Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks Book Summary
I see people who are highly regarded as story tellers, on YouTube, making movies and was curious how I could learn more about what makes a good story good? I don’t think it is that hard to tell a good story.
Watching videos that pull me into another dimension, fully immersed through sound, visuals and dialogue that intertwines into a masterful web which pulls everything together. Why does this happen?
As I worked through getting in front of a camera last year and trying to communicate my thoughts, watching myself back left me wanting to improve, not just the quality of the videos, but to make them unique. I want to include my own experiences, which is unique to me, and inject my point of view in order to have my videos be more aligned with me as a personal brand.
This book does a few very clever things that I enjoyed while reading. For the first time in a long time I was excited to pick up a book everyday and read. I had a goal of finishing this book by the end of January. As I sit here January 6, writing this, I have been done for a few days already. I started early because I couldn’t wait to get through it and finished early because the book is written in a highly digestible fashion.
There are story breaks between each chapter, where you get to be pulled into Matthew’s winning stories, which then get dissected and used as effective examples of the strategies in the book. Some of them are even on YouTube where you can see the craft as it was intended, in front of a microphone/crowd, rather than on the written page. Reading “this is going to suck” and watching/listening, were two very different experiences for me.
It was clear the story was designed for the spoken version, which I much preferred and it sure tugged on my heart strings mores with the human connection, rather than reading the words on a page, in my own head.
Likely the best part of this entire book is the fact that Matt teaches you that you don’t have to have life threatening experiences, get arrested, or die, to have good stories to tell. In fact, since most people reading this have not died, they can connect better to events that might have happened to them. These everyday moments are worth capturing and developing. He calls this “Homework for life”.
“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?” - Matthew Dicks
Writing down the highlight of the day, no more than a sentence really. The goal here is to find a transformation that can be later turned into a story. A bite sized memory. Here is just an example of a few of my days:
Jan 19 - Screw today, icy driveway, car stuck, hand hurts, head hurts
Dec 22 - Courage to do the right thing, specific example recounted about a time at work (a story I had almost forgotten)
Dec 21 - Single moment of happiness, sitting on the couch with Mia and Ollie after reading Storyworthy. Appreciative
None of these have yet been turned into stories, but each is the start of something that happened to me that day, or something on that day triggered an old memory for a story that I haven’t told or thought about in years. That is one of the things that struck once I started doing homework for life, was stories that I had long forgotten. At one point, they would have been told often and poorly. But as I started to search for clues in my everyday life of stories that exist, I began to uncover old memories that were long forgotten or blocked out of my mind.
Even in business you have to know how to tell a story
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” — Steve Jobs
That powerpoint you have to give at work? Would be a lot more compelling if you weren’t reading from slides. What is the story? What is the transformation you are selling? Communication and storytelling is useful not only for people who want to stand on stage at the Moth, but also those in the board room, teachers, YouTubers, pretty much anyone could benefit from being abl to structure stories and figure out messaging so what you are trying to say, comes across clearly and in a relatable way.
So why did I read this book? One of the last chapters asks this question. I actually have no intention of standing on stage at the Moth or going to a competitive storytelling event, however I do make YouTube videos, which is effectively sitting on my own stage, competing against many others for who has the best story. Sure there are videos that might not need story, but I find myself far more interested currently in people who can make a good story. I have in my head some way to weave story into YouTube, so I don’t have just another talking head explanation in a sea of the same.
In order to act out that vision or dream, I’ll have to start telling stories. I learned that in order to improve my ability to make videos, I had to start making videos. It was very clear when I decided that I wanted to bring a little bit more of myself into the videos that I wanted to be able to use moments from real life and craft more videos about life’s real moments and less about what latest tech gadget I bought or program I learned to use. Coincidentally, so far, none of that has made its way onto my homework for life as a 5 second storyworthy moment.
The real moments in my life, those small 5 seconds that will turn into stories, what really matters is the human element. That connection that we all have stories to tell and finding them becomes easier, the more we look.
