Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

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.

The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results. The best stories give rise to unanswered questions.

The other way of discovering the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do.

This is the trick to telling a big story: it cannot be about anything big. Instead we must find the small, relatable, comprehensible moments in our larger stories. We must find the piece of the story that people can connect to, relate to, and understand.

Matt’s Five Rules of Drinking Stories 1. No one will ever care about your drinking stories as much as you. 2. Drinking stories never impress the type of people who one wants to impress. 3. If you have more than three excellent drinking stories from your entire life, you are incorrect in your estimation of an excellent drinking story. 4. Even the be

It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. — Alan Rickman

This is how to tell a success story: Rather than telling a story of your full and complete accomplishment, tell the story of a small part of the success. Tell about a small step. Feel free to allude to the better days that may lie ahead, but don’t try to tell everything. Small steps only.

Sometimes the place to begin is convenient and easy to find. Sometimes not. In “Charity Thief,” for example, my story ends with the realization that I know nothing about loneliness. Once I found that five-second moment, I asked myself, what is the opposite of knowing nothing about loneliness? The opposite of knowing nothing about loneliness is the

Just tell your story. All of it. Forget the strategies. Start in the wrong place and end in the long place. Ramble. The goal is to return to that moment as best as possible in order to find its meaning.

Be yourself. If your language sounds more formal than your normal speech, you have failed.