Linear: beginning, middle, and end.

Personal doesn’t mean private. Personal stories don’t require telling private information or oversharing. You decide your boundaries and what is private.

Know your starting, ending, and transition sentences for a strong start and finish.

Conflict: Where is the point where something happens? What is at stake? This is the fuel for your story.

The difference between a good story and a great story is how it engages the senses and emotions of the audience to make them feel and experience the same things as the characters.

Not every situation requires storytelling with data. Tell stories: To connect to deeper understanding, mindset shift, or exploration. When you have a new audience or stakeholder. When approaching a decision or milestone. To highlight insights and outliers in the data. To understand scale.

The structure contributes two things: enabling the storyteller to map out a coherent story with ease, and helping the audience follow the story.

Stories build empathy and trust. As we listen to stories, we develop empathy, leading to a measurable spike in oxytocin. The more oxytocin that is released, the more trustworthy we perceive the storyteller.

He focused on creating an arc for the audience to connect with the characters’ emotional growth. Each musical number had to earn its way back into the movie by meeting specific criteria. Does this advance the story forward? If cut, would anything be lost?