Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Opinion
Surprise Is the Single Most Effective Technique for Entertaining an Audience
“And then surprise is the third way to entertain an audience. It's the best way. It's the number one way.”
Insight
Audiences Automatically Assume Funny Storytellers Are Highly Intelligent
“Weirdly, we believe that funny people are smart. It's automatic. An idiot can tell great jokes and you'll assume he's the smartest guy in the world when he's still actually an idiot. But the ability to make someone laugh is perceived to be so challenging and d…”
Insight
Audiences Engage With Stories of Personal Failure, Not Success
“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.”
Insight
Nostalgia Is the Easiest and Safest Humor Strategy in Business
“The easiest one to use, especially in business, is nostalgia. People almost always laugh when you remind them about how the past once was. In business, this is really helpful, because when I'm working with business people, the last thing they want to do is to …”
Insight
Effective Stories Rely on 'But' and 'Therefore' Transitions, Not Chronology
“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, …”
Insight
Storytellers Should Ban the Word 'Suddenly' to Preserve Genuine Surprise
“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…”
Insight
Promising 'the Funniest Story Ever' Ruins the Comedic Payoff for Listeners
“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.”
Insight
Every Story Must Conclude With a Realization or Personal Transformation
“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…”
Insight
A Story's Opening and Ending Must Be in Direct Opposition
“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…”
Insight
Business Communicators Must Treat Dry Presentations as Entertaining Performances
“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…”
Insight
The Best Way to Practice Talks Is Passively Listening to Recordings
“The best way is you make a recording of the story you want to tell, and then you begin listening to it.
If you think about all the songs, you know, in your life, you probably didn't try to learn the lyrics to most songs.
You listened to the song long enough th…”
Insight
Verbatim Memorization Creates a Rigid Sentence Chain That Breaks Easily
“When you memorize the whole story, what happens is you create a chain of sentences.
And if you forget one of those sentences, the chain breaks and then you're trapped.”
Insight
Positive Feedback Should Build Consistency, Not Make People Feel Good
“I'm trying to increase frequency and consistency by giving you positive feedback. I'm not here to make you feel good. I'm here to make you better. That's the purpose of every bit of positive feedback I ever give is to make you aware of what you're doing well s…”
Insight
Opening With Location and Action Triggers an Evolutionary Survival Response
“As you start with location and action, the brain gets flooded with chemicals that essentially say, shut the hell up. This might keep us alive.”
Insight
Public Stories Must Pass the 'Dinner Test' of Informal Conversation
“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.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Dec 2025
Dicks Teaches Storytelling Techniques to the FBI Hostage Negotiation Unit
“The FBI I work with these days, helping their hostage negotiation unit tell better stories.”
Disclosure
Dicks Spends 75% of Prep Time Crafting a Story's Opening Lines
“I spend 75% of my time deciding on where to begin and what that first few lines are going to be”
Insight
Suspense Relies on the Strategic Inclusion and Exclusion of Information
“Suspense is the strategic inclusion of information alongside the strategic Exclusion of information.”
