Matthew Dicks

“Within six months, I found myself working with Microsoft and Salesforce and Slack and Google.”

“The FBI I work with these days, helping their hostage negotiation unit tell better stories.”

“So when we talk about how time flies, it doesn't actually fly. That's just nonsense. What happens is it just gets forgotten. So we look at a full year, 365 days, and we reduce it to 50 days or 50 moments or 20 moments. That's why time feels like it flies.”

“All you have to do is start paying attention to your life, finding a way to hold onto it, and you'll have more stories to tell than you have time to tell them.”

“I spend 75% of my time deciding on where to begin and what that first few lines are going to be”

“When stories have moments that take place far apart from each other temporarily, time-wise, we don't want to tell them in chronological order.”

“I discovered that by telling stories about my stupidity, People paid a lot of attention to me. When I told stories about my success, nobody cared.”

“What we want to do when we're telling a story is we want a story to feel the heartbeat monitors up and down. That's what I'm looking for in my story is sort of an up and down path, which means that I'm constantly trying to, but, or therefore through my story, …”

“A word like suddenly, we should never use that word. I could have said I turn and suddenly I see Eric running across the kitchen, but suddenly is a word that never makes anything feel suddenly. It only signals that a surprise is about to happen. If I say I loo…”

“I guarantee if you use that phrase, it will 100% not be the funniest story I've ever heard. You've just ruined any chance of humor, because now I can see the humor coming. I know you're about to say something funny.”

“The end of every story is always a realization or transformation of some kind. It is seeing the world in a new way. It is the recognition that I once was one person, but now I'm another. I once thought one thing, now I think another. I once felt one thing, now…”

“What you essentially need is an effective beginning and an ending that actually contains meaning. And the two of those are in opposition to each other. It's what I call the frame of the story. The beginning and the end have to be deliberately and strategically…”

“A performance requires preparation. It's an acknowledgement that there's an audience and it's an acknowledgement that regardless of what you're doing, you should be entertaining. Regardless of what you're doing, no matter how dry it is, you should be entertain…”

“One of the ways that works really well is what I call speaking through adjacency, meaning we're going to use a personal story, but we're going to use it in order to relate a business concept to it.”

“Stories don't begin on slides. Stories begin with the words that we're going to speak or the words that are going to be on the page or some combination of the two. Slides should be used to support a story only when necessary. They should not be the story.”

“If you need a deck, you're not telling a story. You shouldn't even be walking in the room if you need a deck. Stay home and practice. Turn it into a performance.”

“The pet peeve is someone gets on stage because they want to say nice things about themselves and they couch it within a story. Nobody wants that. I don't even think your mother wants that. It's weird because they want us to like them more, but what they've don…”

“I have something called the dinner test, which is the story that I tell you, the story I told you today should be a close cousin to the story I would have told you if we were having dinner together.”

“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 happe…”

“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 going to be appreciated and remembered and impactful and someone who will sort of…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 y…”

“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.”

“A backpack works especially well when a plan is not going to go well. You know, the Ocean's 11 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 goi…”

“So an hourglass is 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.”

“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.”

“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. It's not really the money as much as it is. I think the Cowboys…”

“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…”

“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 che…”

“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 gonna do a good job. Many, many times I have sat in an au…”

“Right before I'm gonna 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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All of the openings of movies are almost all of them will predict the end of the movie for sure.”

“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 so…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 vul…”

“I always tell people the but is the most powerful word in all of storytelling.”

“What something is not is more powerful than what it is.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Nobody wants to hear a forty-year story. A forty-year story sucks, right? So what we do is we turn the forty-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 gonna t…”

“People want to hear the story of the person sitting across from them. They want to 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.”

“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.”

“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 befo…”

“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 n…”

“If you're talking about spelling, Grammar or handwriting, you're making a terrible mistake. You're making writing unfun.”

“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.”

“And I resist it all the time. Cause 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.”

“The purpose of a story is essentially to land a singular moment of change or transformation. So that means 95% of a story Is designed to make the five percent at the end make the most sense to your audience.”