278: Neil Gordon — How to Tell a Story that Sticks

How not to be boring.

Af.

That's what we're talking about today, right? Let's bring some life to your pitches, to your talks, to your keynotes, to your employee trainings, to like, whatever. Let's bring them to life. We're going to figure out how to tell great stories, how to captivate your audience. Listen. Hi again, everyone. My name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm one of a small group of scaling coaches around the world who help people grow and scale and develop their businesses. We love to work with people who have huge ambition, who have 10x100x dreams, who want to dominate their industry, who want to be billion dollar companies and more and more. And anyway, we love working with people like that. This show is all about that. We bring shows like this every week. You can find them wherever you get your podcast, video, et cetera, kind of content. Or go to scalingcoach.com where you can get in touch with us as well. Scalingcoach.com Anyway, we're joined today by Neil Gordon, who's going to talk to us all about great storytelling and how to bring our talks to life and that kind of thing. So listen in. Welcome to the show, Neil. Glad to have you.

You're on. Thank you very much for having. Bill. Yeah, I'm on the East Coast. I'm in New York.

But you used to live in the west coast, correct?

I was an Angelino for a little over 10 years.

And did you stop anywhere in between?

No, I've. I've only ever lived in New York or Los Angeles my whole life. My whole adult life, rather. I just don't seem to acknowledge the rest of the country. Yeah, yeah, there we have it.

I've been. I'm doing a lot more work kind of in the middle of the country lately, and they can get very sensitive about being ignored and not, you know, by us coastal people.

So. Yeah, but what I meant to say is I've been all around and lived in all the cities of the country and know a whole lot about all of them. In case anyone in the middle is.

Listening from wherever you're from, there you are.

Right.

Like, we all have these little things and yet we're united by a lot of things, which is, I think, the subject of our conversation today. So for the listeners, Neil helps people to craft and develop themselves in developing storytelling and that kind of thing. He has groovy hobbies. He'll tell us about stuff like that. But he's featured columnist and Expert and speaker and etc. On storytelling and has worked with people in all realms from business to broadcast media and so on. So I'm delighted to have you on the show because this is something I'm really passionate about. I'm always talking with our guests about tell stories, talk with our coaches, tell stories and trying to remind myself to focus on, lead with stories, then get into the concepts, then get into kind of the processes and things like that. Exactly how did you become an expert in storytelling? Right. What gives you the right to tell us about storytelling and what's your background?

Well, the next thing, Bill, that I'm supposed to say is, well, I was a really bookish kid and always had my face in the book my entire life. And I got 800 on my sat verbal and all that. And none of that is even close to true. I hated reading. I got my first book report in second grade and that was it for me. I was just done and I really paid the price. By 10th grade. The first time I took my SATs, I got a 330 verbal score, which put me in like the fifth percentile. So in case everyone doesn't. Anyone doesn't understand, 95% of the people who also took the SATs that year did better than I did. And so it wasn't until the end of college I started reading for leisure. And right after I graduated, I moved to New York and I needed an escape from the subway, so I really immersed myself in reading. It was before smartphones and stuff, so I didn't have. Didn't have what exactly? I just like, I just didn't want to take in all the noise and all of the grime and all of that. And I read one book in particular, it's called A Prayer for Owen Meanie by John Irving. And it just led to the shattering of my worldview and a realization that anything, including like sad endings, couldn't happen. And I just went to this morose, kind of angst ridden, typical 20 something, what's it all mean kind of phase. And then in the process, I just read everything I could find, mostly fiction at that point, and just developed an insight into the. Into the written word that carried me into getting a job at Penguin, the book publishing company, and entry level editorial gigs. So that was the beginning of my work with words and storytelling.

So the horror of New York subways. Led you into escapist fiction.

Exactly. Well, you know, an interesting thing about Owen Meaney in particular is that I thought it was going to be escapist fiction and it just really put me up against some really stark realities, at least for when I was 22. And so it's just a matter of the way that faith and spirituality and predestined kind of stuff comes up and all of that, and just challenged my notions of what was possible.

Interesting. I don't know work. But now I'm curious. I'll have to read it. I would say that for a long time now, I've been focused on business book reading. And yet some of the most remarkable books are the books where they're not about business at all, but we hear an underlying human thing. Unfortunately, humans run businesses. Very challenging.

Yeah. I think of Ken Robinson's very famous TED Talk on schools and creativity. It's the most popular TED talk there is. And he talks about university professors just having, like, body, like, being kind of disembodied. Just their heads and their bodies are just there to take their heads from one meeting to the next kind of thing. And that often happens in businesses. We get really immersed in strategies and tactics. But ultimately, if once. It's sometimes when we just return to that more basic sense of humanity that we make some of our most profound decisions.

Yes. Yeah, we have insights, we have leaps of thought. So what has you. Where do you go from book editing to speaking in media kinds of things? How does that transition happen for you?

I remember when I was working with one client in particular as a freelancer. By this point, I had left Penguin, and I was helping him with his book proposal, and he just wanted to vomit as much information onto the page as possible. And I just. I mean, I wanted to put a gun to my head. I was so overwhelmed by all the content and the information and stuff. And he just thought more was better, more was better. And I started to notice how there were a lot of people who agreed and how they wrote books and how they gave speeches. And then TED talks by this point were very popular. And I was watching these most famous TED talks with millions and millions of views, and I was noticing that there was something similar about all of them. And it was in stark contrast to that proposal that my client wanted to write. And it was then that I figured out that there was a more essential ingredient that relates not just to being an expert, but also to our topic today of storytelling around. There was this kind of basic secret sauce, like, sentence that showed up in the TED talks. And then when I looked at books on the Kindle and you would see, like, certain passages were highlighted by thousands of readers and stuff. And it was also the same kind of sentence. And I just realized that whether you're writing a book or you're speaking or something, there's a very basic practice of being an expert that just makes something land and that it becomes the moral of the stories you tell, and that the stories fit with the message, and it all just kind of comes together. So if you had 45 minutes on stage, you could have an amazing impact if you're just strategic about how you put certain ingredients in certain places.

Interesting. Right now all our people want to know, what are those ingredients?

What are those ingredients?

Okay.

I'm thinking, like, we could probably just go through a little bit of a lab of. I could tell you a basic story that demonstrates what makes a story worth telling, like a true story about our lives that we might use in business and our talks and all that. And also show you where that ingredient shows up as well.

Sure.

So when I was in fourth grade, I was in the Jungle Book with my fourth grade class based on the Disney cartoon. And I played King Louis the orangutan. And I had this big song based on Kipling.

Was that not Rudyard Kipling?

Yeah, well, you know, it's like it's Jungle Book in quotes. Because I'm pretty sure Rudyard Kipling didn't exactly think of these big swing time kind of ragtime kind of numbers and stuff like that. But that was my responsibility, was the ragtime. I want to be like you number as a big ham. As a fourth grader, I've always been a big ham, frankly. And. And I had this big dance around the stage kind of number where I kicked my legs all over the place. And the first time I wore my costume was also the first performance in front of half the school. I had these big furry gorilla slippers on and kicking my legs all over the place. And my left slipper falls off my left foot and lands in the pit between the stage and the audience. And I'm on stage, I have the fourth grade equivalent of an oh, crap kind of moment. And I honestly, Bill, don't know what made me do it, but I just reared my right foot back and hurled the right slipper off my foot and sailed halfway back across the auditorium. Everyone went berserk. And when kindergarteners and first graders wrote us letters about the thing on construction paper and all that, they were all, like, writing about how much they love that the lion in quotes kicked off his slippers even though I was an ape. They didn't know that, but. But they just. Everyone loved it. And so I decided to do that for every performance, deliberately thereafter. And I realized that sometimes the greatest catastrophes are the greatest opportunities for success.

Right.

And so in that story, there's a lot to unpack. But what I particularly did deliberately was I told the story about a very particular moment in time. It was a scene. It wasn't just a big sweeping narrative. And what I did, the reason why that story might stand out for somebody, they might remember it, is because of the slipper that fell off. It was a moment that I didn't see coming. It was a moment of the unexpected. The value of a story about our life is driven by how much we incorporate the unexpected. And why is that? Because the unexpected moment forced me to adapt. That kicked off the other slipper. I did something differently than I ever had before. And that adaptation is what leads to the lesson that the greatest catastrophes are sometimes the greatest opportunities for success. Okay, now, so the unexpected tell a specific scene and then to circle back to that ingredient I was enigmatically alluding to. Right. It's that sentence. The greatest catastrophes or the greatest opportunities for success is the moral of the story. Yes, but you don't need a story to have that kind of sentence. It's what I call a silver bullet. It's a one sentence encapsulation of an idea. It's in all of these famous TED talks, and it's the passages highlighted in the Kindle. It's this secret sauce like statement that gives people that kind of epiphanous moment. So when you're on stage, you tell a story. And again, I mean, I'm glossing over a lot of the more technical details of putting together a great talk or a presentation or a pitch to investors. But basically, you set up an unexpected moment that will stick with your audience, and then it leads to that big aha moment.

Say it again.

You tell a story that includes the unexpected moment.

Right.

Forces you to adapt, and then because of that adaptation, you learn something and the learning becomes this moral, secret, sauce like statement.

The capture of the lesson or the takeaway is the nugget. Right?

Exactly. The nugget. And so when you think of Ken Robinson's TED Talk, the most popular TED Talk that I just mentioned before, he tells a story about Jillian Lynn, the choreographer, and she would have been just diagnosed with ADHD, but she was in the kid in the 30s, and they didn't know of that condition at that point. And so this really great specialist said to her, mother, your daughter isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to dance class. And then by igniting her creative capacity as a person who has to move to think, she became this world class choreographer and hooked up with Andrew Lloyd Webber and choreographed Cats and all that sort of thing. But the lesson, the moral of his talk, the secret sauce thing that I call the silver bullet, is our only hope for our for the future is to see our creative capacities for the richness they are. Because our only hope for the future is to see our creative capacities for the richness they are. Okay, so the story sets up the lesson.

So I have this thought that we all have a bunch of stories, whether we realize it or not, right? And getting great at telling the stories is a really, really useful skill. But I have the second thought that, you know, depending on what, I could pick like any one of several different stories to tell to make lots of different points from. Like, I feel like I could take any number of my, like, powerful stories and they're just moments of like, power and surprise and turning points in life and that kind of thing. I could tell that story well and then I could pull out of it a variety of different lessons. Like, they're not always necessarily about just one thing, but they can be used interchangeably. Do you do that same thing or like.

Absolutely. And it's a very astute observation, Bill, because I have a story I like to tell of a client of mine. When she worked, she founded a program at Children's Hospital back in Los Angeles. And it was a program that gifts books to kids staying in the hospital. And you send volunteers to Bedside Read. And I was a volunteer. That's how I knew her and that's how she became my client. And I showed up for my shift one day and she was all flustered because she had to give a 10 minute presentation and she hated giving these because people would just gloss over and then they would just, just kind of tune her out and then just politely clap at the end. And she's just like, I have no idea why I do this. Like, why am I even going and talking to these people? And so she was all flustered and anxious and I said, would you like to work out what you're going to say to today? She said, yeah. So I took her aside and we spoke about it and I sent her off and she did the presentation. When I saw her that afternoon, I asked her how it went. She said I had them held, wrapped at attention from the moment I started speaking. And at the end they all lined up with their business cards and one of them even invited me to apply for a grant. Okay. I've told that story a number of times. What I often do is use that to demonstrate the silver bullet concept that we had that conversation that morning about what her talk was going to be. And it took two minutes because I already understood what her big idea was. And so I was able just to help her in two minutes to put together a whole talk, because I had that kind of clarity with her. It was no problem. But the other thing. So I could use that story to talk about the power of that lesson in your presentations, but I could also tell that story to explain why she had them held wrapped at attention from the moment she started speaking. And the reason why she did is because rather than visiting, saying, oh, it's so nice to be here, and thank you all for supporting the hospital and visiting and ingratiating herself, she just started with the story. As soon as she had been introduced, she stepped out, said, I wasn't really able to prepare for this because of something that happened last night. And she tells a story of this boy who was close to death, quite frankly, he was near the end of his life, and tells a story about how she brought in a SpongeBob SquarePants book and read. And the family, which was just in a daze in this really dark cloud, just conversed on the bed and just ate up the book along with the boy, and he pulled through, and he actually did stay with us for several more months after that. And so it was a great example of the lesson. But this is kind of meta, and I hope our listeners can keep up with all of this. The original story about helping her with that talk could help with how quickly we put that talk together because of the clarity of that silver bullet statement. But it could also be a great story for indicating how you can really draw your audience in from the moment you start speaking. Same story, different purposes. Yeah.

Applied to a different thing. I had an entrepreneur I coached some years ago. Now. It's been a while, but I remember he was having trouble with his, like, investor pitches, and he started in. So I said, all right, well, let's go through it. Like, give me your pitch. Like, take me through it and tell me about how it goes. And, like, just lay it on me. And he started in with all the facts and the figures and that kind of thing and why he cared about it, how important it was. And I'm like, I'm just so bored. Like, it's obvious. I know it, it's good, it's worthy, and I couldn't care less. Yeah. Why are you here? Like, why did you do this? What was the moment? Right. And then he opens with the thing that I. That I think you've been speaking to. There was, like, a little tease or whatever. I've always told people, let's figure out the. The turning point or the crisis, and then let's open there and then let's back up and talk about what led you to that moment and then carry through to the future and that kind of thing. And so he's like, all right. So I was 42. I'm making up some random shit now. My boss called me in and said I was doing a terrible job. And I looked at myself and I'm like, why am I killing myself driving back and forth for all this thing when my son was struggling with this, and I realized what I really needed to do was create a business that helps kids deal with this thing like his son was doing. And that's what my life should be all about.

Yeah, right.

And. Oh, now I want to know. Now I'm totally, like, I'm curious, like, what you created and did it help your son and how many other sons and daughters is it helping? And, like, I'm totally, like, I feel your connection to it. I'm like, I'm with you in your journey, you know?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, I mean, if any of our listeners are familiar with Entrepreneurs elevator pitch show, they actually only have one minute to do their pitch in a literal elevator. Right?

Yeah.

And in that case, I feel that stories could potentially derail the thing. But if you had at least like, maybe, like, 10 minutes to give your pitch to a group of venture capitalists or something like that, then. Yeah, that kind of story. The moment of crisis in particular that you mentioned, Bill, I mean, that's really what business is driven by, is improving the solutions we have to problems. And when you can start with a story that features some kind of problem that your listeners can either relate to or at least know that the marketplace is going to relate to, that's when you create that integration of emotionally compelling and intellectually justified.

Yeah, that's interesting. So talk about the story with your dad and your childhood thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Your bad storytelling.

Yeah, so.

Or whatever it was. Right.

Well, what happened? You know, it's interesting. A lot of us wind up kind of very gradually finding our way into our expertise or into our work or something like that. Sometimes there's a moment in time that proves this catalyst. And I didn't know I had a moment in time type story. Until just like a year and a half ago, where my work as a communication expert ultimately took shape after, like I told you already, like after I had been out of Penguin for a few years and all of that. But it really started when I was 18 and I was one of those kids, those teenagers who was morose and sullen and withdrawn and didn't talk to adults and had no personality and all of that. I probably sounded half like a zombie on the phone when my parents, friends called them and I picked up. Back in the days when we shared a phone, right. And by the time I was 18, though, I'd come out of my shell a bit and my family and I all went to this party thrown by a family friend. So it was mostly adults, but with some of us kids there too. And rather than be withdrawn, I actually talked to the adults. And I felt kind of good about that. I felt good about the fact that I had a little personality finally. And I recognized I was a little ashamed and embarrassed by the lack of personality I had shown in the last few years. And we get home and my dad takes me aside and he says, son, every time I heard you in a conversation, you were doing all of the talking. And this hit me like a. This is like a gut punch. I didn't like the fact that I was self absorbed and just, just talking about myself the whole time. And it wasn't until about a year and a half ago that I realized that that was the inception of what became my life's work and also the larger message I have to share with people. That effective communication values the recipient over the sender. On some level, I guess I kind of vowed that day to get better at that. And I mean, look, we're on your show where you're interviewing me, so our listeners won't necessarily get an impression of me being an active listener, but in a normal situation, at a party or whatever, I'll talk to a person for an hour. And they might not even learn anything about me because I'm asking them so many questions about their world. And it was just my mission in life just to turn communication into an act of service from that point on.

Yeah, well, you know, there I struggle with that all the time too. I'm. I tell stories easily. I'm very verbal, putting thoughts into words, not a problem for me. I certainly have more than my fair share of moments where I put my foot in my mouth and I say something insensitive, inconsiderate, like on and on. But I do find myself in the middle of conversations going, wait, why am I still talking?

Yeah, yeah.

Especially in a, in just a regular conversation. Right. But when you have to give a pitch, a presentation, a talk, teach a class or whatever, then that's an occasion where they're expecting a story. There is a story that draws them in. They're there to listen.

Right.

That's different kind of thing than a social setting or a one on one or whatever where there's much more give and take.

Right, right. And that's a really good point to make, Bill. I like to teach my folks, especially if they're, if I've taught them how to give an elevator pitch in like 30 seconds or something like that. If someone just asks you what do you do for a living? And it's just at a networking event or a party or whatever, and you launch into a super formal speech, they're going to probably tune out what you're saying and just think about why did this person just launch into this super formal thing? I just asked them a simple question. I encourage people in less formal situations to be more casual with the, with the content. You know how when you're struggling with this kind of thing, this really becomes a pain in the butt and all that. And like. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You set up the elevator pitch with a little interaction first and that winds up leading to a more engaged kind of rapport. The situation dictates the formality of the content.

There was a book, now I forget it. It was like stand like Lincoln, speak like Churchill or something like that. Do you know this book at all?

I don't know the book, but it's a good title.

It's a good title. Right, so Churchill, Lincoln, both really known and it was written by like a former Nixon speechwriter and who, who did quite a few political things. Definitely conservative and definitely from a whole different era. Because the number of like, like weirdly sexist and insensitive references and stuff through the book written at a very different time. But there are a lot of really interesting techniques in it about how to open things and how to keep people engaged, that kind of thing. And I never forgot that, like arrest it. You talked about it here a couple of different times about setting up something that creates mystery, creates something unexpected, something to open up and create interest, then that I'm going to hold back a little bit, then to fill in the story and create the whole journey and then pay off in the end with my nugget or my moral or whatever. The thing is that I'm using the story for.

Right, right. A big mistake I see in a lot of speakerss, storytellers, is that they think they have to tell the entire story all at once and go beginning, middle, and end. Done. I like to teach my speaking clients to start with a story of a person in crisis and then describe a night and day transformation that they went through. Basically skip to the end of the story and say, how did we get there? How did we get to that amazing outcome? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today.

Yeah.

Like, you started with a mystery. It draws them in. Instead of like, like learning objectives where someone's just like, I'm going to talk. Here's what I'm talking about today. And you have a slide with all these bullet points and like all the things and just.

Well, that's. We've been told that, though.

Yeah.

Tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them the thing and then tell them what you told them.

Yep, yep. It's terrible. It's like the essay. The essay composition structure that we learned in high school, have an introductory paragraph, three supporting ones, and then a concluding one. It's just like, I almost just fell asleep just describing that to you just now, Bill. It's just terrible. We can break up everything into a nonlinear format because that's what keeps. Keeps them on the edge of their seats.

Right. It's also, though, possible we see this a lot in quite a bit of reporting and things like that these days where we don't attend to any of it. So there's a tease of a headline and whatever. And then you get into reading and you're like, what is this article even about? This isn't about all of whatever. I got soldier, end of the thing. I'm like, okay, when does the movie come out? Like, and where can I watch it? And we're not dealing with the concerns of the listener at all. We're just like in our own mind, amused by our pithy phrasing and like.

Yeah, there was a. There was a website a number of years ago that was masterful at clickbait type headlines. And so you won't believe what she says at 1 minute and 36. And then I watch it 1 minute 36. Like, I completely believe that that was completely believable to me. It did not scream credulity at all.

And I'm like, it was obviously faked.

Good Lord, what are we doing here? And clickbait is one of those terms that's misused most of the time, but in that case, that was really what it was.

Yeah. Yeah. I used to lead leadership course.

Speaking of meta.

Right. I lead a leadership course today. Even I have a group, but this one was usually pretty large and we would run for about four months long and. And I would tell a story about them and I would come and I'd open the class and then the first day and I'd say, let me tell you how this story goes. One in four people don't finish this.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That.

That's a.

That's a good device because it is. Well, it's about as personal as it gets, isn't it?

Right.

You're not giving them a story with a hero. Hero's journey that they can relate to. They are the ones experiencing it right then and there.

Right. Let me tell you how this story ends. One in four of you won't be here. So 25%. So look to your left, look to your right. Pick three people, tell me who's going to quit.

And you could, you could, you could double as like a soothsayer there, Bill. You could be like, I studied divination on the side and I can predict the future.

You know, and then I would, I would carry it on and I would go to the person that we give up on again and again is the one in the mirror.

Mm.

You'll fight for those people next to you more than you'll fight for yourself. Mostly. Yeah. It was really, really great. And then we'd set up a whole bunch of other things. But I think that that construct. Right. Makes a difference. I love that Mystery surprise creates something that teases something.

Yeah. And with, with that silver bullet like lesson, that thing that leads to the epiphanous moment.

Yeah.

That really becomes incredibly important because it's not going to be like that clickbaity headline I just mentioned. You won't believe what she did kind of thing. If you're gonna have that kind of mystery and that kind of ramping up kind of anticipation in the, in the arc of your content, it's really good. It's a really good thing to live up to that build up, to have something of real value. And so if you just say, water it down with I'm giving you five things to learn kind of thing, it's just, I mean, I think that like a listicle, like 5 Things to Know about blank is good for an article headline, and people click and read that content. And I'm not dissing the listicle model, but if you're going to build up anticipation around something it's much more powerful to have a distilled essential thing that gives them something that they're going to be thinking about when they go to bed that night.

Yeah, some core thing. And along the way you may discover little side stories or supporting stories. You may end up telling three or four stories and then kind of one central or opening one.

Right, right, right, exactly. I mean, in any given talk, I might help a client to put together. We'll have a big opening story and then at least two or three other shorter ones that might be a little more self contained. And I even sent an email to my list the other day where I was appeared in another podcast. And the introduction, in the introduction, my host told like a five second story and I told my list. Check out what she says at 51 seconds in or whatever it was. Right. And it was like you can really get just even a little micro story across. And it does help to make whatever you're saying that much more tangible and sticky as you're going through a whole bunch of other content.

Yeah. What do you say? Or can you give us some examples of what especially CEOs get wrong? CEOs and business leaders, where do we screw up? What are the mistakes that we make in our storytelling?

I mean a lot of the things we've talked about in terms of telling it all at one time and, and not including an unexpected moment and all of that. But another thing that I see happen a lot is people will only ever tell big sweeping narratives. As in when we first started this company, we noticed a lot of things that were happening in the marketplace. And then you just telling that kind of big general story that just kind of covers like 6 months in 30 seconds or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

But what about the moment in time where you suddenly had the idea for the company or you suddenly looked at your earnings report and realized that you had gone from negative 12% growth to 78% growth in the matter of a month. And describing your feelings in that moment, describing the looks on the faces of the people right next to you and the dialogue that you had and all of that. I love telling stories where I'm actually there as it's like a scene, it's dialogue, it's reactions, it's moment to moment kind of thing. So if you're a CEO and you're going to go up and tell a story about, let's say it's a year end holiday kind of thing and you're going to, you've invited them all and you have five minutes that you're going to talk and you tell them a story instead of just telling them about the whole year in the five minutes. What if you told a moment in time that really captured how successful or meaningful that whole year was? And then describe. And we had many other moments like this throughout the year and many of you were there for those moments. I just really want to get across how we're really onto something here at this company and that's what we're going to do in the coming year is focus on blank or something like that. Have a specific moment in time with dialogue, with reactions, with whatever it is. Like me having the oh, crap moment on stage with the slipper and doing that kind of story that will make it incredibly tangible in your audience's mind.

Yeah. So specifics, like a picture of it. So I'm sitting in a cafe on Mission street about to bite into my BLT and having a conversation with my partner about how the freaking thing isn't working anymore. It does this one thing perfectly. But that isn't why we built the thing. And it's that moment that we realized there's actually a whole world of people who need exactly that. In fact, my neighbor, right. That I just made up all that.

Right, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Imagine.

But I mean that, that like richness. And I have people who are like, I was working with an executive, mid, middle aged executive in the Midwest for a Fortune 100 coming. Like, give me a picture. Create like make us real people in all of this.

Yeah, imagine like there's a very famous story, you probably know it, of Arthur Fry in the early 70s. He worked for 3M and he was really frustrated because his little piece of bookmark paper in his hymnal or his prayer book or whatever it was because he was in the church choir, kept falling to the floor and he just wanted to stay in there. And then he saw Spencer Silver's presentation on this, this low grade adhesive that he had developed and he put it all together and I was like, oh, we put it on paper. And thus was the birth of the post it. But it was the moment that the paper fell out of the book. That is what makes it real in the audience's mind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting something that. Yeah. Creating a rich picture of it. Now here's. I think for myself it's always comes down to this. If you tell me about a story, it's different than telling me the story. If you allow yourself to see it, to feel it, to go there again and you share the story with me, it's different than telling me about a story. So I have a story about the time when my business was doing this thing and is very different from in 2002. I got a call from the bank that they were going to close our line and they wanted to take my house. Right.

Right, exactly.

I'm telling you the story. I'm reliving it again. I'm remembering it. I'm experiencing it all anew. If I keep going with this thing, it could get very emotional as I talk about what it felt like to think that my business and my house and my family were all about to crumble. And that's very different than explaining it the moment I start telling you that it's conceptual, it's not lived anymore.

That's right.

Right.

We seem to have a real need to protect ourselves from the most vulnerable expressions of our stories and our content and all of that. And so we might talk about a story just as kind of a layer of protection so as to keep ourselves from being vulnerable. But it is that vulnerability that really drives people to be invested in it.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be. I mean, there's often fear and crisis. Right. Turning point, loss and like, that kind of thing. But there also can be surprise and eureka and elation and breakthrough and like, you got the whole arc of. Of what could show up there.

That's right.

Any other mistakes or hacks or that kind of thing for our listeners or stories about those things?

Well, I. I had this kind of funny experience going all the way back to January of 04, and I had a story that didn't have a proper ending, and it drove me nuts because I loved the story where I was supporting a. I'm revealing my politics. The content is hopefully going to be relevant regardless of our listeners politics. But I was in the Democratic primary of 2004. I supported Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and he had gained some momentum before Kerry ultimately won that nomination. And so I was up in New Hampshire canvassing in the middle of winter. And I love local accents and I love, like, the way people who speak English have a completely different way of talking than I do. It's just. I don't know why. I just love it. And one of my favorites is the New England accent. So I was like, oh, I'm going to go to New Hampshire and there's going to be all these accents everywhere and no one had an accent. But finally, at the end of the day, I go to this woman who's like, in, like, getting mail out of her mailbox, like, would you be interested in talking about the Howard Dean campaign? And she's just like, well, I'm not, but my husband is into that stuff. And Dean was one of like, you know, Kerry and John Edwards and Wesley Clark, the general. And these are all the candidates and all that. So I was like, well, these are Democrats, so they're at least my people. See what happens. So I go in and this older gentleman comes up to me and he's kind of leaning to the side and he has like, his hearing aid pointing toward me. And I say, sir, your wife suggested you might be open to talking about Howard Dean's candidacies. Like, oh, sure. I hate to burst your bubble, though, but I'm really pulling for Clark. And I'm like, oh, okay, well, Wesley Clark, sure.

Cool.

Well, what does he like about the General? I was like, oh, well, I like old boy Dean over there. But when Clark joined, my jaw sort of hit the floor. And it's been there ever since. And then I just, I just got through the conversation just trying to keep a straight face because I was loving every moment of it because not just had the accent, but these amazing colloquialisms. And I described how I was really excited about the momentum that the Dean campaign had gotten with the anti war movement and all of that. He's like, oh, sure, that must have been a real short in the arm. And he gestured putting like the vaccination in his arm kind of thing. And that was all the story went through. That was like all it was. And I just didn't have anywhere to go with it. And I would still tell it because it was me excuse to use my ridiculous impression of a New England accent. But then I was like, this has no value or you're used. It doesn't really have an ending. Well, a couple of months ago, and I want to be very clear, I just told a story about January of 04, and now skipping ahead to about May or June of 2021. And I was looking up the vaccination percentages by state because I was curious where we were at as a country. And you know, Alabama, Mississippi were down at the bottom, but the top six spots were Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode island, and New Hampshire. The top six were the six New England states. And I was just like, oh, my God, New England quite literally got a shot in the ass. And I Finally, after almost 18 years, had an ending to my story story. And so the mistake, to come back to your original question, Bill, is that I don't Think people always give it enough patience. If I can wait 18 years to finish my story. Honor your stories, no matter what. When you find the ending, honor that and tell it in any way you can. And also think to your original question, you might have different uses for your story. I'm just. I just got that ending like a month ago or whatever. I'm still working out the use of that story. I plan to use it in many different ways as I can. All an excuse to again, use my ridiculous New England accent. But the point is, is that there is so much fertile ground that if you have a moment of the unexpected, which you didn't have until the vaccination epiphany I just had, when you have the unexpected moment, look at it from every angle you can, and then you will find something of value.

Mm. Mm. Totally get that. I think that's a, like, that's a really, really useful thing to remind people. I don't think about that enough. But think about these powerful, funny, surprising turning points in your life. They can all be used to make some point. Pick any one of them. You for sure have some embarrassing moments in middle school and grade school, right? You for sure have some crisis moments in high school and college. You for sure have some career breakdowns and things like that. The moment of inception, of when you decided to go for your business idea or when you had the idea or like, whatever it is. All of those are interesting moments. And you can use them to tell almost anything. Like, you can pull a story because they're all human moments where you felt something. And if you can tap into that and share it again with people, they'll all feel something. And you can use that to then propel onto that next thing.

It's all completely true. You just don't know where those moments are going to come from. And another little nugget for our listeners is that sometimes the unexpected moment isn't even a crisis. Sometimes it's the best part of the story in that you could just have this moment. Like Art Fry with the post it thing, the unexpected moment was that moment of discussion.

Eureka.

Eureka.

The. Yeah, exactly.

So it could come with the good stuff, it could come with the bad stuff and everything in between.

Yeah, yeah, all of them. Surprise. Right? The unexpected, a mystery, all of that. And then being willing to, like, get real about it, to share the details that I tell a lot of stories about clients and things like that. And many times I have to keep the names and specifics, you know, confidential, because they don't really. Even if they know I'm telling the story. They don't really want it pointing exactly at them.

Right, right.

But you can do that too. And you can still tell a picture of. Oh, sure.

I helped someone once who had a very famous client who had a pretty critical issue with her, with her back. And the story that was told just made her into, like, a teacher or something like that. And just. We just took out the fame part because the fact that she was famous was irrelevant to the point of the story. We just changed the details. The important thing is that's a value and of use to the person who consumes the story.

It's really, really, really useful. And then spin it into any number of things. So they're all kind of bound by the same human component. The same, like, people grappling with their lives.

That's right. No matter where we are and how influential, famous or wealthy or any of these factors we might be, I mean, you think, like, right as of this recording, there's a lot of headlines about very wealthy men going into space. And these are still, like, geeky little boys who probably learned about the solar system in third grade once upon a time. There's still that quality of wonder and of excitement about a thing that people are coming down on a lot, frankly. But I don't fault people for wanting to live out a childhood dream. I mean, take a vacation. That's just where they happen to be going for it.

It's funny, it really is, having us reassess things, but it is a fundamentally different thing. I remember really clearly being five years old when my dad woke me up and said, come and watch this. And we gathered in front of the little black and white television in our small house in Honolulu and. And I watched Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

Yeah.

And it was, like, amazing. And what is emotional for me at this moment is that my dad said you could be anything. You could do that. That's right. Because I was white and middle class, I believed it. Households didn't have the same reaction, but a lot of people did, like, wow, we did something. Human beings. Some people said men did it, some people said white men did it, whatever. But humans in that moment did something new and different. And I remember being, like, equally inspired and moved the day that Scaled Composites, now Virgin Galactic launched their Spaceship one and they won the X Prize with that thing. And in that moment, I wasn't particularly inspired by the.

The.

The Virgin Galactic or the Bezos Blue origin launches because they did seem a little, like, fanciful. But that first one I had the notion of oh, private space flight is possible. And that dream that I had as a kid that I'd be an astronaut that I held for a very long time thinking I'm gonna be an astronaut. Right. And I really had that for a long time until other things.

Right, right.

Of course, interest sphere. But was suddenly like I was suddenly in touch with being a five year old dreaming about the stars again. Right. And that was like, oh wait, maybe my life isn't over. That like maybe I could reach dreams and do something extraordinary and it wasn't on a predictable path anymore. Maybe anything is possible. Right. And it wasn't necessarily that I was going to go into space again, but that like anything is possible for me. And that's kind of the beauty of the entrepreneurs that we work with and the power of storytelling is to create a moment of anything is possible for people.

That's right. And I really like those themed especially for our audience here today because of the larger conversation around scaling that someone who's squeezing out a low six figure revenue in a year can't even imagine getting to seven or eight figures or beyond. And it's like when you find you make the kind of choices that gets you to that point, if you work at it and you, you troubleshoot and you figure out how to scale, how to get the momentum that you need, you'd be surprised what will happen within a couple of years kind of thing. And whether it's space or it's an eight figure business, it's just it's all there for us which and we're fortunate to live in that world.

Dreams and inspiration. Well, if you want help figuring out how to tell your story or want to read more about Neil and all that, you're going to go to the best URL that I've seen in a long time. Neil can help there on the crawl below me in the show notes. Neil can help is the URL to go to. Thank you Neil so much for coming on the show today and talking with us about it.

Thank you very much for having me Bill.

Thank you. Reminder to everyone to go find anything about our show. All the old shows, well over 400 now in total at scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your podcast or video content. And if you want to drop a note, feedback, get in touch with somebody, ask a question, find a coach in your area, whatever it is. Info scalingcoach.com is an email that works as well and we answer and monitor infoscalingcoach.com Big thanks to Lucy Summers in the background, throwing up our titles, getting our guests ready, prepared, scheduled, getting the shows in and out, promoted. All that and more. Thank you so much, Lucy Summers. And to the folks at poplight Productions, Alby Burke Burge, who produces our audio each week, I'm codina. And Tim McGowan, who write it up and edit, proofread all of the show notes and get them out there. Thanks again, everyone. Keep scaling up. We'll talk to you next time.