Matthew Dicks
Storyteller & Author, Storyworthy. On 4 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorentertainerother@MatthewDicks ↗LinkedIn ↗matthewdicks.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Matthew Dicks is a multi-time Moth GrandSLAM champion and bestselling author of books including Storyworthy and Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend. A longtime educator, he coaches business leaders and trains corporate teams on narrative structure and public speaking.
4shows
4appearances
126statements
4resolved
2supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
12said about them ↓ Everything Matthew Dicks said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Presenters Reliant on Slide Decks Should Stay Home and Practice
“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.”
Dicks: Married men in business should disclose marriage to project safety
“If you're married, you should always make it clear to people you're married, especially if you're a man, because if you're a man and you're married, you're safer in the world because men are inherently just dangerous human beings.”
Storytellers Should Avoid Heavy Descriptions to Reduce Listener Cognitive Load
“What storytellers should do is take the nouns or the locations that exist in your brain, and I leverage them on my behalf. I don't want to describe my classroom because that's time and that's cognitive load for you.”
Business Stories Begin With Words, Not Slide Decks
“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.”
Matthew Dicks: Speakers should remember narrative beats rather than memorize scripts
“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 …”
Dicks: Stories should minimize physical descriptions in favor of actions and emotions
“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…”
Dicks: Gambling's grip is driven by prediction psychology, not money
“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…”
Dicks: Wonder Woman portrays female hero as incapable without male sacrifice
“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.”
Dicks: Lying in stories destroys audience trust
“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.”
Matthew Dicks: Narrative structure matters far more than sentence-level prose
“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…”
Dicks: Business speakers are forgettable because they exclude personal stories
“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 are round, white, and flavorless. Why they're all forgettable. Why everything they say is ultimately forgotten. Be…”
Dicks: Never lead narrative storytelling with a topic sentence
“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…”
Dicks: Focusing early on spelling and grammar ruins writing for kids
“If you're talking about spelling, Grammar or handwriting, you're making a terrible mistake. You're making writing unfun.”
Dicks: Pitches That Anyone Can Deliver Should Not Be Delivered
“If you're creating a keynote or a sales pitch or a marketing plan that anyone can deliver, then no one should be delivering it, because essentially you're just creating Something that a corporate spokesperson could speak for you, and no one has ever in their l…”
Dicks: Compressing Time and Omitting Facts Is Valid, Fabricating Is Not
“What I will do is I'll throw out facts that don't help me. So some random person is in a story that doesn't really do anything. They're gone. You know, I'll compress time, something that takes place over the course of three days. I'll make it three hours. So i…”
Dicks: The original Star Wars is fundamentally a movie about religion
“You know, if you think about a movie like Star Wars, the first Star Wars that came out, right, that is a movie essentially about religion, which people sort of don't always see, but it is true.”
Matthew Dicks: Shortest version of every story is the best version
“The shortest version of every story is the best version of every story.”
Dicks: Biotech scientist telling pure story won more conference leads than peers
“He got more leads at the conference than the other scientists combined. All the other four scientists combined.”
Dicks: Being entertaining is the most important requirement in any communication
“Ultimately, no matter what you're doing, whether I am teaching a fifth grader how to behave better, or presenting a new product for a large company, or helping someone deliver in all hands, the first and most important thing you have to be is entertaining. You…”
Matthew Dicks: Speakers should avoid rote memorization of presentations
“If you can avoid memorizing, that'll save you. A ton of suffering because memorizers, they're the most tortured souls in the world. So avoid that if all possible. Remember your talk without memorizing your talk.”
Time Only Feels Fast Because People Forget Their Daily Experiences
“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.”
Tracking Daily Micro-Moments Produces More Stories Than Anyone Can Tell
“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.”
Stories Spanning Distant Time Gaps Fail if Told Chronologically
“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.”
The other half of the tape: Matthew Dicks's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 11 times in 5 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jonathan Becker 4Lane Shackleton 3Shane Parrish 2Ted Seides 1Lenny Rachitsky 1
Statements about Matthew Dicks, by other people (1)
Shackleton: Great stories are built around a five-second moment of transformation
“The nugget of a great story is like five seconds of transformation. So if you just orient like everything else around that, like moment of trans, you know, transformation, then you end up usually telling a reasonably good story.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 8
the Knowledge Project 2
Capital Allocators 1
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Matthew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Storyteller & Author, Storyworthy | 1 | 48 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Storyteller & Author, Storyworthy | 1 | 38 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Storyteller & Author, Storyworthy | 1 | 29 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Storyteller & Author, Storyworthy | 1 | 11 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |