Updating Your Priors [Edition 4]: Nobody Wants to Hear Your Story And Other Brutal Truths ft. Matthew Dicks, author of the best-selling book Storyworthy
Reading time: 15 minutes
"I assume all the time, 100% of the time that no one wants to hear anything I have to say."
This isn't coming from a novice speaker. This is Matthew Dicks - a 60-time Moth StorySLAM champion and one of the most successful storytellers in America. And he starts every presentation assuming his audience couldn't care less about what he has to say.
It's a jarring admission that cuts through the noise of "storytelling" as just another business buzzword.
As Dicks says to Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny’s Podcast: "Everyone loves the word storytelling in business. It's a huge buzzword. They love to think of themselves as storytellers. But when they come to me, they don't really want to be storytellers because to be a storyteller means you have to separate yourself from the herd... But the alternative is you're in the herd, which means you're forgettable."
Matthew Dicks is a masterful storyteller with an extraordinary track record: 60-time Moth StorySLAM champion, 9-time GrandSLAM champion, and founder of Speak Up, one of the premier storytelling organizations in the US.
As an elementary school teacher turned bestselling author of multiple books including "Storyworthy" and "Someday Is Today," Dicks has a unique take on how to tell stories to be better at whatever it is that you do.
In this edition of 'Updating Your Priors,' we'll explore Dicks' framework for compelling storytelling through six key areas: building stakes, finding the five-second moment, starting at the end, embracing change, speaking with adjacency, and personalizing business stories.
These insights are as seen on Lenny’s podcast featuring Matthew Dicks. Link to the episode and transcript at the end of the mail.
Let's dive in!
Building Stakes: Making Your Audience Care
The fundamental mistake most speakers make is assuming people want to hear what they have to say. Dicks takes the opposite approach
You know, some vice president marketing thinks that because they're vice president of marketing and everyone is sitting in a chair and looking at them that they automatically have That audience's attention. I assume all the time, 100% of the time that no one wants to hear anything I have to say. And so I am relentless in my attempt to get the audience to be constantly wondering what the next sentences and stakes are a big part of that.
This is where stakes come in.
What are stakes?
As the name suggests, stakes are what your audience should worry about, what they should want for you, what should keep them on the edge of their seats. Dicks has developed five powerful techniques for building stakes:
The Elephant
Place a significant event at the beginning to immediately grab attention. Think of it like "a big spaceship shooting at a little spaceship" - something that makes the audience instantly realize something important is at stake. In his book "Storyworthy," Dicks shares several examples:
Opening with "The day I nearly died..." immediately hooks the audience into wondering how and why
Starting with "I'm standing in front of my class of second graders, realizing I'm about to break a little girl's heart..." creates instant emotional investment
Beginning with "The police officer's gun is pointed directly at my chest..." makes the audience need to know what happens next
These openings create immediate tension and make it impossible for the audience to look away.
Sidebar: I have used this extensively in narrating stories about Blume’s portfolio. Here are a few examples.
Purplle:
Once you read this quote from the founder of Purplle, you know that there’s something Manish will do to elevate the lifestyle of this 18-year old girl.. you care about this girl and you care about Manish elevating her life. You now have a stake in the story.
Intrcity:
You are going to root for the mother to have a safe ride. You now have a stake in the story of Intrcity to know how they can change this.
Ultrahuman:
There’s beach, there’s mountain, and there’s Thailand. How much more stake can you add :)
The Backpack
The storyteller reveals their plan upfront, allowing the audience to share their hopes and anxieties as the plan unfolds. Just as Ocean's Eleven reveals the heist plan early, letting the audience share the anxiety when things go wrong, your story should let listeners know what's at stake early on. As Dicks explains:
If you didn't know what the plan was, you would not be able to go, 'Oh, no.' So that's sort of like loading your audience with your hopes and dreams so that they can feel those stakes.
The Breadcrumbs
Drop hints throughout your story that keep the audience guessing.
You know, the classic one is sort of the gun, you know, there's a gun in the room and you know there's a gun in the room and it seems like it's not going to be relevant. But if you have a gun in the room, you know, it's going to eventually go off. There's something going on there.
The Hourglass
When you've got your audience on the edge of their seats, slow time down.
That's the moment to load your story with details. When I know my audience wants to hear the next sentence, that is when I prolong the arrival of the next sentence... making them wait for it.
The Crystal Ball
Plant possible negative outcomes in your audience's mind. Dicks illustrates this with an example.
If I get this wrong, Eileen is going to begin to cry. She's going to cry in front of 22 kids who for the rest of the year will continue to stare at this girl... That's me predicting a terrible future because I put that terrible future in the audience's mind.
These five techniques work together to create a complete stakes framework:
The Elephant grabs attention
The Backpack creates investment
The Breadcrumbs maintain engagement
The Hourglass controls tension
The Crystal Ball amplifies the consequences
You can use one or combine multiple techniques depending on your story's needs. The key is always having at least one clear stake that makes your audience care about the outcome.
The Five-Second Moment: Finding Your Story's Core
Every great story revolves around a moment of transformation or realization that takes just seconds. As Dicks explains: "Every story is about a singular moment. I call it five seconds. It can be one second, honestly. It's a moment of either transformation... or more common is realization."
This moment is where everything changes—where you shift from thinking one thing to thinking another. While the story might feel longer, there's always that crucial instant where everything shifts. You believed AI cannot drive a car, you see a driver-less Waymo navigating expertly through traffic and in an instant, now you believe it can.
The key insight?
And the purpose of a story is essentially to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible to the audience so that the audience can sort of in a way experience that flip, that transformation Or realization along with the story of the storyteller. So 98% of the story is the context to bring that singular moment into fruition.
Everything else you're telling exists to make that moment land with maximum impact.
Starting at the End: Working Backwards
Here's where most storytellers get it wrong—they start at the beginning. Dicks advocates for the opposite approach: start with your moment of transformation and work backwards. When you connect this with the earlier insight about each story being told to lead the consumer to that 5-second moment of transformation, this technique becomes super-powerful.
With this moment (5-second moment), what's also interesting is you talk about how knowing that moment of change also tells you how the story will end. So as a storyteller, you will know how it ends based on knowing what this moment is, which then also tells you how it's going to start.
So we start as storytellers at the end. Well, we start at the end if we are telling true stories about ourselves or our companies or our products, things that we know.
You found a moment worth speaking to that five second moment. And then whatever that moment is, in my case, I discover that Eileen has more confidence than I realized and is ready to take a big step forward (Eileen is a girl in Dicks’ class who is weak in Maths and underconfident). What's the opposite of me realizing Eileen has confidence and is ready to step forward. It is Eileen does not have confidence and I need to help her find that confidence. So that's the opposites that will work in a story. Essentially, a story is about these two moments in time, a beginning and an end, and they are operating in opposition to each other.
Every story should be essentially a beginning and an end, in opposition to each other," he explains. "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.
The Power of Change: Making Stories Universal
What makes a story connect with audiences across different backgrounds and experiences? According to Dicks, it's change.
The actual moment of transformation lends importance to the story and allows the audience to connect to it.
Without change, you're just reporting events. With change, you're sharing an experience that anyone can relate to, regardless of their background. For instance, I can speak to another marketer and I can tell about what all I do (report my day). Or I can talk about how what I did moved the needled - something that was small (a piece of content in my case), became massive (was quote-tweeted by the best-in-class founders). They will relate strongly to this version of me because that’s also the version they want for themselves.
Speaking with Adjacency: The Art of Indirect Connection
One of Dicks' most powerful insights is about speaking with adjacency—when finding a story for a business problem, focus on matching theme and meaning rather than direct content. This approach solves a common problem in business storytelling: how to make technical or complex ideas relatable without losing their essence.
Most businesses fall into what Dicks calls the "content-to-content trap." Dicks illustrates this through his work with a scientific company that was struggling to explain the importance of specialized tubes to its audience because it was talking to them about tubes, which was boring.
Well, I got to find a way to talk about these tubes to make people understand how important they are. And I said, well, let's not talk about the tubes. Let's talk about something else instead.
So when they come to me and they say, here's what we've got. I'm not thinking about the thing. I'm thinking about what is the theme they want to convey or the meaning that they want to convey or the message they want to convey. And what story do I have that will match that? Or what story can I get out of them?
The scientist did not come to me with the Apple story. The scientist came to me with the tubes and I said, well, it sounds like you're a company that wants to give people what they need. Let's find a story in your life about a time when you have to give people something that they need. Right?
And we brainstormed it. And when we landed on apples, I knew we had it because he was going to be able to talk about I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm the kind of husband who takes Apple orders from his family before going to the grocery store. I'm going to be able to be funny because like the fuddled husbands and grocery stores are always funny
The magic happens when audiences make the connection themselves.
That snap when someone realizes you were telling me about apples, but really you were telling me about tubes—that snap is so powerful.
Personalizing Business Stories
The final piece of the puzzle is making your stories personal—but strategically so. Dicks uses what he calls a "personal interest inventory" to determine what personal details to share and when.
If you're married, what you're essentially saying to people is someone has agreed to spend theoretically their life with me... But if you're a marathoner, your total addressable market is very small... but if you happen to find a marathoner, the intensity of that connection is enormous.
The key is weaving these details naturally into conversation.
Whenever I'm asked a question, I am trying to include an item of my personality, my life, something that might be of interest to people while also answering the question.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Updating Your Priors. If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can join the free mailing list below. I ship this newsletter every week-ish.
Rohit
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