Storytelling

“I think the alpha is in design, just like in marketing. It's not the tools. It's not the channels, not the metrics. It's the storytelling. It's How do you cut through the clutter in the snappiest, most compelling possible way?”

“It is not necessary, and it is not sufficient, but it is one of the most valuable skills that a founder can have, because founders ultimately have to tell the story of their company. It is possible to build companies without being a great storyteller. If you h…”

“Her ability to tell a story about anything in any context, Is a superpower, because it's by far and away the most powerful way to communicate”

“Once politics gets back to normal, and no one is tuning in for half an hour with a slightly more sympathetic bias as they're listening to you. That's when, actually, if you're able to communicate with storytelling, it would have served me better, actually.”

“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 do believe that attention spans are really low. ADHD is a reality. And the future of storytelling lies under a 120 seconds.”

“The external would be, what are we doing? Right? What are we making? What are we selling? What are we buying? Whatever it may be as a, the core function of the company. The philosophical is the why on a more abstract level. So you believe in certain, certain i…”

“The new is, is really just the obvious uncovered through systematic trial and error over a certain period of time. So that by striving to stay within the obvious and trying to find a variation on the obvious, I think you have a higher chance, at least in story…”

“I think that's a recent meaning in the last 3040 years phenomenon where, where, Storytelling became entertainment almost exclusively, and I don't think that's really the genealogy of that space at all.”

“A PM is really great at motivating something incredibly boring as existential, and so whenever I'm interviewing PMs, you know, I just ask, okay, well, what are some projects you've led, and whatever, and if they can't make it sound interesting to me, no matter…”

“I think we've actually gotten much better in the last couple of years at separating storytelling from just charlatan bullshit. And like, there was a period when we weren't like, we were not very good at that. Probably, you know, late, late twenties, early twen…”

“The thing that is true about this Wave of AI is it's taking storytelling and it's making it way cheaper than it has ever been before. And I don't think that that replaces professional storytellers, but what it does is it allows you to tell stories in places th…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“As a storyteller, what you don't say is more important than what you do say.”

“Using storytelling, even on low stakes moments, actually builds likability and fandom more so than the dramatic, I was skiing and there was an avalanche. That's cool, but it's unrelatable. And actually, there's something fundamentally unlikable about it.”

“And the biggest thing is stories that we tell people, it's like the tip of the iceberg. And if anything, it even Doesn't matter. I've worked with a lot of folks who their teams say, stop it with the storytelling, stop talking at us, and they don't want any of …”

“If you can tell a story about how people think, that is something that an eighty-year-old hedge fund manager will appreciate, and a sixteen-year-old will understand. I don't think there's any data equivalent of that. There's almost no chart or formula of data …”

“Essentially every story is about a singular moment. I call it five seconds. It can be 1:02. Honestly, it's a moment of either transformation, meaning sort of, I'm telling you a story about how I once used to be one kind of person and now I'm a new kind of pers…”

“Every story should be essentially a beginning and an end in opposition to each other, and you should start at the end. That guarantees that you have something important to say, rather than what most people do, which is they simply report on their lives. They j…”

“When you're telling a story in a formal way, if you're performing on a stage or delivering a keynote, or even delivering sort of a pitch to entrepreneurs or a sales pitch, essentially the story that you're telling should be very closely related to the story yo…”

“If you're telling a story about someone else, essentially you might as well be telling fiction because that person's not in the room and to the audience, they don't really exist unless they're, you know, if they can't see them, that person is just another huma…”

“The shortest version of every story is the best version of every story.”

“So often people load the front end of a story with all of the stakes because they're worried that the audience will not pay attention to them. So they think I'm going to throw everything right in front and that'll hold an audience for the rest of the story. An…”

“Most communication in business is round, white, and flavorless, right? Intentionally so, because a lot of people are afraid to stand out.”

“Our minds are not designed to remember a pie chart. Or facts, or statistics, or, you know, platitudes, or ideas that are not attached to imagery. So the risk you take if you're not telling stories is that you will be forgotten. 100% you will be forgotten.”

“It's stakes, it's surprise, it's suspense, and it's humor. Those are the ways that you're going to hold people and keep them listening, and if you're not engaged in one of those four things while you're speaking, people are not listening to you anymore.”

“We create positive connections with items in the world related to our company by telling stories, and that means we've, like, built advertising into people's lives Without them even being aware that we've done it.”

“Storytelling is not about facility with the language or your vocabulary. It's all about decision making. That's all it is. Storytellers are people who think before they speak. They make strategical, tactical decisions before they speak.”

“So two things should start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life. So you start with location. Where are you? Location activates imagination, right? If I say I'm standing in the kitchen, You've already automatically applied a thousand adjectives t…”

“Listen for people who say things like, oh, something like that happened to me once. What they're really saying is, I wish someone would want to hear what happened to me once, and so I am always someone who's willing to say, Oh, tell me that story. Offer someon…”

“One of the most powerful skills Of a product manager storytelling, right? Because you look at generation after generation after generation, what people pass on is stories. They're not numbers. They're not stats. It's stories. And actually when you blend storie…”

“The problem is sales is literally the most important skill for non-technical founders. And honestly, I would say sales is the most important skill for executives in general. And when I say sales, I also mean storytelling, so selling investors, selling employee…”

“The only thing I would add is it's not just your company, it's about you. Because the most interesting thing about what you do is who you are. So there's plenty of developers who can code like the wind, but you and your specific story and why this problem and …”

“For me, I was on a learning journey, so I needed to iterate as fast as possible, so I gave myself 24 hours to make a mistake. If I made a mistake on day 68, I could fix it on day 69, you know, and so I was creating, improving every single day until I became re…”

“That's what a story will do. It draws you in, and it keeps you there, and it's almost like the artist was probably in flow state when they wrote it. If they can get you into flow state where you forget about everything else. Dude, that's magic.”

“The great thing about stories is people are often able to recite them. There's no way I could give you 50 pieces of data and have you remember them later, but in a story, they can remember the basic arc of it, and it's memorable in that way.”

“Any story really shouldn't be a long description of an environment, but if you are going to describe the environment, the points that you describe should have a reason for appearing.”

“I think it is a career staller if you can't for a product person. Can do the IC level product management job, but getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and running the team behind the shared goal and all these kinds of things.”

“If you're a company and you're growing and you're not thinking about storytelling, if you have any sort of consumer facing angle, you're going to struggle long-term because at the end of the day, you just cannot like, even just like mechanically, when you're s…”

“Storytelling is going to be a big thing. And the next trillion dollar company that you will see in next, maybe a decade's time is going to be a storytelling company or company that's supporting storytelling.”

“It's a points of view and how to talk about points of view in the structure of storytelling and not understanding why, why is she acting that way? Why is she acting that way? Oh my gosh, she's acting that way because of that. You know, that kind of thing. I lo…”

“And what entrepreneurs who tell stories will succeed at, is they realize they're not the hero in the story. The audience of their message is the hero in the story. And what they're doing is they're helping that person go on a hero's journey. To co-create a bet…”

“She used to say that a story is like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it dies, right? Or you can imagine it as a trapeze, where the listener, you have to provide that next rung for the listener. There can't be any gaps or they fall.”

“The biggest source of economic waste is when people produce something that's objectively brilliant, or they produce an invention which should be life-changing, But then they tell the wrong story about it, and it doesn't sell.”

“So we need to become great storytellers, and that never, never, never Fits the templates that the VCs want to see. Why? Because the VCs want to punch all the metrics into a spreadsheet and judge you coldly and rationally. The best thing that we can do is grab …”