space. That's what you're doing. All of those characters are essentially characters who are being disrespected by the people they value the most. And at the end of the movie, all of them will gain the respect of the people they value the most. Now, if Roland Emmerich, who made that film, said, hey, Shane, want to come to my movie, it's about a bunch of people who are not really feeling the respect they deserve and over the course of time they're going to find that respect and it's actually going to come from the sources that they value the most. You're probably not very excited about it, but if you place those actual stories amidst an alien invasion, suddenly we have something that people want to go to and when they leave, they go. It's kind of not a great movie. And yet for some reason, it sort of stays with us in a way that other movies don't. And I really believe that's why, even if we don't know it on the surface level, I believe that somewhere inside we recognize we watched people do a thing that we hope to do someday, which is to say, get the people who don't notice us to notice us. That's what that movie is about.
- [51:13]
Shane Parrish
Oh, that's interesting. I mean, when I hear that and I'm like, why is it memorable? I haven't watched the movie, so I'm going to watch it tonight, maybe, I think, oh, we've all been in a situation where we're feeling underappreciated, undervalued, and we all want to be the person, the hero in the end, right?
- [51:29]
Matthew Dix
Yeah. And that's exactly what that's about.
- [51:30]
Shane Parrish
What makes the difference between a memorable movie and when you walk out of and you're like, oh, that was entertaining, but you forget like two days later.
- [51:37]
Matthew Dix
Oftentimes the problem with those films is that whatever is sort of being expressed, hopefully that five second moment at the end, because most movies actually have that. Regardless of what you're watching, most screenwriters and filmmakers are taking us on an arc in a certain way. The more relatable that ending moment is, the more deep the more resonant it is through the movie, as opposed to what happens in a lot of movies, which is it just sort of lands at the end because they know they have to wrap it up at the end. Some movies carry it all the way through. If you think of Die Hard, Die Hard is a movie about A man who's trying to get back his wife, and his wife has decided that her career is going to take precedent at this moment. Right? And he's decided his career is going to take precedent. And so they're apart. And essentially he's just trying to get back to his wife. The whole movie is he's just trying to get back to his wife. And they have placed terrorists in front of him rather than what we face typically, which is like a bad phone call, the job isn't working out, our kids are making us crazy. That's not entertaining. But terrorist are. John McClane, the character in that movie, throughout the entire movie, we're always thinking about his wife. We're always going back to his wife. His wife is always in peril, and he's just trying to get back to his wife. In a lesser version of that movie, that idea is introduced at the beginning of the movie, but we don't really see the wife again until the end. And so we will feel like, oh, yeah, he did go on a journey, but it didn't sort of have the time to sink into us in the way that it sinks into us in Die Hard. You know, we understand. It's also really important that in that movie he's not sort of a jacked up Arnold Schwarzenegger. We're like, I'm kind of like that guy. It hurts to run through glass. Like, I understand that I might be able to do it to save my life, but the fact that in the next scene, he's sort of screaming and pulling glass out of his foot, in a way I would. As opposed to the way Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie would, which you just pull it out and crack a joke, you know, and toss it away. That's why that movie stays with us, because we're like, that's us. And I understand what it's like to try to get back to a loved one, and I understand how things are placed in front of us. Not those things, but things.
- [53:43]
Shane Parrish
How do we make a good trailer then for a podcast or for a movie? Like, what goes into that in your mind that pulls people in and like, I have to watch this. I have to listen to this.
- [53:53]
Matthew Dix
We want to make sure that people understand sort of what the problem, the character is facing, what that problem is, and make sure that it's something that we all can go, yeah, I get that. But not solve the problem or even let us know if the problem will be solved. John McClane desperately wants to get back to his wife. And unfortunately, terrorists now Stand between him and his wife. What do you do when there are terrorists standing between you and your wife, Multiple terrorists, and you have nothing except your wits? What do you do? And we go, I wanted to get back to the love of my life. You know, how. How is he going to do that? And suddenly you want it to happen. If they present it as something we want, then absolutely we're going to watch it because we want to see how to do it. You know, I think there is a part of our brain that says, I need to see how John McClane gets back to his wife. Because I want to get back to. Maybe it's the love of my life, or maybe it's like, I used to love playing poker and I haven't been playing it for a long time, and I want to get back to that love of my life. But we want to present sort of the stakes in the story without revealing too much of the story. So we want to see the yearning, the want, the desire. If it's a podcast, it's essentially you're going to present a question at the top. You know, something like, you've probably been telling not so good stories all your life, and you've probably heard people who tell amazing stories all the time. It turns out that's not actually something that people are born with. It's just strategic. And if you become a little more strategic, you can be one of those people. Right now we want to know. Now we're curious. We're not giving anything away. We're not indicating the end, but we're finding something that's going to, like, appeal to people in a real emotional way. We're going to identify a need they have. And if we identify an appropriate need, then we're going to grab our audience and they're going to pay attention.
- [55:41]
Shane Parrish
I love that. That's really cool. How do we learn to tell better stories then? Like, walk me through, sort of. You teach a class on this, like, what's that, that process for? If you had to give a high level overview of that, like, how do you. How do you learn to do that?
- [55:56]
Matthew Dix
Start by becoming what I call strategic listeners. There's listening, which everyone thinks they're good at and many people are not. And then there's active listening, which is, as far as I can tell, you look at the person and nod while they speak. But I'm not sure if that actually yields anything. So what I say is strategic listening, which is what I'm relentlessly doing all the time, which is to say if I'm Watching a movie and it makes me laugh. I say to myself, what did they just do to make me laugh? Like, what combination of words or situations did they assemble? Or how were the words spoken in a way that produced the laugh? If you hear someone tell a great story and you think, wow, that was a great story or a great movie, strategically, you should be thinking, what was it about that story about that movie, about the book I just read that made it great? I think a lot of times what happens is people allow that content to wash through them, which is great if you want to be a consumer of other people's greatness. But if you want to be a reproducer of that greatness, then we have to be strategic. My wife, when we leave movies, I don't know, somehow she knows when I know a movie is terrible, even if she thinks it's good. We left the first Wonder Woman movie, and she was feeling great because it was feminist, superhero, icon. And as we left the movie theater, she goes, I know something's wrong with that movie. I can tell by the way you're walking. And I said, that movie is a disaster. And she said, can you not tell me for 15 minutes so I can keep enjoying it? What she was saying is there's something fundamentally flawed with that movie, and you, as a strategic listener, have pinpointed it. I have not pinpointed it. Right now, I'm just a consumer of this content. Eventually you're going to tell me, and it's going to ruin the movie for me, but just let me enjoy it for a little bit. I told her, I said, I never have to tell you. And she said, no, you'll eventually tell me. So, you know, 15 minutes down the road, I told her what was wrong with Wonder Woman. As soon as I told her, she said, oh, what a terrible movie. And I said, yeah, I know, but most people won't notice because they're going to be consumers of the content and not the strategic pulling apart at the threads kind of person. I'm the pulling apart at the threads kind of person. And if you can become that, then you're going to be a much more effective storyteller because you're going to pick up on the things that people are doing.
- [58:00]
Shane Parrish
If I don't ask, I'm going to get eviscerator for this. So what was wrong with Wonder Woman?
- [58:04]
Matthew Dix
So at the end of Wonder Woman, did you see the movie?
- [58:06]
Shane Parrish
I did, like, a long time. Okay, I forget it.
- [58:08]
Matthew Dix
At the end of the movie, Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, she's battling the bad guy, he's some sort of God or something.
- [58:15]
Shane Parrish
Hades.
- [58:16]
Matthew Dix
Hades. And they're fighting. And while that's going on, Wonder Woman's boyfriend, for lack of a better word, is in a plane, and he's flying some poisonous bomb into the sky. And she's losing to Hades. She's about to be killed by Hades. And then off in the sky, she sees her boyfriend, and he dies. The plane blows up. He's risked his life to save her and all the people in the. In the area, right? And it's at that moment that she finds the strength to rise up and defeat Hades. Which means it's a story about a woman who is incapable of winning her own battles unless a man sacrifices his life and therefore inspires her to defeat the bad guy.
- [58:59]
Shane Parrish
Oh, that's interesting. I'd never thought of it that way.
- [59:01]
Matthew Dix
But that's exactly what happens. Right? But how often in movies does that happen? When Luke Skywalker defeats the Empire, it's not because he's thinking about Princess Leia. He doesn't need Princess Leia to inspire him to take the shot. Right? In movies, quite often, many times, almost always, the man manages to defeat the bad guy without any inspiration. Right? When Iron man defeats Thanos, he's literally looking at Dr. Strange. He's not looking at his wife, who is on the battlefield with him. He's looking at Dr. Strange. And Dr. Strange says, like, this is the one, one in a million circumstances where we might win. Right? He's not relying on a woman and the support of his wife to do it. He's doing it on his own with a little information from a guy. And that's how most male heroes win the day. Female heroes in so many movies can only win the day if a man does something first. Actually, the Mary Poppins movie, the new update of Mary Poppins, is even more egregious, because Mary Poppins is this woman who's trying to save this family. There's a father who could be the hero of the day, and he's not. And there's two kids. They could be the hero of the day. They could save the home, but they don't. Mary Poppins could be the hero of the day. She doesn't. Instead, quite literally, the door opens and a man walks in. The guy who played Burt in the original movie, he's the. He's an old actor that we're all happy, suddenly made a last appearance. The door opens, and he basically says, I have all the money you need. Here you go. Everyone fails to save the day. And then the door opens and a white guy with a bunch of money walks in and says, here you go. Here's what you need. And we're all happy because we see an old actor that we didn't know was going to be in the movie, and he suddenly appears, and we're happy and hooray, the day's been saved. And I sit there and go, really? None of the people in the movie are going to save the day. We're going to have the random white guy we haven't seen for all except the last two minutes of the movie pop in. But that's the difference between being a strategic listener and saying what's happening in this story? And someone who just is enjoying it. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. Although I do think in both of those movies, I think that what is being said, which is women can't win the day, I think that does sort of work its way into our unconscious. I actually think both of those films are pretty bad if you're a little girl and you're watching that movie, because you don't get to see kids win in Mary Poppins. You don't get to see Mary Poppins win. You don't get to watch Wonder Woman win on her own merit. I do think that they're sort of insidious in that way. Not intentionally. I don't. I can't even comprehend why these filmmakers did not see these problems as they were putting their films together or they decided they were problems. But who cares? Because. Because we have to kill him somehow. And why would we kill him for no reason? So we'll. We'll do it for that reason. But I do think they're pretty detrimental to girls in general, so.
- [61:41]
Shane Parrish
So if you're a parent, you have a young daughter. What's a good movie to watch with her that is not like that? That'll see conscious properly about the woman sort of not needing anybody else and saving the day.
- [61:52]
Matthew Dix
Thelma and Louise, what happens in that movie? They both die. Well, actually, they don't die. That's an interesting. I use this one in storytelling all the time. Thelma and Louise is a. It's from the 1980s. Two women sort of get mistaken for having committed a crime that they did not commit, and they essentially get chased by the police, and it's looking really bad for them. And it's a story about two women coming together, female friendship. And at the end, they have a choice of looking back and ending up in prison or driving off a cliff together. Holding hands. And they drive off the cliff holding hands. Now, the interesting thing about that movie is it ends with the car mid flight. We don't actually see it hit the ground, which allows the audience to think maybe they survived. It's improbable, and it's not meant to be thought that way. But there's a reason why we don't see the car disappear off screen. And it's because we're going to hang it right here. We're going to stop the movie right here. And you get to sort of determine what you feel about it. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the same thing. Butch, Cassie and Sundance Kid, they run out of the rocks to go face, you know, a hundred Federales. And we know they're going to die, but we don't see them die. So in our hearts and our minds are still alive. Maybe Butch and Sundance get out of it. And that's the idea that our story should always sort of have a little bit of a tail on them. When a story is not complete, when there are still unanswered questions at the end of a story, when the audience can sort of play it out a little bit on their own, those stories tend to hang with an audience much more. So we want our stories to not be wrapped up in a bow. Cause when we wrap it up in a bow, we get to shove it away and stop thinking about it. You know, I think of it as a rope. I don't want a knot at the end of the rope. I want a frayed ending that allows people to sort of wonder what the hell happened the next day. That's great. When they're wondering the next day, I'm thrilled.
- [63:29]
Shane Parrish
Is it okay to lie when we tell stories?
- [63:31]
Matthew Dix
I don't think so. I'm a novelist, you know, I've published six novels now. I believe in making stuff up all the time. The phrase never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. I hate that. It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say. When we lie in our stories, we can no longer be trusted. You know, when I'm telling stories to people, there's a reason why people share more secrets with me than you could ever imagine. Everyone from an audience member all the way up to the CEOs of tech companies that you interact with on a daily basis, they end up sharing, like, really private things with me. My wife will sometimes, like, you know, she'll be in the other room and she'll hear me talking to someone about storytelling in a coaching session. And when I come out, she goes, that didn't sound like storytelling. Like, the whole hour wasn't spent on storytelling. It's because I've spent so much time with this person and shared stories and expressed empathy and done all the things that I do that people are willing to trust me, connect with me. You know, there's a reason why I tell you the spoon of power story. And, you know, an entrepreneur once told me, you should sell spoons. You should drill holes in spoons and sell them on chains. He's not wrong. I could totally make a bundle. I'm not going to do it. It's a really cynical and awful way to be. But it's because they know the story is true. If you think it's fiction, suddenly you don't want to touch the spoon of power. It's just the thing he made up, and somehow he got a spoon on a chain, and that's all that's going on. So, no, I think the extent of lying in a story amounts to I'm allowed to take things out of stories that are inconvenient for the story, not inconvenient for me, but because they make the story not run as well. I tell a story about a bunch of guys in a car. You know, we're going to a place, and I don't mention one of my friends. And here's the story. He says, I was in the car that night, too. And I say, I know, but you didn't do anything. You know, you're just cluttering the field. Like, you're just stealing bandwidth from the audience, mentioning that Martin was also in the car. Like, if you don't do anything, you're out of the car. You're irrelevant to me at that point because you're irrelevant to the audience. So I'll take Martin out of the car. I'll condense time. So a story that takes place over the course of two days, I'll push it into one day because an audience doesn't want to have to hear that I went to bed, woke up, ate a bowl of cereal, and then the story continued. Right. I don't want to have that clunkiness of a story. I'll shorten locations, push things a little physically closer together, and I'll eliminate things. All of that is done in the service of the story, though if I did something stupid over the course of the story, I'm not going to remove the stupid thing I did in an effort to make myself look better. In fact, I will enhance the stupid thing I did, because I know that's what audiences really want. You know, that vulnerability is what they crave. So whenever I do something stupid, I am thrilled because it often means I'm going to have a story to tell.
- [66:06]
Shane Parrish
A lot of people tell end stories. This happened and then this, and then this and then this. And it's not super engaging. And I remember listening to a clip. The south park guys, they used the terms but and therefore. And then I remember reading this in your book. So talk to me about this and, like, how we take an and story and make it a but therefore story.
- [66:28]
Matthew Dix
It was devastating for me when I saw that clip too, because I thought I had stumbled upon something that was mine. Like, hey, look what I found. And then someone said, that's great. Did you know the south park guys believe that, too? And I was like, oh, really? I was going to be like Matthew Dix only. But they're right. And I'm right, too. And Ann story is essentially a story that is a series of events, one after the other, that are not connected in any meaningful way. First graders tell those stories all the time. I got up and then I got my cereal, and then I went to school. Right. But adults still tell those stories, too. Actually, most decks that I'm working on with marketing and salespeople are and stories. You know, it's an and story, because if you can just throw a slide into a deck, you don't have a story. Because I couldn't just throw a random scene into the spoon of power and still have that story work. Right. But people feel they can do that. I'm like, well, that's fine, but you're not telling a story now. You're just. You're just a slide monkey. You're just throwing in slides. So an Ann story is the kind of story that if we take something out, the story still plays. Nothing really changes in the story. We still can get to the end, which means it's probably not a story. You're probably just reporting on your day, but are. Therefore, stories rely on connection. Scenes are connected to other scenes, connected to other scenes. So I'm doing this, but that happened. Therefore, this happened, but then that happened. And when we connect it in that way, we can't actually remove anything from the story because the story will fall apart. I also think it. It creates motion in a story. Sort of an angular, exciting nature to the story. The spoon of power appears, but it's not the spoon of. It's not just a spoon. It's the spoon of power. Therefore, I must have it. So. Which is because. Which is therefore. So I chased Jamie, but I don't get it. But that's okay because he's my student and I'm still going to have time to teach him. So I'm in math, right? But he's put the spoon right here. So we're in this standoff. Then we're. I'm doing reading, but the spoon is still here. But that's okay because eventually I'm going to teach writing. I walk up the aisle, but the spoon isn't here. The bell rings. Therefore Jamie gets out of the seat, runs over to his coat, but also goes to the library and pulls out the spoon. So if you're budding and therefore ing all the way through, you know that every scene is required. You know, you don't have any fluff along the way. There's no extra scene sort of hanging out, and people are going to be. Be so invested in the story. I always tell people the but is the most powerful word in all of storytelling. If I say to you, I got into Uber today to come over here, but that just makes you want to hear the next part of that sentence. If I said, I got into Uber to come over here today, and, like, the power could go out and you'd be like, whatever, but. If I say but, you know, something happened, it's an indication that the world did not continue on in the way you wanted it. To you. It's the same thing when we Oftentimes the not is more powerful in storytelling. What something is not is more powerful than what it is. If I say Shane is smart, that's fine, but if I say Shane is not stupid, can you feel that that is a better way to say that? And what it does is when I say Shane is not stupid, it presents the dichotomy. It says, there's a stupid and there's a smart, and I'm going to tell you which one he is. If I say Shane is smart, it's flat. I've only given you one option. That one option exists, and it's the one I've chosen. So I'm often describing things by what they are not rather than what they are, because that creates that binary dichotomy in language that causes people to feel energy in our sentences as opposed to sort of that flatness.
- [69:55]
Shane Parrish
Does that only work when it's complete opposites, like, Shane is not lazy, or does it only work when there's like a really corresponding strong opposite to that?
- [70:04]
Matthew Dix
No, because I could say something like, and sometimes I do this. It's really weird. I actually teach people to practice this in a way that's weird. Like when I play golf, my coach will say, do this. And he goes, we're over exaggerating it right now. Eventually we'll get it back to normal. I have people over exaggerate it. So if I wanted to say the apple was red, you know, if I want to over exaggerate that and get really good at this, I'd say the apple wasn't yellow and it wasn't green. It was red. Right. So red, yellow, and green are not opposites of each other. They're just different colors. But you can still do it that way. I might not do it in that instance. That would start to make me sound weird. But I actually. My people I coach, I have them do that for a week. I say, I want you to never say what it is. I want you to say what it isn't. Just in an effort to get used to it. So that when you speak, there's people who just speak dynamically and there's people who speak flatly. And I think the dynamic speakers are the ones who are always trying to energize their sentences by doing things like that.
- [70:59]
Shane Parrish
What else goes into teaching people how to tell effective stories?
- [71:03]
Matthew Dix
Knowing what a story is is really important. So understanding as you move through your life that there's moments happening to you and those are the things that are worth sharing. I just spoke to a guy two days ago. He's going to be leading a conference, a whole bunch of people. He's a guy who does this all the time. And he met with me because he said, I'm out of stories. He said, I used all my stories in the last conference, so I need new stories. And I said, how long was the last conference? And he said, two days. That you ran out of all the stories of your life in two days? He did, Right. That's the problem often is we just don't have enough stories to tell. If we start to recognize that our lives are filled with stories, that they're everywhere, that we don't need enormous moments in order to carry the day. And instead, small moments are actually some of the most powerful moments we can ever share. I would much rather share with you a tiny, seemingly insignificant moment that's filled with meaning, rather than one of my crazy stories about the times I've died and been brought back to life. Those are fine stories, but they're not actually my go to stories because they're a lot harder to relate To I'd much rather tell you some tiny, seemingly insignificant moment that meant the world to me because that is more likely to relate to you. So paying attention to that is going to be really important. And then just establishing that mindset of what can I say next in order to keep the person listening to me. You know, when it's those stakes we've described, it's the idea of suspense, which is really powerful. And once you understand it, it's simple to use. It's simply the strategic exclusion of information alongside the strategic inclusion of information. That's what suspense is. It's. I'm going to tell you some of it, but not all of it. It's a metal object rather than saying spoon, right? Crossword puzzles are just suspense devices. They just say, there's a five letter word for the color blue. What is it? And now you have to know. And if you don't know what it is, it's suspenseful and almost frustrating that you don't know. And the beauty of suspense is the more information you provide, the greater the suspense increases. So if you don't know the five letter word for. And I say, oh, we figured out the first letter, it's an A, your suspense increases. You've either solved it and now you feel good because the solving of suspense makes an audience feel good, but also the perpetuation of suspense makes an audience feel good because they want you to keep talking, right? So eventually we discover the word is azure. But some people figured it out and feel good about themselves. And some people heard the word azure and suddenly felt relief. But either way, I'm winning. So when we're speaking, we just have to ask ourselves all the time, if the power goes out now, will people care? Twice in my life I've been in a movie where the power's gone out. Has ever happened to you?
- [73:28]
Shane Parrish
No.
- [73:29]
Matthew Dix
Maybe because I live in New England and we have a lot of weather.
- [73:31]
Shane Parrish
Like thunder and lightning. So I'm like, super worried the power is going to go right now.
- [73:34]
Matthew Dix
But. Yeah. Well, twice in my life it's happened with a movie. The first time I was alone watching a movie, power goes out. Manager comes in and says, you can come back tomorrow or later today, see the movie. I never went back because I didn't care about the characters. The power went out and I literally was happy that the story was over. The second time I was with my daughter, the power went out. We lost our minds. I was like, maybe we should go to another movie theater. Let's just go find another movie theater. That has power so we can find out the end of this movie. That filmmaker had me on the edge of my seat. That filmmaker made me want them to continue talking. If we place that as our mindset, if the power goes out, will anyone care? I'm thinking that all the time. If the power goes out, I want everyone to stay right where they are and be waiting for me to get the microphone back on so I can finish my story.
- [74:18]
Shane Parrish
That's fascinating. When they test movies with focus groups, they should almost test halfway through, sort of like a fake power outage. And like, do people want to come back tomorrow and see the resolution of the conflict that you have?
- [74:29]
Matthew Dix
Yeah, well, they do the. They do these registers where, like, how much are you liking the movie? And how much are you not liking the movie? And depending on what kind of movie you're in, if they're not liking the movie, if I was paying attention, I would say, well, listen, you're missing one of the four things. There's either no stakes at this moment. We're not worried about anything. There's no suspense. Right. We're not feeling a surprise coming, or we're not laughing. And it's one of those four things. I tell stories where sometimes I know there's a boring part. I hate it. But I'll get to a point in a story and I'll say for 45 seconds, I have to explain this thing to them. And I don't want to explain this thing to them, but I have to. So I'm either going to make it suspenseful or I'm going to make it funny. Those are probably the two. Go to strategies that I use. One of the two is going to work and get me through the boring part. I still register it as a storyteller, as the boring part, because I know that suspense and humor are not really storytelling. They're sort of like I'm painting over the problem so I can get back into the story the way I want to. But it's when we don't paint over the problem. It's when we're speaking and we suddenly know we have to say something that's not going to be terribly engaging. Those demos. Right now, I'm going to demo my platform for you and we're all going to see how it works, right? That's boring. It's always boring unless we paint over that problem with humor or suspense, even things like novelty, just do it in a different way. Do it in a way no one's done before. That works too. There's a Reason why, you know, Andy Kaufman took the stage with a record player, opened it up and played Mighty Mouse, and just stood there. And people were captivated. Eventually, they got irritated. But that was supremely entertaining for people for quite a while because they had never seen it before. So sometimes it's just, I'll find a way to do it that's never been done before, and that'll be interesting, too. But as storytellers, we have to be thinking that structure is everything. It's as long as you've structured your story properly, meaning. You've started at the right spot in the beginning and landed in a place of meaning, and you haven't filled it with unnecessary nonsense. It almost doesn't matter what the sentences are that you're choosing. There's a woman in New York, a storyteller named Anusha. English is her third language. It was Polish, Russian, and then English. And her English isn't great. It's fine. But her nouns and verbs don't always agree. Her vocabulary is limited compared to mine. She still kicks my ass sometimes because she's making good decisions. Once we have a good structure in place and we can perform at an adequate level, the sentences we apply to that structure mean a lot less because we're actually saying something of meaning, and we're starting in a place of engagement, and we're not filling our stories with unnecessary content. You do those three things. There's still a million things I could teach you about storytelling, but those things are really going to level you up quickly.
- [77:07]
Shane Parrish
So you advocate homework for life, which is sort of keeping track of the little moments every day that happen to you. That might be stories, might be anecdotes in an Excel spreadsheet. That's what you use. Walk me through, like, one you haven't made a story recently that you think is a story. And, like, how do you think about structuring it? Like, just walk me through your internal monologue about one of those moments.
- [77:27]
Matthew Dix
I knew this was a moment. I felt it. My son is getting ready to go to scout camp. And part of scout camp, which I went to all my life, saved my life. The Boy Scouts were more instrumental to me than anything. I knew that he was gonna have to take a swim test on the first day. You're gonna swim 100 yards. He's not the strongest swimmer. He actually had a little swimming kerfuffle a couple weeks ago. He swam out to the dock for the first time at the lake where we go, and then he couldn't get back. He got Nervous because he had gotten so tired swimming out to the dock, which was only like 40 yards out. I knew that going into this scouting swim test he might not pass. And if you don't pass, it doesn't mean you can't swim, but you have limitations placed on you. So when I was a kid, when I first went to scout camp, they had us do our swim test at 8:30 in the morning, right after breakfast on a Monday. And I was annoyed. I was just that kid that I always wanted to do things on my own terms. To this day I'm sort of that way. My wife says it's a double edged sword. I've got like nine pancakes in my belly and I go down in the cold of the morning and I have to jump in the lake and I swim about 50 yards and I'm done. I'm like, this is stupid. So I get out and they go, okay, you can swim, but you didn't swim far far enough. You're a beginner swimmer. And I said, okay, whatever. And they said, that means you can only swim in this little area here. And I was like, oh. And they said, and you can only take a rowboat. And I was like, oh, forget it, I'll do it again. I'll, I'll take the test. They go, great, Wednesday. That's when the next test is happening. So for two days I was a beginner swimmer, which also meant on Tuesday when we went across the lake to camp on the other side, all my friends glided across in a canoe and I was in a stupid rowboat. It took me 45 minutes longer to get across the lake. Everyone made fun of me. I hated it. I remember that moment. It sears in my brain. So as my son's getting ready to go to scout camp, I'm not sure if he's going to pass the swim test. But I tell him that story. I say, this is what happened to me. I say, it's okay if you don't pass. But what I want you to make sure you do is not the stupid thing I did, which is just get out because you're annoyed. I said, just try. I said, and don't stop swimming because you get tired. Stop swimming because you physically can't swim anymore. And then it doesn't matter what the results are because you'll feel good about yourself. So I pick him up a week later. I don't make it the first question I ask, but it is the first question I want to ask. I sort of like try to play it cool. I wait a While. And I go, oh, hey, what about the swim test? How'd that go? He goes, oh, I passed them the first try. And I was like, oh, thank goodness. Like, you know, my heart is with him. And I said, how did it go? And he said, actually, on the second lap, I was going to quit because I was so tired. But then I heard you in my head, and I remember you said, don't quit just because you're tired. Quit if you can't swim anymore. And I heard you say it, dad. And I swim the other two laps. I'm oddly emotional. Not oddly emotional. I'm appropriately emotional right now because I sent my son off for seven days, and there was a moment when I was in his head. It was like I went on that swim test with him, and it was because I told him a story and I was vulnerable, and I tried to make it as relatable to him as possible and as accessible to him as possible. And it carried the day. It's probably going to be a story I tell someday. It's a little trickier to tell because I don't like to tell stories where I'm the hero necessarily. You know, that is definitely a Matthew Dix is the greatest father in the world story. I'm going to have to, therefore, temper it with some of the terrible things I've done as a father so that I can indicate to people that I am not here to place myself on the top of the mountain as the greatest parent, but as a parent who screws up quite often. But isn't it beautiful in those moments of parenthood when you do the right thing and it actually works out and your kid is wise enough to tell you that it worked out like, it was just a perfect moment for me. So that's probably something I'll tell. And I knew right away that it was going to be a story.
- [80:54]
Shane Parrish
So you had this little memory, and then you just did this all in real time. So walk me through, like, how you structured it, how you thought about the beginning, you know, what the ending is. Because, you know, that moment, that was the moment you're sort of like, recording almost, Right? Like, that's your note.
- [81:07]
Matthew Dix
Yes.
- [81:08]
Shane Parrish
So why do we start where we started? Why did we go on that journey? And obviously, like, you did this in real time so you would refine this. But, like, walk me through your decisions when you made that story.
- [81:18]
Matthew Dix
The most important decision to make in that story is the structure. Meaning what's the chronological structure of that story? I used a BABC model, which is a Model that I started in the middle actually of the story I started with my son is going to camp and I know he has to take a swim test. And I know it might not be easy for him. The real beginning of the story happens in 1983. I'm going down to the waterfront to take a swim test with nine pancakes in my belly. I jump in the pond and think it's stupid and get out. And I end up a beginner swimmer. Thirty years later, I'm with my son. That's a terrible way to tell that story. You can feel that already. But that's how most people tell it, right? Most people tell it chronologically, meaning abc. I started in the middle because. For a bunch of reasons. One is if I tell you that beginning of the story, it already gives away the end. You know what's going to happen. Right? Right. So I don't want that. Also stories that take place over the course of 30 years, actually that story takes place over 40 years. Nobody wants to hear a 40 year story. A 40 year story sucks. Right. So what we do is we turn the 40 year story into a week long story, which is my son is getting ready to go to camp and I don't want him to make the same mistake I made. So I'm going to tell him a story. So I start in the middle at the B. The next part of the story, the next scene is the a, which is 40 years earlier. I'm at camp and I do this thing right? So that's I'm bringing us back in time, but I've started us in sort of the present. So it's a story that takes place in the present, but I yank the past into the present for a moment. And that way the story doesn't feel like it's taken 40 years, it feels like it takes a week. A guy tells a boy a story and then he waits to see how the story plays out. That's the most important thing to figure out in a story like that is where should I start? And it is absolutely not in 1983. It's absolutely in 2024 now. Things I already know I did poorly when I was telling you that story. I didn't start with a scene right. I started by teaching you. I said, my son's getting ready to go to Boy Scout camp. That's a terrible beginning. What I should have said was, my son's trunk is laid out in the bedroom and he's throwing stuff into it in a way that will never work out for him. I'll let him make this mistake for a while, and then eventually my wife will come in with packing cubes, and she will solve all these problems, right? But while he's throwing stuff into this trunk for Scout camp, I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, and I decide this is the right moment to tell him what he needs to hear. And that sentence is important, right? In the new version of the story because that makes you want to know what it's going to be, right? So I'm constantly trying to create a sentence that causes you want to hear the next sentence, or I open the story by making you laugh, right? You actually laughed when I said throwing stuff in in a way that's never going to work out. And then packing cubes is a funny thing. So all of that is designed to. I'm going to make you laugh, and then I'm going to get you to wonder what the story is, and then I'm going to tell the story, and then I'm going to go ahead and have him come back. And I really liked the thing I did with you where I said it was the first thing I wanted to ask him, but I tried to play it cool. You laughed when I said that, and I knew it. I knew you were going to laugh because I thought that was the truth, and I said it, and I knew you were going to laugh because that is the truth of our lives, which is there's so many times in our lives when we want to just ask the question right away, but we know we're not supposed to. So we order. We order the coffee, and we ask how your day was, and we ask how your wife is, and we ask how your kids are doing. And then eventually, when we feel the moment's right, we get to the question. That sameness, that reality that makes you laugh because you think, oh, I've done that. Like, that is a. That is a real thing in life that we do all the time. All of that is how I sort of thought about that story. The structure was good. The opening was not. But fixing the opening, you can see, is pretty easy.
- [84:53]
Shane Parrish
That's amazing. Thank you for going into detail on that. Talk to me about metaphors and finding metaphors and how they can be used for business people specifically telling stories, or even individuals telling stories about greater meaning. I remember the story that stood out, and I forget the guy's name in. In the book that you just wrote about the Little League and how he turned that into a story for his company. And I thought that was really interesting. But like, how do we find those metaphors?
- [85:19]
Matthew Dix
So what we want to ask ourselves when we're trying to do business, when we're trying to send a message, right? We're trying to look for theme, meaning or message. People, content match. That's the problem. Rather than thinking about what they're really trying to say. This is a good example. I'm working with a guy who's getting ready to do some speaking. He's going to be speaking to entrepreneurs about getting through bottlenecks so they can accelerate their companies. Sort of the lesson he wants to teach them is sometimes you just have to find the one right thing that's holding your company back. And he has a great example of it. He says to me that at Facebook, early on, when they were failing to gain traction, they looked at their data and they realized that if a user accumulated seven friends, made seven friends or seven connections on Facebook in 10 days, they were likely to stay on the platform. And if they didn't do that, they were likely to leave the platform. And so Facebook, recognizing that data point, focused all of their energies on how can we get a user to find seven friends in 10 days. And that's when they added features like load your email contacts into Facebook so that we can show you who they are. We'll recommend friends to you, things like that, your friend, we'll start telling you who your friends are that you have in common. All of those features were designed so Facebook figures out that's the one bottleneck we have. That's what he wants to tell the, tell the audience. But he doesn't want to just use that story. He wants other things, right? So when I'm talking to him, I say, well, what are other examples of sort of singular solutions that you can think of? He gives me a business solution which is just content matching. You already have your business example, the Facebook one, and it works really well. I think it's great. Like right away I went, uh huh, yeah, okay, great. I said, what about in your personal life? Do you have a personal life, you know, simple solution that really changed things for you? He says, well, there was a point years ago when I was struggling with my marriage. You know, my wife and I were just not getting along and we had gone to couples therapy and it wasn't seeming to work. And he, one day he sat down with his buddy and his buddy said, are you kissing your wife every morning? And he said, no. And his buddy said, kiss your wife every morning. You know, and he said, what's that going to do? He said, Just do it. And it changed everything for him. Somehow. There was a lack of physical closeness and intimacy that was missing in the relationship, and a kiss in the morning started to change everything for them. I said, that's the story you should use. And he goes, I'm not using that story. He said, that's not like what the purpose of this business is. And I said, no one's going to remember your other business story. In fact, a lot of people aren't even going to remember the Facebook story. But if you want to land the idea that sometimes a singular solution can solve a big problem, you tell the story about kissing your wife in the morning, and they'll never forget it, and they'll start kissing their wives in the morning, and they will start telling other people to do so as well. You will have an echo through their lives. Now, that's a metaphor, right? That's a metaphor for his Facebook example, which is what I said to him, was the Facebook example matching theme, meaning, or message, essentially is what's the theme, meaning, or message of the Facebook story? A singular solution can sometimes solve a really complex problem. So let's find that in our personal life. Now, I'm always fighting with business people on this because they never want to bring their personal life into the business world, which is why they're round, white, and flavorless, why they're all forgettable, why everything they say is ultimately forgotten. Because we don't remember business stories. We don't remember most of them, and there's so many of them. But a guy who gets on stage and is vulnerable enough to say, say, a few years ago, I was having a problem with my wife, and she was having a problem with me, and we were not getting along and things were looking bad, and then I told my buddy, and I end up kissing her. And somehow today, we're the happiest couple in the. That's unforgettable. Now, I think he's going to do it, but part of me thinks he just told me he's going to do it and he's not going to do it, because that happens all the damn time. I don't understand why people don't see it. Because I know you see it like you made a sound, right? I listen to audiences. When I said, do you kiss your wife every morning? You made a sound, you went, mmm. Which said to me, that's all I need to know. The story is perfect, right? When you hear that sound from an audience, you know you have found the perfect story for this example. And if he was you. And I was telling him the story, he would make that sound. He'd go, mm. But for some reason, because he has to tell it now, he can't do it. Because I can't tell a personal story, I'm there to teach them about solving business problems and bottlenecks, right? And I'm like, you are? But we don't teach lessons like always by sticking to the content, right? We have to expand beyond it to get people to understand it, particularly when things get complex. When your business is different than mine, you know, you have a platform and I have a broom company. How are we going to talk to someone who's working for Slack and someone who's working for a broom company, Right? If both of those people are in front of us and we're trying to improve their businesses, how are we going to do that? We're going to use metaphors. We're going to find ways to send lessons and messages to people in ways that resonate in their lives. Now, the beauty of that story, too, and all the stories I teach, like the story of Boris, you know, the one you mentioned about the baseball game. When we do that, when we're daring enough, courageous enough to do it, we create these markers in people's lives as well. The next time one spouse kisses another spouse in the morning, they're thinking about him and they're thinking about simple solutions to solve bottlenecks. It's going to continue to reverberate whenever we can take the content from our business world and bring it into the personal world and allow people to feel it in a way that is really human and not profit driven. Then suddenly we have stories that people want to hear and we become unforgettable because everyone is forgettable unless they're doing something that is touching the heart and the mind. Slightly different than everybody else, changing brain chemistry, being entertaining, all of those things.
- [91:04]
Shane Parrish
Is there a difference between telling our own stories and telling other people's stories?
- [91:07]
Matthew Dix
Yeah, there is. Is. Unfortunately, when you tell other people's stories, they're never nearly as good. If I had told you that my brother went through customs and got the X on his form and had to get through that second layer, that story doesn't mean very much to you. My brother, in your mind, is a fictional character you don't even know. Maybe I don't actually have a brother. It doesn't mean they can't be told. There is a way to tell them. It's tricky and it's not as effective. People want to hear the story of the person sitting across from them, they want to know. Know that you're the one speaking, because that requires vulnerability. If I tell you a story and it's not about me, the only vulnerability required is public speaking. And I've overcome that. And presumably anyone who's standing in front of other people can at least publicly speak in an effective, somewhat unnervous way. So me telling you stories about other people is just me reporting on events for people that you may or may not know. The vulnerability comes from, I'm having difficulties with my wife, and we can't figure out how to solve it. And then one day I decide to start kissing my wife in the morning, and everything changes. That vulnerability is so powerful. Other people's stories, you just don't have that.
- [92:15]
Shane Parrish
How do we teach confidence to get on stage, to tell a story, to have the ability and not only to get on stage and tell a story, but to be vulnerable? It requires a certain degree of confidence in the audience I know and yourself.
- [92:28]
Matthew Dix
I get asked inevitably, if I work with someone long enough by every client, if I can help them learn how to be confident, I have more confidence than I need. My wife will tell you, you know, and if I could teach people how to be confident, like a magic pill, I would be the richest person on the planet, because it is the most powerful thing you can have when you genuinely don't care what other people think. Most of the time, my wife will tell you it's extraordinary and terrible depending on the day. And that's very true. Sometimes when I, you know, I genuinely don't care about most of what people think, it allows such freedom in life, but also, as my wife will say, sometimes is disastrous.
- [93:05]
Shane Parrish
Were you born that way, or is that something you learn? Like, how do you teach people not to care about what other people think?
- [93:10]
Matthew Dix
Well, I used to think, and I still kind of think most of it happened for me. When I was, you know, around the age of 21, I was in an armed robbery. I was managing a McDonald's restaurant. After closing, three men broke through the glass and came into the. Into the restaurant. And I knew I was in a lot of trouble because the police had come and they had told me about these guys. They had already killed two people. So when I heard the glass break, I knew what was going on. I was sort of managing the safe at the time, collecting all the money, and for reasons I will never understand, I had a deposit of about $7,000 in my hand, in a bag. When I heard the glass break, I took it And I reached to the back of the safe, and I dropped it down the chute into the box that I did not have a key for, you know, in a little placard on the box. That manager does not have key. They got to me. They put me on the phone floor. They told me to open the box because they figured out there's not enough money in the safe. I told them I can't. And they. They began beating me. And eventually one of them put a gun into my head and said, I'm going to count back from three, and then I'm going to pull the trigger, and I'm going to shoot you if you don't open the box. And then they counted back from three, and he pulled the trigger on an empty gun. And I kind of fell apart at that moment, and I tried to crawl away, and they pulled me back. And then the guy I was afraid of. Of the guy, I was afraid of all of them. There's one, you know, that there's just one. I'm like, that's the one that you don't. That's the one I don't want to deal with. And that was the one who put a gun to my head and said, this one's loaded, and now I'm really going to blow your head off if you don't open the safe. And when he counted back from three again, I remember being so astounded because all of a sudden, I wasn't afraid and I wasn't angry. The only thing I felt was regret for what I had not accomplished yet, that I was 20 years old. I was on a greasy tile floor at the back of a McDonald's restaurant. I had just been homeless, like, six weeks before. I was actually awaiting trial for a crime I did not commit. My life was a disaster. I had all these dreams, and I knew with absolute certainty that I was going to die in that moment. And I just fell. I haven't done anything. And then he pulled the trigger on an empty gun again, which, you know, resulted in a lifetime of ptsd. But it's a trigger in my life that suddenly made everything else seem unimportant, like nothing seems to matter very much. I get yelled at by my fellow teachers. Some of my teacher friends say, matt doesn't care about anything. There's an A schedule, B schedule, and C schedule. You guys have to figure out who's going to get which schedule. And I'll say, I don't care what schedule I get. And they get mad at me for not caring. But I'M like, that's not a relevant thing. And so, you know, what I tell people is that sort of a moment where other people's concern over what I looked like or thought or did all just washed away. But oftentimes I'm saying, listen, there's not a gun to my head. I'm not about to die. So this is nothing. And sometimes it's not true, sometimes it is something. And my wife will say, that can't be the level for everything. And she's right. And sometimes it is something. And I have to acknowledge that. With all of that said, my brother and sister would tell you that when Matt was a kid, he just didn't care what other people thought either. And maybe that is in me a little bit. I was the oldest of three and then later five. Growing up in a home that sort of didn't have very much parental support. I was sort of taking care of myself at a very early age. And I suspect that when you're nine and you're trying to find food and take care of your siblings and you know, going to your sister's parent teacher conference because you know that the parents aren't going to go to the conference, so maybe you can figure out what's going on. Like, I think maybe that helps a little bit too. So I think it's. The problem with all of that is to say it's. I don't know how teachable it is. Public speaking is very difficult and storytelling is even more difficult because you have to be vulnerable. It's kind of like going off a high dive. You know, when I was growing up, There was a 14 foot high dive at the town pool which would absolutely not be allowed today. It was very dangerous when you went off it. Like you always had to hold your hands out or you'd smash your head into the bottom of the pool. But I remember standing there and watching kid after kid after kid go off that high dive and everyone was fine. They all swam to the surface, jumped out of the water, did it again, and finally I decided to do it. And even when I was up there and I knew everything was going to be fine and I'd seen a million kids do it before me. Still terrifying. And eventually I just had to go off, off and hit the water. And the second time it was still terrifying even though I had just done it and it didn't kill me. I had to do it a whole bunch of times before I finally was able to just go off and not care. And I often think that's what I'm trying to get people to do. I can't make the fear go away the first time, right? You just have to go off the diving board and see that it worked out okay. And the beauty of it is, if you stand on a stage and you share something vulnerable, and I have lots of people who have experienced this, you share something vulnerable. The response you get is extraordinary. Oftentimes when people share something like that, they're worried they're going to be judged for the stupidity, the shame, the ridiculousness. But we just all walk around with that. We're all walking around with something that we are. We think we're the only one who does. And it's never true. But the problem is, so few people are willing to speak about their stupidities and their shames and their foolishness is that the people who are willing to do it are really valued in this world because they make the world easier for everyone else. And I've never had. Never in my life have I ever said something on stage and had someone come to me and say, I think less of you because of it. You know, I tell a story about pretending to be a charity worker for Ronald McDonald's Children's Charities. When I get stuck in New Hampshire one day without any gas, I actually go collecting door to door as a charity worker to get gas money to get home. It's a pretty terrible thing. Now I'm able to tell that story because I was 19 at the time, so a long time ago. That's okay. But I tell that story a lot. It's actually in my first book, and one of the first times I told that story, when I stepped off the stage, it was sort of intermission. A woman came up to me and she said, aren't you worried about what people are going to think of you for that? And I said, well, what do you think about me? She said, I actually love you for it. And I said, do you think you're some kind of unicorn? Do you think you're the only nice person in the room? They all like me better for it. Just some of them want to be at the bar, are. Some of them are using the bathroom. And you came to talk to me. I said, but no one in the room is thinking he's a scoundrel. Because at 19, with absolutely no money and destitute, the best solution he found was pretend to collect money for charity. Now, if I'd done it the day before, maybe then I don't tell the story. And maybe you're right to think I'm an awful person. I've never had a situation where I say something like that on stage and have anyone say anything, but something kind to me.
- [99:35]
Shane Parrish
Is there a difference between writing a story and telling a story? And what are those differences?
- [99:41]
Matthew Dix
Yeah, I had that conversation with someone today, a client, who said, can you write my keynote for me? And I said, no, I don't do that. That's also boring. I don't want to do it. I've never written anything down that I actually speak on a stage other than maybe an outline. But even then, it often is just, I'm going to tell this story to make this point and this story to make, like, almost nothing, because I know that what I put on a page is always going to be more grammatically correct. Correct than what I'm saying. And so when I help someone with a keynote, I don't ever want to see the page. They want to send me the. They always want to send me the document. I say, I don't want to see the document. Because a speech does not live on the page. It lives in life. It lives in the air. It lives in your voice. I want to hear what you say. Because what I say and what you say are going to be very different things, and we're going to say them in different ways. So when I'm writing, which I do, I mean, I have nine books, I believe in writing. I know that if I was to take something out of my book and read it out loud, it would sound wooden, inauthentic, it would sound written. If you've ever seen David Sedaris perform, he reads from his books and his notes. He stands behind a lectern and he reads it. And you can tell it's read like. And that's the goal of that. And there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not performing. And it's written more to make you laugh than it is to connect with you. Because it is a little harder to connect to someone as they read. You know, it's why even politicians who use teleprompters, you can't see the teleprompters. Right? They're designed in such a way that you often don't even know they're there when a politician's using one. Because you want to believe someone's speaking from their heart and their mind. Which is why I don't memorize anything. Everything is remembered, but not memorized. If I was to look at a page or even memorize a page, you would know it right away. My wife and I When we attend storytelling shows, we'll hear a storyteller, and I'll be like, that was a great story, and it was fully memorized, and I'm sure it was off the page. And she'll go, yes, it was. Was. And it just does not make us love the person as much as the imperfect, stumbling storyteller who also told us a story and did it in that authentic, imperfect way. The former director of the Moth, Katherine Burns, once told me, I was getting ready to speak in front of 2,500 people. I told the story, and I made a mistake in it, and no one knew it but me and Catherine, because she knew the story. There was just a place where I forgot something and I had to double back and, like, slide it back in because I knew I had to have this thing to have the end play out. And I sat down, and the first thing I said was, oh, I screwed that up. And she's like, don't be ridiculous. You and I are the only two people who knew you had to double back. She said, you did a great job. I said, fine. And she said to me, it's in the imperfection that the beauty lies, because the imperfection tells us you had not memorized that thing. You remembered it, and then you realized in the midst of the story that you had forgotten something, and you went back and caught it and then moved on. And that made everyone feel like you were speaking to them and not at them. And I always think about that. The imperfection is the beauty.
- [102:36]
Shane Parrish
Go deeper on the speaking to people and not at them.
- [102:38]
Matthew Dix
Speaking at them is the idea that it's almost irrelevant who's in front of me. Ninety entrepreneurs at a conference, or 2,000 people at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, or six people in a library, you know, and all of those are audiences. I speak to someone who has a sort of memorized speech. I know authors who have them. You know, authors. Authors who have their speech that they take wherever they go. And it never changes because they've crafted it, memorized it, and they deliver it. That's speaking at an audience, meaning nothing's going to change. I'm here to say words. I'm going to basically say them to the middle distance. And when I'm done, I will take a few questions and I will go home. Right? That's at. If you're speaking to an audience, people know right away that what I'm hearing tonight will not be the same thing he says tomorrow night. Right? And it's in those imperfections that people will detect that Stopping a sentence to correct what you just said, or circling around or even repeating yourself accidentally and then saying, oh, I already told you that I'm sorry. Like that's a beautiful thing. Because then they know it's for them, right? People want to know that when you're speaking, it's specifically for them. Like, I've brought this part of me to you and it's never going to be this way again. It's going to be the same stuff, right? But it's going to be done in a very different way tomorrow. And I might leave something out, put something new in, which I often do. But that's the difference between speaking to the middle distance, regardless of who's in front of you or looking at people and saying, who are they? I once did a show at the Brooklyn Historical Society. I went there with a story to tell for a moth story slam. And I'd never been there before. It was like a one time deal. And when I got in and looked at the audience, they were basically all blue haired old ladies. And I thought, the story I have is not going to be appreciated by these ladies. It was a sort of raunchier story. Like it just wasn't going to work. But because I don't memorize my stories, I spent 15 minutes pulling out all the humor that I knew wouldn't land and leaning into the heart instead. And I won that slam. And it was absolutely not the story I would ever tell the next night. No one laughed at the story that night and yet they loved it the next night. If I tell it, everyone's going to be roaring with laughter and they're going to love it. And that's the difference between speaking, you know, to an audience versus at an audience.
- [104:53]
Shane Parrish
So if I come to you and I'm an author and I say, listen, I don't talk, I don't do talks, but I need to write really compelling stories. What are the key points that you would get me to learn or understand?
- [105:05]
Matthew Dix
The first thing I would do is, especially for an author, I'd say, let's tell stories. So we're not going to read from our book because no one has ever wanted that in the history of the world. Let's tell stories and let's find interesting stories about how your book got written. Moments along the way. People are really interested in the work that other people do. They want to know, like, how the process works. What do you do as a firefighter? Like, do you live in the firehouse? How many days do you live in the firehouse? What's it like? People really want to know that stuff, and the same thing for an author. So if you ever hear me give a book talk, it's never about even the content of the book. I almost don't tell you anything about what's inside the book. I tell you about the journey to write the book. And that's the method of let me find half a dozen stories about the writing of the book, where the idea came from that better be a story, not just a one sentence. It's a story. I don't know if you've noticed, but, like, I can't answer a question without going on for a long time with a story. We're looking for those stories along the way that will lead people to want to open the book because they've taken the journey on the creation of the book and now they're going to want to open it up and find out what's.
- [106:07]
Shane Parrish
They're invested in it.
- [106:08]
Matthew Dix
Almost right. The same thing with the keynote people. For someone who says, can you help me with my keynote? We start at the end, just like a story. What are you trying to say? And when they say, I'm trying to say three things, I say, well, you can't. You gotta say one thing. And then we'll say, all right, that's what you're trying to say. Let's find a beginning that's the opposite of that. The acknowledgement of, there was once a time when you didn't know this thing and now you know this thing. But then the next step is to find those stories. Let's find some stories along the way that led to that understanding. Because a keynote is typically 60 to 90 minutes, we can't tell a 60 or 90 minute story, but we can tell six stories over the course of 90 minutes that will support it and be entertaining. So that's what I'm helping authors do all the time, is find those stories to tell.
- [106:48]
Shane Parrish
But those are stories that you're telling people. I mean, like in a book. I'm writing a book on xyz. Like, how do I tell a better story in that chapter?
- [106:55]
Matthew Dix
I see. Yeah, yeah.
- [106:57]
Shane Parrish
What makes a difference when you're writing a story versus you're telling? Like, you can use intonation and pitch and you can speed things up and you can go faster and slower and you can pull me. I can't do that on the page as easy, right?
- [107:10]
Matthew Dix
No. One of the things you can feel a little better about with a book is you can actually use more adjectives because people expect them. I Still don't. The first novel I wrote, I'll never forget it. My agent called and said, we have no idea what your character looks like. You have not provided 1oz of description of your protagonist. That's crazy. And I said, I don't know. I kind of visualize them as me, you know? And she's like, that's not actually a thing. Like, I have such a poor visual memory that helps me as a storyteller. I lived in my home for 10 years with my wife. Wife. We were driving home one day. Somehow we started talking about the color of houses. I told her we lived in a yellow house. She said, we live in a tan house. I said, it's yellow like the sun. And when we pulled down the street, I looked and went, oh, my God, it's yellow. Ten years, I didn't know the color of my house. So it's not surprising that I. I don't love adjectives anyway. But on the page, we can use a few more, so that can be helpful. The paragraph and sentence structure oftentimes can replace intonation and pacing. What I'm always fighting with my editors on is this single sentence should be part of the previous paragraph. And I say, no, it should not, because I want it to stand out in the way. I would punch the sentence if I was speaking it. So if you look at the way I write, especially today, actually, if you compare my first novel to my latest novel, you'll see an enormous difference. Because this understanding has come to me. I can craft the sentences and the paragraphs to look such a way that it can provide some of the humor and some of the suspense. That's why I hate closed captions. My kids watch everything with closed captions all the time. And I can't stand it because it gives the joke away all the time. Right? You see the joke before the person says the joke. But that's how sometimes people write, which is they don't allow the. The punch to stand alone. They lose the punch in the previous paragraph of, you know, the eight sentences. And the punch is the last one. And I say, take the punch out and make it its own paragraph. It looks weird in the eyes of an editor because it is associated with the paragraph before. But I say, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the physical effect that the reader has when they finish the paragraph. And then, bang. There's another sentence there all by itself in a way that I love. It's also the reason I drop subjects all the time in sentences. So rather than Saying I went to the store. Especially if I'm emailing people, I'll say went to the store rather than I went to the store. Because I want to punch right away. I want to get into the sentence quicker and I want them to feel the action of it. So you can start to think about things like that when you're writing to sort of bring some of those things that we get to use Honest Data page, you know, onto the page. A simple version would be someone would say use italics and bold and that's fine, but like, I kind of feel like that's a 400 year old trick that's been used for a very long time. And I think sometimes it actually doesn't work. It feels almost corny to suddenly land on italicized words, whereas I would much rather be doing the things like I've described. So thinking about the way the print lands on a page can really make a difference in the way that it's affecting a reader.
- [110:07]
Shane Parrish
That's really interesting. I think also sort of like your topic sentence for a paragraph pulls people in. Or sort of like a lot of people just read the first sentence. And so when you put the final point at the end of a paragraph, that's five or six sentences, you're losing a certain percentage of your audience along the way because they're reading the first sentence and they're like, okay, I get this paragraph, I'll go to the next paragraph. And so they missed that point.
- [110:30]
Matthew Dix
Common mistake with storytellers all the time is I teach them. You've been taught to write in a boring way, which is topic sentence and supporting details. That's a disastrous way to write because you're right. Once you present the topic sentence, people know you're going to provide some evidence. And unless I'm like a nerd who wants to know the efficacy of the evidence, I'm moving on. So in storytelling, we never start with a topic sentence. If I want to say, I had a really rotten grandmother, right, I would never start the sentence with my grandmother was a terrible person person, and then list the way she was terrible. That's how you were taught to write. But that's a terrible way to write. Instead, I would say, my grandmother did this to me. My grandmother did this to me. My grandmother did this to me. And then the last sentence might be, my grandmother was a terrible person. Or I might say to myself, as the writer or the storyteller, I've made my point. I'm going to allow that topic sentence to go unsaid because I think they're going to know it already and audiences love that. They want to put things together on their own. But you're right, when you lead with a topic sentence, you've kind of failed most of the time. Now, there are times when this is appropriate if you're writing for a newspaper, right? If you're writing scientific things. I was going to write a book with a sociologist at one point, because I've spent 26 years now primarily in the company of women. Because I'm an elementary school teacher. I'm almost always the only man in a room. And I actually attended an all women's college. So for four years before that I was in a classroom and I was the only man. So I wanted to write a book about sort of my reflections on living in a world filled with females for all my life. And I was going to partner with the sociologist. And ultimately the project fell apart because she wanted to write it like a sociologist, which was topic sentence and supporting details. And I said, no one reads your books. And I know why, because your books are boring. Because you write in the way that you were sort of taught. And I wanted to do the opposite. I said, I want to lead them to the conclusion. And she said, no, you start with it and then you explain why it's the conclusion. And we just couldn't, we couldn't come together because she wanted to write a boring book and I wanted to write an entertaining book. Her book would have been respected by like, you know, academics.
- [112:30]
Shane Parrish
But your book would have been read.
- [112:32]
Matthew Dix
And my book would have been read and been impactful to the people. I actually wanted to be impactful, which was not academics, but basically men who maybe operate in a female world and are not doing it effectively, which was.
- [112:45]
Shane Parrish
What my goal was as a fifth grade teacher. How do you advocate that parents teach kids how to write?
- [112:50]
Matthew Dix
I tell them a bunch of things. One of the things is, if you're talking about spelling, grammar or handwriting, you're making a terrible mistake. You're making writing unfun. When kids are little, they're writing with pen and paper and then when they get older, they're typing. I say, never look at the writing that your child is doing. Always have them read it aloud. Because what comes out of your child's mouth is always more beautiful than what they're putting on the page. That so of nonsense on the page. That'll get cleared up eventually. We don't have to worry about that. What we want is to make kids love to write. That is the only goal every Teacher should have. Because once you love to write, you'll start writing and you'll just get good at it. So we want to do things like let kids write as many things as they want to. You know, there's mistakes where teachers say, well, I need you to finish this before you start that. But as a writer, I can tell you I've never met an author who's only working on one thing is the thing that's to do do. And then there's the thing you're cheating on. Right. And then there's the. The thing you're not telling anyone about that you think is actually the greatest of all the things you're writing.
- [113:48]
Shane Parrish
Yeah.
- [113:48]
Matthew Dix
You know, and then there's the writing in the new genre that, you know, you want to explore. Like, there's all of that. And yet when we get to school, we tell kids they have to write one thing and finish the one thing and then move on. We don't let them abandon writing. You know, my daughter is a writer. She's a real serious writer. I think she was like 130 pages into a novel. I know at like the age of 12. She's an unusual human being. She, at the age of 12, she got that far into a novel. And she said, dad, I don't think it's that good. I don't think I'm going to finish it. And I think a lot of parents would have said, you got to finish that. Look at all the work you put in as an author. I said, yeah, if it sucks, you should abandon it. I said, the lesson is, figure that out a little earlier next time. I've abandoned a lot of things. I've never actually gotten that far into something and needing to abandon it. So let's, like, try to figure out how to do that a little sooner. But we often tell kids we. They can't abandon their work. They got to finish it. Let me look at it. Parents want to see spelling and grammar and punctuation because that's the things they understand how to fix, Right. So they're like, oh, show me that. Because I can actually be helpful. When a kid reads out loud, you don't know what to say, Right. And I always say, say kind things. Say what you liked about it. Right. Say the things that you thought were extraordinary and the thing that you know has to be fixed or the thing you really want. Make it like the last thing you say after you say eight things. Things. In teaching, we try to achieve a six to one ratio. Six positive comments for every corrective Comment that we're going to offer and try to make that your home too. So just say good things so they keep writing. Because if you say things that are not kind or you're overly critical, the thing about writing or even public speaking and storytelling is it's not like math. Two plus two exists for everyone. If you don't get two plus two right, you got it wrong. But it doesn't mean that you're, like, bad in a heart and mind sense. But when someone stands on the stage and shares a story, they're essentially saying, here's my humanity. What do you think of it? When a kid writes something on a page, whether it's an essay or a story, they're saying, here's everything I have that represents me. What do you think? And if you go, well, I didn't really understand. Right. Right there. You're just like. You're stabbing the person they are.
- [115:51]
Shane Parrish
You need a capital letter.
- [115:53]
Matthew Dix
Yeah. It makes them want to never go back to it again and again. The goal for every teacher or every parent is to get kids excited about writing and worry less about the mechanics of writing. You know, that comes and it's relevant, but not important.
- [116:07]
Shane Parrish
It's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for your time. We always end on the same question, which is a personal question. What is success for you?
- [116:15]
Matthew Dix
Yeah, I just had this conversation with someone. Someone. For me, success is always that. At some very future tomorrow, I'll be doing something different than I'm doing today. I. I think stasis is death. I have a company, you know, I have a company that produces storytelling content, and I've got a business partner. He always wants to plan out six months or a year. And I know why he wants to do it. Actually, my production manager wants the same thing, and I resist it all the time because I feel like if you've planned out six months, we don't have the opportunity for me to stumble upon the new thing that I want to stumble upon. So for me, success is in six months, will I be doing something I never could have imagined doing today, that I'm now trying and maybe loving or maybe hating, but at least finding a thing that I want to start doing that is different? As long as my life is constantly evolving and I am being presented with new challenges and new opportunities, or I'm cracking doors open that I had never cracked open before. I feel like I'm successful. So avoiding this moment that we're in right now, making sure that everything that's going on in my life right now is not what's happening six months from now. That'll be perceived as success for me.
- [117:37]
Shane Parrish
Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts and more, go to FS Blog Podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project. Recently I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview. After the interview, I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I may haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of the Knowledge Project. You can go to FS Blog membership, check out the Show Notes for a link and you can sign up today and my Reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed. You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The Farnum Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at FS Blog Clear until next time.