Dharmesh Shah, speaking to 5,000 HubSpot employees, says he'd teach 6th graders storytelling above programming or writing. It matters everywhere: job interviews, startups, nonprofits. Kids tell stories naturally, but lose the nerve. What you can learn is how to deliver them on YouTube, TikTok, or a stage.
Chapters
So this morning I had a Zoom meeting and I didn't have my usual level of anxiety that I have around Zoom meetings. I had 1,000 times more anxiety. And the reason was it wasn't a group of 5 or a group of 50 or even a group of 500 people. It was a group of 5,000 plus because this particular meeting was an ask me anything session that the HubSpot leadership team does on a regular basis where any employee at HubSpot can ask a question. But what made this particular meeting interesting was that we opened it with a couple of kids of our employees that were going to ask the opening questions, whatever they were curious about or wanted to ask. And so one of those questions was from a 6th grader. And her question was awesome. And the question was, if you could teach a class to 6th graders, what would you teach? And so here's my answer. If I could teach a class of 6th graders, I would teach storytelling. Not software programming, which I love, not even writing, which I think is important, but storytelling. And the reason is not because I'm particularly good at it, but I think people underestimate the importance of storytelling in one's life as far as a skill to be able to have. And the reason it's important is that whatever walk of life you go into, if you're applying for a job, you're going to be telling the story of you. If you start a company, you're going to be telling the story of your company and why people should join or why they should invest capital or why they should become customers. If you go work for a nonprofit, you're going to be telling the story of that nonprofit. So this ability to storytell is a very, very powerful and useful skill to have across a broad spectrum of career choices that a 6th grader might make later in their life. And the odd thing is that I think as humans, We have this natural capacity for storytelling. I think kids are particularly good with their friends of telling a story. It's like, oh, here's what happened, and I ran into her, and then this happened, and then we did this, or I was playing a particularly intense game of Roblox and then that happened. They're really, really good at storytelling, but I think they sort of lose that natural ability over time as they become more self-conscious. And it's a very solvable, teachable skill. And what they need to learn, I think, is how How to storytell already, they know that, but how to tell it across multiple channels, how to be able to tell it on YouTube, how to tell it on TikTok, how to tell it on stage in front of a group of people, because that particular skill is not natural. You know, storytelling itself is natural for humans. Doing it in front of a camera or doing it up on stage is very much unnatural for most people. So if you can kind of get that skill developed kind of earlier in your life, I wish I had learned this early in my life. I did not. Anyway, storytelling, super important. If you're looking for skills to kind of add to your repertoire, I would put that way up on the list, even if you're not a 6th grader. Hope that's interesting or useful.
