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

A hook is an attempt to be entertaining, engaging, thought-provoking, surprising, challenging, daring, and even shocking. This can be done in dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of ways.

This is why every lesson requires a hook.

I believe that it is the teacher’s responsibility to provide a reason to learn.

When a student-teacher presents me with a lesson that he or she would like to teach to my class, my first question is always this: “What’s the hook? What is the reason for my students to listen and pay attention to you?”

When you are entertaining, people learn better. You convey information more effectively. You will become a better teacher, presenter, coach, salesperson, trainer, CEO, professor, parent, and dinner companion.

It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that you do not waste the hour by reading from PowerPoint slides, providing information that could have been delivered via email, lecturing, pontificating, pandering, or otherwise boring your audience. You must entertain, engage, and inform. Every single time.

The ending of the story — your five-second moment — will tell you what the beginning of your story should be. The beginning will be the opposite of the end.

Stories can never be about two things.

I realized that the story had two important meanings for me: 1. It was the first time I realized that people will turn their backs in the face of evil and walk away rather than taking a stand. 2. It was the first time I felt that the world was a fundamentally unsafe place, that people will hurt you for no better reasons than traditions and payback.