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.
Dicks: Audiences Will Not Listen Unless Given a Reason Upfront
“My first principle of all storytelling is no one wants to hear anything you have to say unless you give them a reason to listen.”
Dicks: Speaker Pedigree Ends the Moment You Open Your Mouth
“Your pedigree ends the moment you open your mouth, and if Barack Obama takes the stage and he sucks, people stop listening. Even if he's Barack Obama. It does not matter who you are. If you suck, nobody cares.”
Dicks: Every compelling story centers on a five-second moment of transformation
“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…”
Dicks: Stories resonate because audiences universally relate to finding belief
“And that's why a story like that resonates with us in a way that another story might not, because we all understand what it's like to not believe in something, And then find belief in something, whether that is religious belief, or I used to think cheeseburger…”
Dicks: Compelling stories begin and end in opposition
“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…”
Dicks: Stories in formal pitches should sound like natural dinner conversations
“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…”
Dicks: Storytellers should never open a story with unattributed dialogue
“Weird things that people do should not be done, like opening a story with unattributed dialogue. You know, so you're standing on stage and you open your story with, Jim, it's time to come in for dinner, my wife said. Like, that's just weird. We don't talk like…”
Dicks: Stories Must Be About the Speaker to Convey True Vulnerability
“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…”
Dicks: Stories should always begin as close to the end as possible
“Starting as close to the end of a story is always the best place to begin.”
Dicks: Audiences stop listening when not wondering what comes next
“If your audience isn't wondering what you're about to say, They're no longer listening to you.”
Dicks: Business leaders mistakenly assume job titles grant audience attention
“When I work with people in business, they are constantly under this misconception that people want to hear what they have to say. You know, some vice president of marketing thinks that because they're a vice president of marketing and everyone is sitting in a …”
Dicks assumes nobody in the audience wants to hear him speak
“I assume all the time, 100% of the time, that no one wants to hear anything I have to say.”
Dicks: The best story surprises feel inevitable yet completely unexpected
“You build information into the audience's mind that will allow the surprise to land in an inevitable and yet surprising way. That is the best surprise you can offer someone.”
Dicks: Storytellers should spread stakes across the first half, not front-load them
“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…”
Dicks: Most Business Communication Is Bland Because Workers Fear Standing Out
“Most communication in business is round, white, and flavorless, right? Intentionally so, because a lot of people are afraid to stand out.”
Dicks: Communicators Who Rely on Data Without Storytelling Are Inevitably Forgotten
“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.”
Dicks: Answering 'how are you doing' with 'great' is a wasted opportunity
“You know, if someone asks you, how are you doing today? If you say I'm doing great, you've just really screwed it up. That's the stupidest answer you can offer, right?”
Dicks: Corporate leaders want to have been funny without taking humor risks
“Everyone wants to be funny. Every person I've ever met who I've worked with every business person in some way wanted to be funny, but that's really not actually what they want. They want to have been funny. Because being funny means you must take a risk.”
Dicks: Speakers must use stakes, surprise, suspense, or humor to keep attention
“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.”
Dicks: Using nostalgia demonstrates company expertise and reliably adds humor
“It's relevant to talk about the past as a company to demonstrate your expertise in your field. To understand that we know the market backwards and forwards for the last 50 years. We have expertise, and we can demonstrate it by telling a story, right? So that's…”
Dicks: Storytelling embeds subconscious advertising into everyday objects
“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.”
Dicks: Removing yourself from personal stories yields effective business metaphors
“And if you take yourself out of a story, often what's left is a metaphor, a simile. An example.”
Dicks: Match stories to business ideas by theme, not literal content
“The best way to sort of tell a story about something that you want people to understand is to do what I call speaking with adjacency, which means we're not going to match content to content. Instead, we're going to match theme, meaning, or message.”
Dicks: Time feels fast because people fail to account for daily memories
“You know, people say that time flies and it doesn't. What happens is it goes by unaccounted. If you can only remember 89 days of 365 in a year, of course time flies, because you had three 65 and you only remember 89. It's gonna feel like it went by quickly. It…”
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 → |