In One Sentence

The art of storytelling easily explained with practical examples and lots of great example stories.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. If you are a genius without the skills to communicate your ideas, your brilliance is wasted. If you pair great ideas with great communication like engaging storytelling, you can change the world.
2. A good personal story is always about a five-second moment that changed or influenced you in a lasting way.
3. You can find more stories in your life by doing what the author calls “Homework for Life”, where you write down your most storyworthy moment of your day.
   As a great side-effect it slows down your life. You go through your day with more awareness since you start to think about and look for your daily storyworthy moment. A look on your collection of daily moments feels like a time machine as you will remember each day much better.

I decided that at the end of every day, I’d reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question:
If I had to tell a story from today – a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day – what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day.

Who Should Read This Book?

People that want to learn how to tell engaging stories that others want to listen to or people that want to improve their communication in general.
It’s also interesting for people that journal and want to slow down life a bit more by doing what the author calls “Homework for Life”, if you are just interested in this you can read only the one section of the book about this and skip the rest.

How The Book Impacted Me

I started to do “Homework for Life” and it’s nice to look back on the days I did it and to see what happened. I have not thought about a particular story I want to write about, but I can see myself writing a small personal story with the guidance of this book in the near future.

Best Quotes

Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.

These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever.
Many times storytellers fail to understand the importance of these five-second moments. They see the big when they should be looking for the small. They come to me and say, «I went to Tanzania last summer. I want to tell that story onstage.»
My answer is always the same. No. Visiting Tanzania is not a story. Your ability to travel the world does not mean that you can tell a good story or even have a good story to tell. But if something happened in Tanzania that altered you in some deep and fundamental way, then you might have a story. If you experienced a five-second moment in Tanzania, you might have something. Think of it this way: if we remove Tanzania from the story, do you still have a story worth telling?

The line between hero and insufferable person is a thin one.

As people’s gazes continue to fall to their screens and communication is truncated into bite-sized text messages, the human beings who can still hold the attention of an audience and teach and speak in an entertaining way possess enormous power.

Summary & Notes

DISCLAIMER:
The following notes are my raw notes for each chapter in the book. Read them as a quick overview and not as fully fleshed-out and thought-out sentences. The titles are the same as the book's chapter titles.

Part 1 – Finding Your Story

1 – My Promise to You

Why to learn how to tell stories?

• improve presentation skills, sales pitches and branding
• refine understanding of stories
• better hold the attention of your audience
• improve your dating skills
• be more interesting at the dinner table
• get your kids to listen to you
• improve your job interview skills
• learn more about yourself

2 – What Is a Story? (and What Is the Dinner Test?)

Storytelling in this book’s context means personal narratives. True stories by the people who lived them.

Requirements for ensuring you are telling a personal story:

• Change
  • Your story must reflect change over time. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new.
• Your Story Only
  • You must tell your own story and not the stories of others. It takes no courage to tell someone else’s story. It requires no hard truth or authentic self. This doesn’t mean that you can’t tell someone else’s story. It simply means you must make the story about yourself. Tell your side of the story.
• The Dinner Test
  • Is the story that you craft for the stage, the boardroom, the sales conference, or the sunday sermon similar to the story you would tell a friend at dinner? This should be the goal. The performance version of your story and the casual, dinner-party version of your story should be kissing cousins. Different, for sure, but not terribly different. This guarantees that you don’t sound «performancy» or inauthentic.

3 – Homework for Life

Storyworthy moments happen in your life all the time, but most of them are not noticed or recognized as such.

«Everyday»-stories are great because the audience can connect and relate better than with «Crazy-Unique»-stories.

How to «generate» more stories

I decided that at the end of every day, I’d reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question:
If I had to tell a story from today – a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day – what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day.

Don’t write down them whole story, just a few sentences so you remember what happened.
Also record old memories that you remember during your day.
Example: simple table with a day column and another column for a very limited amount of words to describe what happened. Easy and simple.

Also therapeutic and nice to live the day fully aware because you want to remember and notice the moments. Great to save all the amazing moments from your life.

4 – Dreaming at the End of Your Pen

Crash & Burn

This exercise is stream-of-consciousness writing. It helps to generate new ideas and to resurrect old memories.

Stream-of-consciousness is the act of speaking or writing down whatever thought that enters your mind, regardless of how strange, incongruous, or even embarrassing it maybe.

• Rule 1: You must not get attached to any one idea.
• Rule 2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your mind.
• Rule 3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving.
  Do this for 10 minutes with these rules in mind.

5 – First Last Best Worst: Great for Long Car Rides, First Dates, and Finding Stories

Another method for generating ideas and stories.

Make a table with the column headers First, Last, Best, Worst and then add in random words that come to your mind for the row titles. Then think about each combination and fill in the word.

	First	Last	Best	Worst
Vacation
Food
Car
Friendship
Injury
Gift

Also makes for a good game on long car rides. 🙂

Part 2 – Crafting Your Story

6 – Charity Thief

(Story chapter, below is the story from the chapter performed by the author on stage)

7 – Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to Tell (and Jurassic Park Wasn’t a Movie about Dinosaurs)

Five-Second Moments

Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.
These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever.

Examples for five-second moments:

• You fall in love
• You fall out of love
• You discover something new about yourself or another person
• Your opinion on a subject dramatically changes
• You find forgiveness
• You reach acceptance
• You sink into despair
• You grudgingly resign
• You’re drowned in regret
• You make a life-altering decision

Everything that is not the five-second moment in a story should be there to build up to it or to serve to bring more clarity to it.

Many times storytellers fail to understand the importance of these five-second moments. They see the big when they should be looking for the small. They come to me and say, «I went to Tanzania last summer. I want to tell that story on stage.»
My answer is always the same. No. Visiting Tanzania is not a story. Your ability to travel the world does not mean that you can tell a good story or even have a good story to tell. But if something happened in Tanzania that altered you in some deep and fundamental way, then you might have a story. If you experienced a five-second moment in Tanzania, you might have something. Think of it this way: if we remove Tanzania from the story, do you still have a story worth telling?

8 – Finding Your Beginning (I’m Also About to Forever Ruin Most Movies and Many Books for You)

How to find the beginning of your story

Your five-second moment is the ending of your story.
Write down or say aloud the meaning of your five-second moment.
Now the beginning is simply the opposite of your meaning of the five-second moment.

Simply put, the beginning of the story should be the opposite of the end. Find the opposite of your transformation, revelation or realization, and this is where your story should start. This is what creates an arc in your story. This is how a story shows change over time.
I was once this, but now I am this. I once thought this, but now I think this. I once felt this, but now I feel this.
Stories must reflect change of some kind. It need not be positive change, and the change need not be monumental.

If you can, start as close to the end (temporally) as possible. This shortens your story and avoids unnecessary setup. You eliminate superfluous details.

Some tips for choosing an opening:

• Try to start your story with forward movement whenever possible
  • Creates instant momentum in a story
  • Makes the audience feel that we’re already on our way
  • Immerses the audience in the world of the story
• Don’t start by setting expectations
  • No «this is hilarious», «you need to hear this» or «you won’t believe this»
  • Unnecessarily raises the bar for your story
  • Reduces chance of surprising your audience
  • Simply not interesting, feels like a lecture

9 – Stakes: Five Ways to Keep Your Story Compelling (and Why There Are Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park)

Stakes are the reason audiences listen and continue to a story. Stakes answer questions like:

• What does the storyteller want or need?
• What is at peril? (danger/risk)
• What is the storyteller fighting for or against?
• What will happen next?
• How is this story going to turn out?

Boring stories lack stakes, or their stakes are not high enough. Stories that fail to hold your attention lack stakes. Stories that allow your mind to wander lack stakes.

Strategies to increase stakes for potentially boring parts that need to be told:

1. The elephant
   • Readers must know what to expect in your story. The elephant should appear as early as possible in the story.
2. Backpacks
   • Increase the audience’s anticipation about a coming event. Give the audience your hopes, fears and plans you had in that moment before something happens. Backpacks work best when a plan does not work. Audiences want you to succeed but not in an easy way. Perfect plans executed perfectly never make good stories.
3. Breadcrumbs
   • Hints at a future event that only reveal enough to keep the audience guessing.
4. Hourglasses
   • When the moment of your story that everyone is waiting for is about to happen, slow it down. Let the audience hang in there and drag out the wait as long as possible.
5. Crystal balls
   • A false prediction made by the storyteller to cause the audience to wonder if the prediction will prove to be true. Deploy them strategically: only when the prediction seems possible and exciting.

10 – The Five Permissible Lies of True Storytelling

1. Omission
   • For example, eliminate people from stories when they serve no purpose. Pretend they aren’t there.
2. Compression
   • Compress time and space to remove complexity and to bring the start and the end of your story closer together.
3. Assumption
   • When there is a detail important to the story that you don’t know anymore, tell it how it most likely was.
4. Progression
   • Change the order of events to make the story more emotionally satisfying or comprehensible.
5. Conflation
   • Rather than describing change over a long period, we compress all the intellectual and emotional transformation into a smaller bit of time, because this is what audiences expect from stories.

11 – Cinema of the Mind (Also Known as «Where the Hell Are You?»)

A great storyteller creates a movie in the mind of the audience.

Rule:
Always provide a physical location for every moment of your story.

12 – The Principle of But and Therefore

A lot of people connect their sentences with and which makes the storytelling blunt and boring. There is just a continuous monotonous flow of information coming in.

Using but and therefore (and their synonyms) is way more interesting because they signal a change. It leads to surprises and keeps the audience engaged.

It’s the causation, or the causal links between sentences, paragraphs, and scenes that make a story. It’s the interconnectedness of moments that brings meaning to an otherwise linear collection of events connected only by time and space.

13 – This Is Going to Suck

(Story chapter, below is the story from the chapter performed by the author on stage)

14 – The Secret to the Big Story: Make It Little

Stories need to connect with the audience.
Big stories are hard stories to tell, because the big parts of these stories are often singular in nature. Unusual. Unique. Hardly relatable.

The trick to telling big stories (crazy unique stories like a near-death experience) is to make it about a small relatable moment inside that story.

15 – There Is Only One Way to Make Someone Cry

Surprise. Build up expectations and then upend them with a surprise.

How to Ruin Surprise

1. Presenting a thesis statement prior to the surprise
   • For example: «This is a story about a time in my life when my friends became my family.»
2. Failing to take advantage of the power of stakes to enhance and accentuate surprise
   • Build up your surprising moment by raising the stakes
3. Failing to hide critical information in a story
   • Sometimes you need to tell important information before a surprise to make the story work. But try to hide it by making it a side-sentence or by mixing it under other not-so-important information

16 – Milk Cans and Baseballs, Babies and Blenders: Simple, Effective Ways to Be Funny in Storytelling (Even If You’re Not Funny at All)

Stories are never only funny, it’s not stand-up comedy. Some stories have no fun at all in them.

• Start a story with an early laugh
  • Signals to the audience that you are a good storyteller and they can relax and enjoy the show
  • Gives you full attention, less likely to be interrupted during the story
  • Regardless of how serious and bad the story is, you show the audience that you’re okay now, that it’s in the past and that we all can laugh about it now
• Contrast is king in storytelling: make them laugh before you make them cry

You should not end your story with humor, but with heart.

17 – Finding the Frayed Ending of Your Story (or, What the Hell Did That Mean?)

If you have a loose story in your head but can’t remember what the five-second moment was or why it was important to you, just tell your story without any strategies. Let it all out and re-immerse yourself into that moment and then it will come back to you why it was important.
You can also think about why you do the things you do in your story.

Part 3 – Telling Your Story

18 – The Present Tense Is King (but the Queen Can Play a Role Too)

Tell your story in the present tense.
Tell backstory inside your story in the past tense.

19 – The Two Ways of Telling a Hero Story (or, How to Avoid Sounding Like a Douchebag)

1. Malign yourself
2. Marginalize your accomplishment

People like underdog stories.

The line between hero and insufferable person is a thin one.

20 – Storytelling Is Time Travel (If You Don’t Muck It Up)

Tips to not break immersion and to keep the audience engaged:

• Don’t ask rhetorical questions.
• Don’t address the audience or acknowledge their existence whatsoever.
• Avoid anachronisms.
  An anachronism is a thing that is set in a period other than that in which it exists. It’s a microwave in the Middle Ages. A refrigerator during the Renaissance. The internet during the Inquisition.
• Don’t mention the word story in your story.
  • No phrases like «But that’s a story for another day» or «Long story short».
• Downplay your physical presence as much as possible.
  • Basic clothes, nothing that draws attention.

21 – Words to Say, Words to Avoid

Don’t use people’s real names when telling a story in public.
Don’t rely on swear words and vulgarity for cheap laughs.
Don’t use celebrity or pop-culture references if you are not absolutely sure that all of your audience will get them.

22 – Time to Perform (Onstage, in the Boardroom, on a Date, or at the Thanksgiving Table)

Nervousness can be your friend. Too much of it is never good, but not being nervous at all isn’t good either.

Being a bit nervous can make the audience sympathise with you.

Don’t memorize your story. Instead memorize:

1. The first few sentences (a strong start is important)
2. The last few sentences (to have a good and clear wrap up)
3. The scenes of your story.

If you follow the advice to place every moment/scene to a physical location, its way easier to remember all your scenes. Also, try not to have a story with more than 7 scenes.

Make eye contact:

Find a person on your left, a person on your right, and a person dead center who likes you. These will be the people who are smiling, nodding, laughing. Use these three people as your guideposts. Make eye contact with them, and the people in each of those areas will feel you are attending to them as well.

23 – Why Did You Read This Book? To Become a Superhero!

As people’s gazes continue to fall to their screens and communication is truncated into bite-sized text messages, the human beings who can still hold the attention of an audience and teach and speak in an entertaining way possess enormous power.

Like the brilliant guide Santi on the free walking tour in Bogotá.