371. Stories Sell with Matthew Dicks

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Matthew Dicks: 

Focusing on what you say in the first 30 seconds of your story is going to be critical to whether people are going to listen to your story or mentally or even physically drift away from you. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. 

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Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And I'm really excited about today's guest. He was on before, way back in episode 269, and that was such an amazing conversation. Brought him back to talk about his newest book. His name is Matthew Dicks. 

He's an internationally renowned best-selling author. His novels have been translated into more than 25 languages worldwide. He's a humor columnist at Seasons Magazine. He's written comic books. He's a record 61-time Moth Story Slam Champion and a nine-time Grand Slam Champion. His story has been featured in the nationally syndicated Moth Radio Hour, as well as their podcasts. He's got a solo show. Matthew Dicks does everything, but he's back with us today to talk about his newest book, Stories Sell, and who knows what else, but it's going to be a great conversation. 

Matthew, welcome back to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today. 

Matthew Dicks:

It is an honor to be back. Thank you so much.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So I usually have people go through their history and they tell us their superhero story. We already did that. So again, I really encourage all of you to go back into the time machine and listen to episode 269. So I do want to just briefly touch on what you're doing, because you're a prolific writer, but a 61-time Story Slam champion. Pretty amazing. So tell us just before we even get into anything else, why stories, why you tell stories, why stories are so important, and we'll go from there. 

Matthew Dicks: 

I guess I've discovered -- I'm also an elementary school teacher, so teaching kids and being a kid myself, who wasn't getting a lot of attention from his parents or any adults, really as a child, I sort of discovered the power, I think, of storytelling, both in terms of making myself known and getting people to sort of look in my direction and listen to what I have to say. 

And then in doing that, sort of the discovery that when we tell a story, as opposed to sort of speaking in words and sentences and exposition, when we actually land images and emotions in someone's mind, we become memorable, we become impactful, we can get people to sort of believe in the things that we want them to believe in, we can get people to remember us long after we've finished speaking. 

I just figured out early on, and now I've learned the brain science behind it and sort of confirmed what I used to suspect, which is the best way to get people to listen to you, believe in you, and pay attention to you is to tell them a story. It's the reason why you and I can probably remember and recite the plots to a hundred different movies and 50 books and a whole bunch of television shows. 

And yet, it's really hard for you to reproduce sort of a pie chart that was really meaningful to you at some point, or a bar graph, or even a talk, like your college commencement speaker. You probably don't remember what that person said, unless that person incorporated a story into their speech. So storytelling is a way to land ideas in people's minds in a really meaningful way. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Well, I love what you said, and we do encode memories that have emotional residents in a different part of the brain than we do if it's wrote knowledge, like the capital of Idaho or something like that. So you definitely have cracked the code there. 

And so I want to talk a little bit about your newest book, Stories Sell. This isn't really a business podcast per se, but people don't realize that they're selling in all parts of their life, no matter whether they're in business, whether they're just doing it in their relationships with their family or friends. So first, I want to know what was the impetus for writing this book, because you've written so many different books. Why this book and why now? 

Matthew Dicks: 

Well, I wrote a book called Storyworthy back in 2017, thinking I was going to help people tell better stories, and it certainly did that. But the business world found it and sort of took a square peg and fit it into a round hole and made use of it to help them with sales and branding and marketing and all those things. And it worked well. And I managed to sort of. put together this surprising consulting career with businesses all over the world now telling them about storytelling. 

So, Stories Sell is sort of the book that they should have received initially, which is, here's how you can actually get people to not only tell a story well, but to carve that story out into the work that you do.

Whether that work is in the corporate world, you're putting together a new sales pitch for your new product, or honestly, if you're trying to get your child to behave differently, and you can do that through telling a story. 

Or even my wife, someone once asked my wife in my presence, when did you first fall in love with Matt? And I thought, I'm so glad I'm here to listen to this answer, because I didn't know what it would be. And I figured it would be, I took one look at him, but she said, no, it was never that. She said it was in a Chili's restaurant when we were having dinner as friends one night, and she discovered that every time she asked me a question, I would tell her a story. 

And the stories were always sort of different than the stories most people tell they were more vulnerable and slightly more entertaining. And she said that night, she realized that if I marry this guy, I'm never going to be bored because he's never going to run out of interesting things to say. So whether you're trying to sort of land the best spouse in the world, which is what I managed to do, or get your kids to change their behavior in some way, or get your neighbor to knock it off if they're annoying you or you're trying to sell your latest product, stories are the way to make that happen, to get people to really believe and trust in what you're saying and what you're doing.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I love this. So take us through storytelling 101 from a selling perspective. So help us kind of set the stage for what to do to be able to get your point across, connect with people in the best way and move people emotionally into a decision. 

Matthew Dicks: 

There's lots of ways to do it. One of my favorite examples is I was working with a biotech company. Can't explain exactly what they do, but they essentially, we'll say they sell tubes. They sell tubes to other companies who need these tubes to conduct some kind of a process. And John was his name, and John's company sells 18 different tubes of different sizes and shapes. His competitors all sell one tube. 

And essentially, if you go with his competitors, you're going to spend a lot less money, but you have to retrofit that tube. You have to make it work for you. Whereas John's company sells tubes that are much more expensive, but they're going to fit what you need. You don't have to sort of mess with them. 

So rather than telling that story, which is a terrible story and a boring story, instead, John gets on stage at a conference and he says, essentially, when I go grocery shopping, my family makes me crazy because no one can agree on what kind of apple they like. So they give me a list of all the apples I have to buy. So my son needs four Cosmic Crisp, and my daughter likes Yellow Delicious, and my wife is baking a pie, so she wants three Macintosh, but she also likes Red Delicious. So he says I spend 15 minutes every week in front of all of those apples, picking them out and putting them in bags and labeling the bag so I can get charged properly. He said, it makes me crazy, but it makes my family happy. 

And then he says, that's what my company does. We believe you should have all the apples. Our competitors say, take a Macintosh and make it work for you. It's the only apple you get. He says, I don't believe in that. I believe that you should get what you need, what you want, and when you need it. And that's what our company believes in. 

So John goes to a conference and tells that story. Absent any data, absent any science, he essentially tells a funny, relatable story about his family and grocery shopping. And he tells that story alongside four other scientists, who I also help tell stories, but they include a lot of data and a lot of science. And John comes back with more sales leads than the other four scientists combined because he got on stage and he told a story that was relatable and amusing and meant something to people. 

And when they left, they probably went home and told the John story at their dinner table to their families. And when they went grocery shopping the next week, the people in that conference, and they were standing in front of the apples, they were thinking about John in a really positive way which is why his talk worked better than all the other talks, even though it was absent of science. 

That's what storytellers can do. We can sort of take something as odd and difficult to understand as tubes used in experiments, and instead relate it to something that is meaningful and understandable and amusing and sort of touches your heart. And you can do that whether you're trying to sell tubes at a biotech or sell an idea to get investment in your company or convince your son, as I'm currently trying to do, to empty his lunchbox when he gets home from camp every day before doing nine other things, and then forgetting the lunchbox and making his father crazy. If we encapsulate it with a story, it becomes meaningful. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

What story are you telling your son to get him to do that? 

Matthew Dicks: 

Well, I told my son a story about taking care of your future self. That's what I sort of phrased it as. And it was the idea that we either do things now that will help us in the future, or we hope that the future is going to work out for us. And so I gave him a couple stories, a story where I took care of my future self. It was actually related to laptops. I keep four laptops going at all times, all updated the same way. He sees me do it every Sunday. I open all four laptops, so they all download and look exactly the same. Because I'm a writer, and if I lose a laptop, I'm in trouble. And he used to think I was crazy. 

And then there was actually a week where I was three laptops down. Like the S key broke on one, so I opened up the next one, and the battery died on that one. And when I got to the third laptop, my son said, you're a genius, dad, because if you didn't have three laptops ready to go, you wouldn't be able to get your work done this week. And I said, yeah, I'm a genius, so I reminded him of that story. 

And then I told him a story about when I was a kid and I sort of like didn't do an assignment and hoped it would just sort of work out and it didn't work out. And I said, in one of those stories, I'm taking care of my future self. I'm anticipating a problem in the future and eliminating it. And the other one, I was just hoping the problem would go away and it didn't. 

So you right now are hoping this problem somehow goes away in that when you walk in the door every day and you don't take care of your lunchbox, you're hoping that somewhere down the road, you will suddenly remember at a convenient moment to take care of it. It never happens, which means I'm yelling at you every Monday morning, saying, where's your lunchbox, the food inside is now rotten because it's been two days, Saturday and Sunday, sitting in a backpack. So I'm telling him those stories in hopes of finally landing the message. The problem is he's a 12-year-old boy, so the audience is very difficult. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I understand that all too well. So I want to go back to stories, telling stories, because the fact that you have four laptops that you're updating concurrently every Sunday is really illustrative of the fact that you are a prolific writer and storytelling is something that obviously comes very naturally to you. If somebody's listening to this and they're saying, I hear Matt, but I'm just not sure that I can tell stories with the proficiency that he tells stories. What's your response to that? 

Matthew Dicks: 

Well, storytelling isn't sort of something that you're born with. There are people who say, oh, there's a natural storyteller in my family. They're not natural. What probably happened to that person, those natural storytellers, they're either outstanding listeners, so they have paid attention and absorbed what was happening around them and learn those strategies, or they were like me and desperately wanted attention as a child and found the best way to get attention is to make people laugh and to make people sort of listen to your stories.

And so you force yourself to learn the strategy behind it, you identify a good storyteller and you ask yourself, what are they doing? And then eventually over time, you'll become one. When I started telling stories, I didn't understand the strategies that I had in place. And it wasn't until people started asking me to teach them to tell stories that I had to deconstruct my own process. But in deconstructing my process, I discovered there's no natural gift to it. I'm just strategically aligning sentences in such a way to maintain interest and excitement and sort of reach an emotional conclusion, but it's something everyone can do. I have taught the absolute worst storytellers on the planet how to tell excellent stories in a short time because it really is a method and a strategy that can be applied to anything that you do. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So let's talk a little bit about that method and strategy because it sounds like there's a logical order to this. So take us through the flow of good storytelling. 

Matthew Dicks: 

Sure. Well, there's a lot to it. I think what you have to start with is understanding what is a story. And I think most people sort of don't understand that. Most people kind of think that if something happened to me, I will tell you what happened to me in chronological order, and therefore I will have told you a story. And that really is just reporting on your life. That's just relaying events in order to someone who is listening, who probably doesn't honestly want to hear that. That's why we have spouses and mothers. They're the people who we report our lives to. 

A story is, at its fundamental essence, about change over time. A story is, I was once one kind of person and then some stuff happened, and I became a different kind of person, or I once thought one thing and then some stuff happened and now I think a different thing. And every movie you've ever watched, every book you've ever read, television show, Broadway show, they're all about that. A protagonist, in the case of your story's you, being one kind of a person, and then over the course of time, whether that's a minute or four decades, becoming a different kind of person. We're looking for those moments. Those are the moments to share with people. Those are the moments that are going to mean something to people, rather than just telling you what happened over the course of my day or my week. 

So finding those singular moments in your life when you realize something is different in you, or different about your view of the world, or different about your perception of your child, or your spouse, or yourself, those are the moments that we seek, and those are the moments that are going to land in people's hearts. So that is the first and fundamental thing we need to understand, is that important idea of sharing things that actually constitute a story. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Okay. So I think this is really interesting because you really differentiated storytelling a story, which really, I mean, we're talking about movies a lot of times, at least for the movies I watch. It's like this Joseph Campbell's hero's journey kind of a thing based on just reporting it. Like, you're watching the news. The news isn't a story. At 8:00 today, I ate breakfast and at 8:15, this happened, right? Like, so I'm really starting to appreciate how you're delineating between these two because they are so very different. So that's the first component understanding really what is a story. What's the next critical piece here, Matt?

Matthew Dicks: 

I think the next important part is choosing where to start the story. I used to say that the beginning and endings of stories had equal weight, and they were the most important parts. I don't really think that anymore. I think if we think of a story as like a plane ride, I'm going to take you to a beautiful place, right. If I don't get people on the plane, I'm flying an empty plane to a beautiful place. And when I land, there's no one to enjoy it. 

So I always think the beginning of a story is the most critical place in a story because it's the spot where people are going to stop thinking and stop talking and start paying attention, or they're not. And I think most of the time, people start stories so miserably that they can't get people's attention. 

And because of that, people tend to speak with sort of verbal detritus, I say. They start using phrases in hopes that they will get people's attention, so they'll open a story with something like, guess what, which is really a terrible combination of words. Guess what is a meaningless question that does not require an answer, nor does it want an answer. It's just an attempt to say, look at me, right. And that's a bad way to begin. Another one is when someone says like, oh, I have a really funny story to tell you. You've just ruined it because it's never going to be as funny as the bar you have just set for yourself. 

So people are often desperately trying to hold attention at the beginning of a story by ruining a story, as opposed to launching in with some strategy that really guarantees that people are going to pay attention to you. So focusing on what you say in the first 30 seconds of your story, it's going to be critical to whether people are going to listen to your story or mentally or even physically drift away from you.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

This makes sense. So, know it's a story, focus on the first 30 seconds to really hook people without self-sabotaging the story. And then what follows that? 

Matthew Dicks: 

Well, let me tell you that, to start the story, I'll give you sort of my best trick. Now I have a whole bunch of things that we have to think about when beginning stories when we want to drill down, but the best thing to be thinking about is we want to create a movie in the minds of the audience. We want our audience to sort of almost leave the physical space they're in and open that third eye, that mental eye and see what we want them to see. 

And so to open your story, I tell people that the two things you should always say in the beginning, in the first sentence, essentially, is location and action. In other words, give us a place that the story is taking, that the story is happening, and then be doing something. Location is great because it activates imagination. When people say to me, your stories are so vivid, how do you make them so vivid in my mind? I say, I don't use adjectives. I eschew them whenever possible. I instead lean on the audience's imagination. 

So, if I tell you I'm standing in the middle of a kitchen, I'm not going to describe the kitchen for you, unless some particularity of the kitchen is relevant to the story. Because as soon as I say I'm standing in a kitchen, I know you've already envisioned me in a kitchen. And you've envisioned me in a kitchen that you can see with perfect clarity, because it's probably your kitchen or your parents’ kitchen, or a kitchen you've seen on television a million times. Whichever it is, I'm not going to waste time describing the kitchen, because that's a good way to ruin a story. Instead, I'm going to lean in on your imagination of kitchen and use that instead. 

I'm not, as a storyteller, interested in verisimilitude. I don't want you to see my kitchen, because that's not the interesting part of the story. I just want you to see a kitchen with the greatest clarity possible. And I love location for that reason, because locations are often imbued with a thousand adjectives, meaning you can see lots and lots of things immediately simply by the word kitchen or the word backyard, or I'm swimming in a pool. Instantly, these things evoke sort of a movie in the minds of the audience. 

And then we start with action, because people want stories to begin. And so often, instead of beginning a story, a storyteller will begin by teaching us something. They'll say, like, I grew up in a one stoplight town with a pharmacy on Main Street and a candy store across. And I'm thinking, this is not a story. This is a description of a town. Like, nothing has happened yet. You think about a movie, something always happens in the first moment. Someone is walking, someone is climbing, someone is falling, people are talking. We can teach the audience things, but we can teach them after the story has begun. To grab the audience's attention, we tell them where we were, and what was happening and then we're off and running and now we have an audience's attention. 

And the more we can do that throughout the story, maintaining location, always letting people see where we are so that the movie continues to run in their mind and always being focused on action, dialogue and thought, because that's what stories drive are driven by people want to know what you said, what you did and what you were thinking. Those three things are the most important things in stories, not what color your dress was, not what the temperature of the air was, not the flow of the river. Those are things that might come into play, but the most important things are what you said, what you did and what you thought. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So action, dialogue and thought, which I would presume that we weave pretty continually through the story. 

Matthew Dicks: 

Exactly. Yes. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

And then talk to us about how we best conclude the story. 

Matthew Dicks: 

Well, the first thing is we make sure we conclude the story, because most stories don't end. Most stories get interrupted by a phone call, or someone steps in front of us, or someone needs to leave. My father-in-law tells me stories all the time. He's never actually reached the end of a story. He just sort of gets in his car while he's still talking, drives away. When he arrives back at my home two weeks later, opens the door, he's still talking, right? So that's how most stories go. 

So before we even begin speaking, we sort of want to know where we're going to land. Like, what was that moment of change that happened to us. And once we identify it, that's where we're going to stop talking, because people often speak beyond that moment. They often just keep telling us what happened, even though the real moment of meaning has now arrived. So we want to know where we're ending, sort of before we begin speaking, and that's a habit you can get into very easily. And then when you say it, you're done saying it, you stop talking. And I often say at the end of a story, you want to say what it looked like, you want to say what it felt like, and then you want to say what it was. 

So last night, I was at a baseball game with my son. And stories can be about tiny little things. I was at a baseball game with my son and my wife. My son's eating ice cream, and he spills the ice cream. He's dripping ice cream all over his shirt while he's eating it. And my wife looks at him and says, what are you doing? Like, what is wrong with you? Why do you have ice cream all over your shirt? And my son looks at her and says, mom, it's called childhood. And she laughed. 

Now, that's a story, actually, because in my mind, and in my wife's mind, our view of something changed, right? I saw a 12-year-old messy boy who doesn't know how to eat ice cream in a way he should, and he said actually, you're making a mistake. You have forgotten that I'm a kid. And instantly, everything made sense to me. And all the ice cream on his shirt was nothing to me anymore, because it was what the world would have expected from a 12-year-old boy. But I needed to hear him go, actually, it's called childhood, right. 

When I get to that, I don't need to talk anymore. I don't need to say, and so the game ended, it was eight to two. It was a really great game. Charlie had a good time. He had to go to the bathroom and wash his shirt a little bit off. So it was -- none of that is relevant. The most important thing is my son says, actually, it's called childhood. I see a shirt in a new way. Suddenly, I understand 12-year-old boys are supposed to spill ice cream on their shirts, and I should shut my mouth and enjoy the game with my son and not worry about this nonsense, which is what I did.

So we want to land it there and then be done. And if someone wants to say, what was the score of the game or how was the rest of the game? Did he ever get his shirt cleaned off? If they want to ask those inane questions, I will answer them once my story is done. So find the moment, say the moment, say what it meant to you, and then stop talking.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Boom. Perfectly said. I love this conversation, Matt. I like the way that you, like a surgeon, you break down exactly how to deliver elements of a story. So valuable. As you know, and I'm going to challenge you to do something different because you answered this question once before a couple of years ago. I wrap up every episode by asking my guests a single question. And that is, what is your biggest helping, that one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today? 

Matthew Dicks: 

Well, I think the most important thing is that people see stories as big sort of momentous occasions in their lives. They watch movies and they see plane crashes and people jumping from building to building and bank robberies and epic romances. And I think what they fail to see is that tiny moments, like the one I just described to you, where your son says something to you, and it just reframes your thinking. I actually think those are the most important stories to tell. 

I'm a person who has died twice and been brought back to life via CPR both times, and those are not my favorite stories to tell. I would much rather tell you the story about Charlie reminding me that ice cream on a shirt is called childhood because I think those are the stories that relate to people the most. They're the stories people understand the most. 

And they're the ones that if we don't pay attention to and hold on to that it's like sand through our fingers, they disappear forever and then suddenly our son is 27 years old, and we don't know where the time went. But if we recognize those moments, we hold on to them, and we tell those stories, like the one I just told you, then they become permanent markers in the life of me and my son Charlie. And suddenly it's not sand through my fingers anymore, but it's something I get to share with other human beings and remember myself. So be paying attention to the tiniest of moments, because they can have the biggest meaning. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Beautifully said. I really love that. Tell us where people can connect with you online and learn more about you and get their hands on your book, including your newest one. 

Matthew Dicks: 

Sure. You can find my books wherever you find books, hopefully. And if you go into a store and you can't find them, you should demand them. But you can find me at matthewdicks.com, or if you're just interested in storytelling, I have a businessstoryworthy.com where you can go and join a free academy and get free training. And I have lots of courses and lots of resources to help people tell better stories. I genuinely think that the world would be a better place when we all begin telling the right story better than we do right now. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Amen to that. And we'll have links to everything Matthew in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com. Well, Matthew, as was the case last time I knew we would have an amazing conversation. I loved it. Thank you so much for joining us on The Daily Helping today. 

Matthew Dicks: 

Thank you so much for having me back. I really appreciate it. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Absolutely. And I also want to thank each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to our conversation. If you liked it, if you're excited, if you're going to go tell a story to somebody you care about later today, go give us a follow and a five-star review in your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show. 

But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are and post in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.