The Wisdom Wall

“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 was to tell you a story now, and then tell you a story five…”

“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 you're going to describe something, you better make sure that…”

“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 are going to win this week and I'm going to put money down…”

“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.”

“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 sentences are that you're choosing.”

“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. Because we don't remember business stories.”

“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 nerd who wants to know the efficacy of the evidence, I'm…”

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

“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 happened, and now I'm actually an authentically different kind of…”

“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 get lost in the crowd.”

“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 about it for days, weeks, months, or maybe for the rest of…”

“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.”

“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 going wrong in order to feel the pressure and the tension of…”

“So an hourglass is, uh, 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.”

“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 earnings call to see if that guidance played out, or…”

“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 audience and thought, buckle up, this guy's gonna fall apart.…”

“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.”

“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.”

“That's how most people start the story, which is, I need to teach you a whole bunch of stuff so that the story will make sense. That's the worst way to begin a story, because no one has ever sat down and said, boy, I hope he teaches me a lot of stuff before he says something good. So that story starts in the right…”

“So I would say most of the mistakes are made in the beginnings of stories where they fail to Engage the audience. And at the ends of stories where they fail to actually say anything.”

“Well, they're almost always in perfect contrast to each other. They, 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.”

“The more relatable that ending moment is, the more deep, um, the more resonant it is through the movie, as opposed to what happens in a lot of movies, which is, it just sort of lands at the end, because they know they have to wrap it up at the end. Some movies carry it all the way through.”

“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 up in a bow, because when we wrap it up in a bow, we get to…”

“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 vulnerability is what they crave.”

“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.”

“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 tell him a story. So I start in the middle at the B. The next…”

“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 before, but I say, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in…”

“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.”

“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 those things, the more we are able to tell excellent…”

“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.”

“Humor changes brain chemistry in really meaningful ways. You know, causes you to, uh, 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 chemicals get released due to humor, which primes your…”

“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.”

“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 solved.”