How to Tell Compelling Stories As a Digital Writer With Robbie Crabtree

If you can tell a story, people will like you. If you can tell your story, people will love you. If you can tell their story, they'll do anything for you.

Welcome to the Digital Writing podcast, where we talk about using writing to capture, keep, and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business, and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I'm fired up for today's session. We're very lucky to have with us Robbie Crabtree. Robbie has done just about everything in the world of speaking law and has brought it all together to found performative speaking, which I'll let him talk a little bit about. But today's we're going to dive into everything. Writing, storytelling, speaking, kind of weaving it all together, looking at the parallels between one another, similarities, differences, tactics for doing both. Well, but, Ravi, we were chatting before this, and. And I think a really cool place to start was you said to be a great speaker, you have to be a great writer. And so could you just jam on that for a second? Why you think writing is a foundational thing to speak well and then we'll go from there.

Yeah. I mean, if we think about it, speaking in the way that I at least think about it, is the act of writing, whether that's in your brain right as you're talking, or writing it out loud, like on a page, and then performing it, you are writing and then turning it into the vocal sound so people can hear it with their ear instead of read it with their eyes. So if you can't write well, you can't speak well. You can't be very succinct. You can't be concise. You can't be clear in what you're trying to articulate. The best speakers I know are incredible writers. One of my favorite people is Justin Micheloit, right. Who was a writer for General Petraeus and Mattis and Secretary Panetta and me and him jam out a lot on this idea. And what you see is the best speaker. So, like, he has a story about General Mattis where he was going to deliver a talk at a White House dinner, and Justin made remarks, and they're like five pages long. And Maddox was like, no, no, no. Like, this needs to be shorter. Like, get it more to the point. And he took one page to him, and Matt was like, no, no, no. Like, make it fit on a single index card in, like, big writing. I want the, like, clear points of what I'm trying to say. And so he finally gets to the small index card gives it to him, and it gives him all copies. And Mattis, of course, took the small index card, and that's all he used was. Because good writing is clarifying our ideas, distilling them down into the core essence of the thing. And then with speaking, what we can do is with that great writing, we can then elevate it by building on top of. With some of the dynamics that we can use in tonality and volume changes and speed and pacing and all these different things to really bring it to life. But it all starts with understanding how to write well, to connect with our audience.

So many. So many things there. I love how you brought in a story to begin with to connect this whole thing. Yeah, right. That was the first thing I jumped onto, is now I have a concrete thing of General Petraeus walking up with an index card saying, this is way too long. So, so many different ways we could go there, I think. Cole, you have any initial thoughts on how we can talk about the connection between writing and storytelling or speaking in general?

Yeah. So I'm fascinated by this because, Robby, you now teach this as a concept. I stumbled into this because I wrote 400 plus columns for Inc. Magazine, and literally every single one of them followed the same exact structure. There's. It was like four ways to do this or three ways to do this or six reasons to do this. And I noticed how much that changed my speaking, because then I just inherently organized things in my brain in lists. And anytime you give someone a list, it's very easy for them to grab onto and all these things. So my first question is, do you practice speaking by practicing writing and thinking first, or when you're trying to get someone to understand these concepts? Like, do you come at it from the voice perspective first or from the thinking and language perspective first?

So I love this idea. When you're talking about these lists and these ideas, what I like to call that as a speaker, oftentimes what we're doing is we're signposting for somebody that we're talking to, and we're saying, hey, I'm gonna give you these three things I'm about to talk about. Here's the first one. Second one. Here's the third one. Because we have to realize when we're speaking, it's somebody's just listening. Right. So they don't have the ability to go back and reread something, which is a lot easier in writing. So, like, there is actually a different challenge in speaking because we have to make it anchor into Their brain, if we will, so that they can easily follow and digest what we're having to say. And so, like, when you're talking about this list structure, that's kind of why that resonates with you as a speaker. Because it's an easy way to help the listener categorize and store that information. So it's memorable. When it comes to this idea though, about, are we focusing on voice? Are we focusing on the writing? I like to think of it this way. There's kind of three stages that I think most speakers go through. The first is we want to make you sound like a competent speaker. That means just simply dealing with ums likes, the basic things that you need to do well. So when somebody listens to you, they give you at least a moment of kind of credibility and of interest to see, like, do I care about what this person is saying? Like, that's step one. If we don't have that, your content could be great, but no one's going to pay attention. Because the truth is people judge your competence based on the confidence in the way that you sound. So if you don't sound like a competent speaker, guess what? Your message could be great. You're not going to get listened to unless you're a celebrity or a well known figure. You can get away with some of those things, right? The second phase is then we've got to figure out how the content plays in. And this is the piece where we actually go much more back to writing and thinking through the strategy piece. I think this is the biggest piece that most people miss when it comes to speaking is the strategy piece of how do we actually think about structuring our talk, framing it, putting these pieces, these rhetorical devices into them to make them resonate. Like if you basically say the word because and you say something after it, people believe that first part more simply because you said because and followed up with something. As a trial lawyer, one of the things I would use is anytime I was in a case and I wanted them to remember one main point that I thought was like this just like core essence of the argument I was making is I would say this. The simple truth is blank and fill it in. Why? The simple truth is it's a signpost. This highlighter, this rhetorical device that I'm giving them of. Pay attention to this. This is important and I'm breaking it down. You can't argue with something if I say it's a simple truth. And so we start thinking about like, but where did I get that? I got that from writing a bunch and realize what points people were picking up on when I'd write and what resonated with them. So I then started using that in the way that I speak. And then the third piece is once we have you where you sound like a competent speaker and you understand the strategy piece, now we're actually developing you into a great speaker. And that's where we get into things like MLK's pacing and cadence and tone, or JFK and the way that he used rhythm and broke it up and used very slow pacing to deliver things, or Jamie Foxx's storytelling ability. These are the pieces that that third stage really brings in those dynamics and what I call musicality as a speaker speaker, which is also something, when I write, I try to bring in music into the way that I write. So somebody reads it in a way that it brings it to life off the page.

Okay, so I. I have. I have a few. Go ahead, actually. Go ahead, Cole.

I. I just want to point out there's a couple things that I noticed there. So one is you. You framed it by signposting what you just said, right? You're like, there, these are these three things. So you sign posted it first, and then you got through the first one pretty quickly. And then your second point, actually you went off kind of on a tangent and told a story and it went on for a little longer. And by the time you got to the third one, I had actually forgotten what the first one and the second one was. And so you then repeated, once you have this, and once you have this, now I'm going to give you the third one. And it's so interesting just like really closely listening to the way that you talk and the way that you are framing things. It's all like writing best practices. It's all like, it's the same exact thing. You're just hearing it versus you're writing it.

Yeah. My take was you laid out three things here, and I'm trying to look at them from a speaking perspective and then dig into the writing side of it. So the first is basics, buts, likes. I think that in the writing world, that's punctuation, words, like very, very simple things. And then it's strategy, it's big picture. What am I saying? What problem am I solving? What value am I delivering? And then you think about tactics. So step three was you're doing the 8020 correctly. Like the big things you have right now, we'll tweak with cadence. And I really like that because I think A lot of writers will they start inverse that middle, right? They're like, I want to do tactics. What time of day should I post? What note taking app should I use? What for like, all these five, six different things. And they skip strategy and they skip basics. And so they're not even getting read in the first place.

I know you talk a lot about this, Dickie. You're a big strategy person. Like, you like to think in those principles because that's really where you get the biggest benefit. And I do think so many people rush into wanting to sound like their favorite speaker, right? They want to just do that or they want to write like their favorite writer. But you skip this big portion where you're like, how do I actually do that? How do I make sure my messaging is clear? And I kind of have, like, a way that I think through this when I'm writing or when I'm speaking. I'm essentially doing it for me and one other person. And if I can connect to one other person and I'm happy with the speech or happy with the writing, I've won. And the example I love for this that I use is if you've ever seen the movie or the. You went and saw the play Hamilton, the character who plays King George, when he's delivering one of his big songs, he is just staring at one single person in the audience as he is delivering that piece. And it is captivating. And if you don't think in that moment that he has captured that person's attention where they are just like, absolutely floored at his performance, you'd be crazy. But the interesting thing that happens is because he's so dialed in on that one person, everybody else starts tuning in even closer. Like, what is going on? What is it about that one person? And so when we write or when we speak, by focusing on me plus one other person, our messaging actually becomes far stronger and attracts a lot more people of like, why are they so clear in what they're doing? Is because you understand the strategy of what you're trying to achieve with that piece you're writing or with that piece that you're speaking.

Yeah. One of our core principles is right for one person. And it's the Internet guarantees that if you can connect with one person or solve one person's specific problem, the scale, there's thousands of others with that exact same problem. So I really like that idea of specificity almost where in speaking, you can be very specific of I'm. My goal with this speech is to find that one person in the crowd who I know I'm going to have a direct connection with. And it's going to resonate with my speech. And the byproduct of that is everyone else that's listening or everyone else that's reading with that same problem. It's going to speak very clearly to them.

Yeah, there's. Everyone's kind of familiar or has heard of Hemingway's iceberg principle. The iceberg principle is, you know, you only see the tip of the iceberg. That's what you see. But in the text, you feel the weight of the whole rest of the iceberg that you can't see under the water. And a lot of people don't actually really know what that means. They've heard of the principle. But what you're pointing out, Robbie, and just to explain, the iceberg principle is basically, it's all like the subconscious nuances that are happening. And when you're talking with one person, whether you're writing or you're speaking, you understand, like, what their fears are, what their insecurities are, what questions they have, what their hesitancies would be. And so when you're only talking to that one person, all those little subtle dynamics come out that make the interaction so much more interesting. When you try and write something for everyone, you lose all of that because you yourself don't have any awareness of what those subtle dynamics are. So I just think that's such a fascinating thing to point out of. You're almost better off. Just. It's like, if you're going to write or speak something around self development, don't think of. I want to help every human on earth think. I want to say this to my friend Jane, who I know has been struggling with this, and she's had a hard time with this, and just write it for her, and then all of the Janes in the world will go, this is me.

So I want to circle back to something you said of when you're speaking, the someone can't go back in and reread, right? So you have to use these very specific tactics for getting your point across while speaking. And where my mind jumped to there is those during a speech, you could probably reverse engineer and put back into your writing to improve it. So your example of signposting and recapping that you did when you told your story, it was. Here are three things. Here's the first thing. Second thing, maybe a little story, something. On that third point, I'm going to bring it all together. Here's what we've covered so far. So are there. What are some of those other kind of frameworks for writing some or speaking very well that you could then take and say, I don't have to do this in my writing, because, you know, they can reread, there's more resources, whatever. But if I did, it would even improve it.

So I think one of my favorite tactics when it comes to speaking and really driving a point home is some sort of big question that I then give plenty of time for my audience to actually think through. The reason being is I'm always trying to get somebody to feel like they came up with the answer and not that I gave it to them. Right. And the same is true in writing, I think if you ask that rhetorical question in that perfect spot and you frame it in such a way, I think a lot of people almost hide a lot of the good stuff in the way that they write. Like they. It's in the middle of a sentence, they'll ask a question in the middle of a paragraph, and it just gets buried and the person just continues to read through. Right. Like, if I'm going to ask that big question, that big question is going to be on its own line. There's going to be plenty of space around it. So when someone reads it, they're just kind of hit with this idea of like, oh, I need to think through that. But oftentimes we're uncomfortable with this idea of, well, if I don't keep them reading, they're going to stop. Or if I don't keep them, if I don't keep speaking to them, they're going to stop listening to me. I think this idea of giving people room to breathe, whether it's in writing or speaking, is so incredibly important, it elevates our words. There's a great comedy clip from Trevor Noah when he's basically talking when Nelson Mandela met Barack Obama, and it's a skit. But as he's talking about it, Nelson Mandela is talking to Barack Obama, and it's obviously Trevor Noah. But he's saying, you want to make people feel like the words you're saying are the very last words you're ever going to utter. They should be slow. There should be lots of pauses. There should be all this weight and drama behind them. And when we write, this is where I think structure and the way that we're being very strategic in the way that we set it up is so important. So again, giving the reader room to take pauses, to think, to trust them, that they're going to continue reading on is extremely valuable. Then things like I said, the simple truth is highlighting that. I think. You know, one of the things I love in some of the writing I think I've seen from you, Nicholas, is the way that you use structure to create interest in the way that you write. And it's not just like, long sentence, long sentence, long sentence, long sentence. It's like, mix it up. Use, like, almost staccato burst. Think of music when you're writing. I think as a speaker, one of the ways that I make it stand out, Dickie. Is if I can create music when they're listening to it, it triggers the creative side of their brain, and so they store it much longer. Think about your favorite theme song, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. If you grew up like me, you probably still know that song. The other day, I made a reference to Captain Planet, and I immediately started singing the song.

Amazing show, right? But.

And I bet you can. I bet you know the theme song right now as you're like, amazing show, right? We could. We could probably all do that. Why? It is spoken word, but it's done in a musical way. So it sticks with us when we write. We want to do things like that, too. So it's not because, like, if you read just long paragraph after long paragraph, long paragraph, you don't remember anything. But if you start doing these things where it's like staccato burst, one single word on the line, a big question with lots of room to bring it in. That's how I think about translating speaking into writing. Dickey. And really drive these points home.

I think my. My takeaway on that is texture, right? It's whether it's in a speech. We talk about this with formatting. 1, 3, 1 different writing rhythms using bolded subheads, things like that. Because you. I really like this dichotomy of. Say there's a bunch of just words on a page in a long line, like a book, and there's someone, just a robot reading something that those are equivalents, right? But then on one, when you have one sentence, three sentences, one sentence, checklist, bolded subhead. And then on the right, you have speed up, slow down, you know, louder, softer, quieter. I really like this. You can see so clearly that they're really the same idea. One of them is just on the page, and one, you are speaking out.

Loud if you're a musical person, too. So I'll actually do this when I write for speeches, but the principle stays the same. I will actually write musical notes or I will Reference different scenes or different speeches for the cadence that I want that to feel like or sound like. And I. If I'm just writing the piece, I need to be able to essentially recreate that. So when somebody sees the example or sees that musical note, they immediately are like, yeah, that makes sense in the way you wrote that. I can see how that's supposed to translate this way. And we can do that to the reader as well. When we're writing, even if they don't know us personally, we can lead their mind to read in a certain way using punctuation, using structure, using bold, italic, underline all these different pieces. If we start thinking about how that brings life to the words, like that's, that's the goal. Instead of it just being words in black and white. Let's give it some color. Let's give it some richness, like you said, let's give it some texture.

Robbie, you're mate. You're making me remember. In sophomore year of high school, I failed a essay in English class because I put commas in all the wrong places in the sentence. And my teacher said, that's grammatically incorrect. And I said, yeah, but that's how I wanted it to sound. And she's like, yeah, but that's not correct. I'm like, but that's how I want it to sound, though, you know? So how do you. How do you think about correctness versus style? And how do you. How do you balance those?

I think there's two things, right, that really come out when we're thinking about writing or speaking. It doesn't matter is one, who's our audience and what's our goal, right? So if I'm writing a piece of writing for a legal crowd and it's going to go in front of a judge, there's like a very specific way I've got to write, right? And that's got to be boring. It's got to be very dry because I know who my audience is and then I know what I'm trying to achieve is to convince them of my position. But if I'm writing something for a different audience, then I'm going to identify what that audience is and what's my goal and when I am writing to like a non legal audience or a non academic or scholarly audience, which is what I would say most of our writing probably falls into, is this creative, personal brand, all this sort of stuff. Great reference. Or Taylor, love that. But there's the question I ask myself is what do I want somebody to feel when they read this. And the reason I ask that question is because if I know what I want them to feel, and I can create that feeling, that leads to them thinking or taking action in the way that I want them to take it. Because we all know this. Anybody who's in copywriting or sales or any of these pieces, People don't make decisions based on logic and reason. We can tell ourselves that all we want. There may be a few people that are able to break through that, but for the most part, it's all emotion that drives us. And then we basically rationalize with logic and reason. So when I'm writing, if I know I want somebody to take some sort of action or I want them to think a certain way at the end of the piece, in order to do that, I need to think, how do I need them to feel in order to get to that outcome that I'm looking for? So that's a question I look at. So how do I make them feel that way? This is where I go back to your question, Nicholas. I don't care if it's grammatically correct. If I know how to make them feel that way. I want them to read. I want it to come to life. I want it to stir emotion. And I know we've actually gotten into this a little bit in the past. This is where I want them to feel my voice. Because I'm very much a voice writer and less of a niche writer because I think that is more powerful for me, because it gives me greater breadth in terms of what I can write on. Now, that's also probably me as a speaker. My voice is more important than as somebody who is just doing it, writing to get distribution. I care about how I sound because it's always been the world I've been in. So when I write, I want it to sound true to myself as well.

So recapping. I like this because it sounds very similar to the four or five questions that I put at the top of everything that I write, which is, who's my audience? What one person am I writing for? What problem am I solving? So you mentioned, what's your goal? And then every piece of writing is in every piece of speaking is inspiring some kind of action. And you should be very specific in what you want that action to be at the end. And you can reverse engineer that action with the third question I ask, which is, what emotion do I want? Is it. Oh, my God, someone finally said this? Is it. Oh, my God. I can't believe someone just said that, right? Lol. Whatever it is, and then that inspires the action. So, so many parallels here between. It's just communicating some kind of value, Communicating some kind of. I think value is the only word between writing and speaking that are really similar.

Robbie, you. You alluded to this. What do you do when someone goes, I really want to speak, like something someone else, you know? Is. Is there a. Is there a time and place where. Where imitations encouraged versus at a certain point, you gotta spread your wings and do your own thing.

So, I mean, the first question is, can that person actually pull that off? Right? Like, sometimes we just gotta be realist. I wanted to play. I wanted to play professional baseball. That was my goal. Like, I played college baseball. I wanted to go and be in the pros. I wanted to live that life. Guess what? Just because I wanted to do the thing didn't mean I got to be the Next Ken Griffey Jr. Cause I couldn't run like him. I couldn't swing about like him. I couldn't throw like him. So you know what every major league team said to me? You're not good enough to do this thing. So stop trying to imitate this guy. Go do something different. The same is true for a speaker, for a writer. If we're trying to sound like somebody and we just aren't that person, right? Like, we just. We can't do it. I love this. I had a boss when I was a trial lawyer, and he was just like. Had this beautiful baritone richness. Just like, very, very slow. Spoke, like, in your face. And it worked so well. And I'd watch it and be like, I wish I could do that, but there's no way I'm ever pulling that off. Like, if I try to do that, I'm going to get laughed out of the courtroom and probably lose my job. So sometimes you have to identify who you can actually sound like. So to your point, when people come to me and they say, I want to sound like Barack Obama, I want to sound like Amanda Gorman. I want to sound like Brene Brown, whatever it is, right?

Cool.

Let's figure out. Can you do that? But now, really what I want you to do is I want you to find five or 10 people that you want to sound like, because I don't want you to sound like any one person. I want you to figure out what your unique voice is, because that's how you stand out. If you just sound like Barack Obama, guess what? Barack Obama is going to win every single day of the week. You can't compete with him. Like, I don't care who you are. So, like, if you're saying, I want to sound like this person, I want to rap like Eminem, great. You know who's going to win? Eminem, because he's already got that established. He's. He's that guy. So we want to imitate, but really what we want to be more like is Kanye. We want to remix the greats. We want to build on top of what other people have done and bring our own unique perspective, our own unique voice and traits to that. And so it's a tough conversation most time, because I'm like, you don't want to sound exactly like them. Use them as a guide. Figure out what they do well, figure out what they don't do well, figure out what you can take from it. And now let's mash it all up and turn your voice into something more memorable.

Yeah, it's my. My framework for this is anytime you kind of step into a game, you want to look around and see who's playing it well, which is study the great speakers, study the great writers. But then it's all about that plus your secret sauce somehow, right? It's your unique. That there's no way to compete with you. Because, yeah, you. You modeled after them, but you say it in this way, or you have this quirky way of doing it or this unique formatting. And we. We say the voice, content, and format are the three things that you can vary with your writing. And one of my favorite examples of this trying to copy is Cole. You've shared this picture before of when Mark Manson first published the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. He was the very first person to use fuck in. In a word in a book title. And then Cole posts underneath this. This. This is being original and doing your own thing, and then this is copying it. And there's like, 15 books all with the same kind of thing that came out a year and a half later. And they. I bet they did well. Like, they probably didn't do poorly, but they say that book. Oh, like Mark Manson's book, right? And so if you're speaking, it's, oh, you sound. That was a good speech. You sounded like someone else. And that's really what you want to escape, because you can't win a game that you're constantly being compared to someone. Like, you said Eminem, et cetera. But Kanye, that's my favorite. That's a tremendous example, because who's Kanye? Like, nobody.

Everything is a sample. Like, he just pulls from other people. And builds on top of them. And so, like, he's playing this really unique game where he's playing into nostalgia. A lot of times where we remember, like, that. That underlying song, and it takes us back, but there's this new twist on it, so it does a ton of, like, really interesting things to us, and we can do that also as communicators. So if you're writing, you can play into some of these nostalgia pieces. It's one of the, like, most powerful emotions that we can pull on is can you take somebody back to their childhood? Can you take somebody back to a trip or an event that they've lived? There's that great scene in Mad Men where Don Draper is talking about the carousel, right? It's a time machine that takes us backwards and forwards, and we relive this. And anybody who watches that scene immediately comes to life and, like, understands how that feels because they've felt it themselves too. Writing. One of the ways to really, like, sink your emotional hooks in is. Is to think through what are some of these, like, universal stories that people have gone through. How can I tell mine in a way that my audience will see themselves? And this is, like, one of my mo. Like, this is my. One of my biggest tweets, right? I was like, if you can tell a story, people will like you. If you can tell your story, people will love you. If you can tell their story, they'll do anything for you. And it's the idea that if we tell this story from our perspective, that we know is going to resonate with our audience, and they're going to see themselves in it. Like, you basically have them eating out of the palm of your hand to do whatever you want. So, like, as a writer, take them back on that nostalgia train, and you can essentially get them to go anywhere you want them to go.

See, Robby, you found an even better way of saying, we say as all the time, you're not the main character. You know, the reader is the main character. And that's. That's what you're saying, right? I mean, if it. It's not about you not talking about yourself. It's about figuring out how to talk about yourself and your own experiences in a way that really accentuates and highlights the reader's experiences, the. The listeners experiences. So are there. Are there ways that. What are some storytelling techniques or frameworks that you help or give people that allow them to figure out? Because I've noticed people just struggle with this, right? They sit there and go, I've got a Gazillion stories. How do I know which ones to tell, which ones not to tell, what's valuable, what's not.

I mean, that's the trick, right? Figuring out which ones work. Some of that's just testing, to be honest. It's just testing with an audience. We can learn so much from comedians the way they test sets. I mean, they'll test sets for a year before they ever actually go on tour to figure out what resonates, like if. If somebody like a Dave Chappelle or Kevin Hart. These people who are super successful comedians spend a year testing their material. Like, why do we think that we're gonna have it figured out on the first take? We write a story and we're like, oh, that didn't resonate with people, I guess. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. They, like, they'll go and scrap their entire set because it doesn't get enough, like, laughter or it's not even the. Like, one of the best things. They'll say it's not the right laughter, but you can tell a difference between the type of laughter. And so I think there's this rush to get it right. And sometimes it just takes time to work through that. So what do we do to connect with an audience when it comes to storytelling? So my favorite framework is what I call a go to story. It's a simplified version of the hero's journey, because I believe the hero's journey is fantastic. But it is way overcomplicated for most people who are trying to deliver a story. They get in their head trying to figure out all the different parts and how to make it work. It's just too much. So let's simplify it down. Let's basically go in 80, 20. And so go to story is adventure, adversity, triumph. And if you can throw in some humor, that's great. Very simple way to figure it out. Figure out the stories that are more exciting, that have more adventure in them, and tell those and do them in a way that brings them to life. And then this is the piece I think is probably the most important when it comes to storytelling, though, is what I call emotional truth. And this is a concept that I basically got from Tim o' Brien in his book the Things They Carried. And so it's a book about. Yeah, it's a book about the Vietnam War. Right. And when you read it, it's a fictional book, but it is based on real experience in the Vietnam War. And when you read it, everything is so over the top. Like, you're reading. You're like, there's no way any of that happened. That's so, so over the top. But Tim o' Brien said the only way for the audience to read it and feel the same way that the soldiers did in Vietnam was to go that far over the top. Because in those moments in Vietnam, that's how they felt. They felt like everything was so over the top, just like we're reading it. So as. As a storyteller, when you're writing, oftentimes people will deliver what I call factual truth. But the reader doesn't have your insight. They haven't lived your experience. So the story doesn't resonate on that deep level like it did with you. So you've got to figure out ways to make it emotionally true. So when your audience reads it, it brings it to life. And all of a sudden, then they can connect and be like, I've been in that same exact situation. Like, I remember when I had my first surfing mishap two or the first time I tried to do that, like that workout routine, and I was on the couch for the next five days. Like, simple things like this bring it to life. And that's what we're trying to achieve.

It makes me think of all the times I've told stories around the dinner table and my siblings have been like, you're exaggerating. And I'm like, well, yeah, but also, like, you're going for the feeling more.

You're. You're exaggerating a bit. You're staying true to the facts. And the other piece, too, that I'll say around storytelling is oftentimes you can blend stories into kind of like. Like, say you have two or three travel stories from a trip that you took to Japan. You could blend those together. If there's one major takeaway that you're trying to get the audience to feel it's still emotionally true and it's not factually inaccurate as long as you're not trying to be like, this was all just like one chronological story. But that's another way to bring it to life, where you blend your stories into a mixture so that you can connect more and make the audience see themselves in that story that you're trying to share with them. Because at the end of the day, no one has lived the exact story that you've lived. So we're trying to do is. We're trying to hit it close enough to the audience where they're invited in to say, I've been through that same thing. And Basically, let me tell you more.

My mind's spinning.

Don't. Don't. Don't let it. Don't let it spin. Dick.

I know, I know, I know. So there's so many different ways I want to kind of go with this one. It's one thing we say is that really there's. With any idea, there's kind of four ways to say it. There's something actionable, something aspirational, something anthropological or something analytical. And storytelling, to me, fits very nicely in this aspirational where a lot of writers can leverage their personal story. However, whatever topic they're writing about, really explaining maybe how they came to know it. And so I'm interested in if you are advising a writer who is maybe sharing something. I'm trying to just connect this to the writing piece of. I don't know the best way to ask this. I'm going blank. I think it's. If you were advising someone who is looking to share an idea from the aspirational side of, you can do this too. How would you go about crafting a story like that?

You know, what I like to do when I'm thinking through stories like that when I write them especially is I like to open loops. So I like to start and leave a cliffhanger, leave that loop open, and then go into almost like some background, some like internal dialogue, some other references that basically back up the way I was thinking and then finish the story at the end to close that loop. And the reason I like to do that is some of this, like, internal dialog and different thoughts that I have around the idea or around the story as I'm kind of walking through it oftentimes is the way that it invites the reader to be like, oh, I felt those same things. Because sometimes, like, the story in and of itself might feel overwhelming. If I tell a story about being a trial lawyer, a lot of people can't resonate with that because they've never been in a courtroom trying a murder case. Right? Like, let's use that as an example. There's a very, very small subset of people who can say they've ever been in a courtroom trying a murder case. But I can essentially use that as like in these super high stakes moments and leave that loop open as I talk through the story. So that story is the setup. Then I'm talking about how do you deal with high stakes situations? How do you deal with the pressure? How do you deal with the chaos? How do you think through that? How do you basically center yourself? How do you Prepare yourself. How do you do all these different things? And this is all kind of those teaching moments throughout this internal thinking and the approach and all the lessons and all this. And then I finished that story at the end of it. The story was really kind of the. The hook into a broader discussion that is more aspirational, but wouldn't have worked unless I had that story to back it up to say, you should believe me because I've gone through something that means my experience and my insight is valuable to you.

It's. It's a. It's a way of showing credibility while making your point. I think is. Is kind of the way to think about that one, 100%.

I mean, I think that at the end of the day is mostly what we're trying to do is show our credibility as to why somebody should be listening to us. And then we're trying to give that insight that somebody can relate to and say, I've been in that situation. Maybe it's a boardroom, right? Maybe that person was in a boardroom as they're reading this piece and they say, I've been in a situation like that. All the executives were in here, and I was pitching to them, and I was terrified. My PowerPoint or my Google Slides had crashed. My, like, the CEO was, like, yelling at me, like, why aren't you doing the presentation? What's wrong with you right now? And all of a sudden, you know, what do I do in that situation? Somebody can think through that. And then if they're reading through this and I'm saying, here's how I got to the point where I felt very comfortable arguing in front of a judge who's yelling and screaming at me. They say, oh, this is something aspirational that I can reach, too. And so that's how I like to kind of think about it. Tiki.

It's almost the emotion that you want them to feel and you're telling it through that's your story lens is if I'm looking for them to feel, to recognize that feeling of unpreparedness or that feeling of imposter syndrome or whatever it is. And then I think that's kind of the North Star of whatever aspirational story you're saying is, I liked your point on very few people. If you are trying to say how you learned how to do, you know, talk slowly or whatever it is, whatever principle you're talking about. And I was a trial lawyer and going to this big thing of like, oh, I was in a case. Most people are going to kind of turn their ears off. So it's finding a way to present the emotion. Maybe it's beginning so they know, almost prepped for what they should be feeling. And I think that is a good nudge, both in the writing and speaking world of getting the reader to feel a certain way. We say this in our headlines. Sometimes of you can put a headline out there that's like, I just ate. I think it's six pints of ice cream. Here's what I learned about loving myself and here's what I learned about self control. Right. Very Two completely different headlines that are going to completely shift the way a reader comes into the piece at all. It's almost priming them in that way.

Yeah, it's just the way you frame. Right. It's that frame that you're bringing somebody into it. If we think about framing, like, Tyrion Lannister was fantastic at framing in Game of Thrones. Harvey Specter and Suits. Like, you can watch these people and figure out, like, how are they framing situations and turning weaknesses into strengths? Or in your case, how are we framing what we want the reader to feel when they first come into our article? And that's through that title, that headline, that thing that really grabs their attention and kind of sets them on that path to actually pay attention to it. I think one of the problems people have when they're trying to tell a story in writing is they oftentimes will just tell a story from beginning to end, and they'll oftentimes give way too much context. So one thing to keep in mind when you're telling a story is drop somebody into it. Think about, like, the best cold opens you've seen. Whether that's the Office, it's always Sunny, Parks and Rec. They just put you directly in the action. You can think about movies, Fight Club, Star Wars. You can go to television, Breaking Bad. They start in these really high tension moments, or they just drop you directly in the action and we figure out the context that we need along the way. But too many writers want to back up and give context in the story, and guess what? Nobody really cares. So they're not going to actually let you talk to them. If you drop into the action, a lot of times you can actually go back to context later on, because now you've hooked your audience to say, I want to know more about what's going to come out of this story. Because you've opened that loop and now they want the resolution. So you've hooked them in so that you can actually get There.

Robbie, I'm curious here because you do a fair bit of writing. So how do you think about writing in the context of the work that you do, as opposed to investing all your time into creating content that's more voice focused? Like, how do you, like, what's your rationalization of I'd rather write this than I'm going to go create a YouTube video or I'm going to create a podcast.

So one I love writing, right? So I think at this point I've published 54 articles. I've got another, probably 20 that I could publish at any point that I wrote during ship 30 for 30 that are ready. It's interesting because, so I'll say this. Actually, one of the articles I wrote during ship 30 for 30 was around like, sales is not a bad word. And I wrote on this. It ended up landing me on a podcast that has like 200,000 subscribers to it. And so for me was that one article I wrote. Super high leverage. Absolutely. Like, that put me in front of a ton of people where then I got to show off my voice and my thinking and my speaking. So there are clear kind of benefits that I get out of writing. Also, I just love, I love writing. It helps me clarify ideas. And so I think one of the things that allows me to be very clear when I speak is, is the fact that I have written so much. So I know how to clarify an idea, I know how to build an argument. I know how to build cadence in the way that my words are. I know what generally resonates with people. I know phrases. I know all this sort of stuff because I'm constantly doing it in the written form, which I think is in a lot of ways for me, harder to create emotion than it is when I'm speaking. So if I can nail it as a writer, I can absolutely nail it as a speaker. And it just makes me that much more clear. And then it allows me an extemporaneous speaking or impromptu speaking situations. Because I've written so many pieces, I can just keep track in my head very, very easily what I want to say in a structure as though I'm looking at it on a page that I'm going to write out.

So this is something we're playing around with too, because we'll find ourselves in these live sessions and during ship 30 kind of talking around a framework that we were like, we're circling it. But then you just need to put a name on it and write it down and explain it and whether it's an atomic essay Or a blog post. And then it's like a new piece of software that every time someone asks about how do I figure out stories to write about, boom. I'm talking about this two year test thing. I'm saying, and how can I what's a framework for thinking about my headline? And for a while we'd say we'd explain it, but now we're calling it the one chip rule and a bunch of different things like that. I think it resonated when you said that when someone asks you something that you've answered via written word somewhere, it just pops into your head and you could go on for hours right away. Because you know right where you're going to jump off to all the questions people have asked you when you publish that piece of writing back whenever you did as potential jumping off points. It's like a pathways unlock that you didn't even know was there. But that was. That resonated heavily with me of once you write something down, it's raw material for you to talk about forever.

It's. And it's also just so easy as we get more and more inbound requests, right, for our time for suggestion, for advice. Writing is one of those easy ways for me just to point people to this thing. Like, I wrote a piece for I work with a lot of founders, right? And I wrote a 2,500 word article about here's my process for how I write a storytelling pitch for a founder and I just publish it and lots of people will come and ask for advice. And I'm just like, here, here's the article I wrote. Go read it. Now I don't have to have conversation after conversation after conversation around that idea because I published it once and now I can just share it time and time again. And it's an asset that I can continue to use. And to the point of why not all speaking? Because some people just resonate more with writing and reading. Some people like that format better. So I need to have a diverse set of assets that I can point people towards. When I'm on a podcast or a webinar, I need to have that. But I also need to have written material that people can use. I also need visual content, right? Like that's important too because everybody kind of learns and understands things differently. And so I think a lot about that. To your point, Dickie, the framework thing, if you can name something, it's so important. That's why I have Gotostory. I've got different frameworks for extemporaneous speaking, impromptu Speaking. I have the Performance Speaking Framework. Like, I just named a bunch of things because it makes your life so much easier. Just like, here's the framework. Go do it, and people will implement it time and time again, and it makes your life so much easier. Yeah.

You pair a framework with a named and claimed framework with a story, and that is just etched into someone's gray matter forever.

Yep, 100%.

But you got to name it something. Otherwise, if you don't name it something, people just go. Remember that one thing Robbie once said that one time? It was really helpful, you know?

Yeah, that's. I mean, that's why I just like Performance Seeking Framework. Go to Story framework, Origin Story framework. I have, like, a CRS framework. Like some other ones, like spf. Like, some. Some are just, like, initials because. Easier to do. But you start naming things, and that's. I think one of the hard pieces is you. You get really good at a thing. Like, y' all are great writers. You get really good at it, and then you have to figure out, how can I take the things that just, like, I know, work and translate them to a more broader audience and name those and teach them, distill them down in a way that other people can then start using them?

Yep.

All right.

Questions?

Yeah, let's save. I think we got about 10 minutes left, so why don't we drop some questions in the chat for anyone who wants them answered? Cole, do you have any immediate questions that come to mind?

I love this question, Robby. We've gotten into it on Twitter about this. How do you define voice? What's your definition of voice?

My definition is when somebody reads my writing, they should know. That's Robby. And nobody else should be able to sound like me. When somebody reads it, they know the things I like. It just. It's my personality. They're like. It sounds to me when I read it, like Robbie is talking to me. That's what I look for.

Hmm. So are you. Have you ever, like, really tried to reverse engineer and pick apart, like, what are the variables that would make up your voice or would make up someone's voice?

So I know what makes my voice when I write. It's. You've seen a lot today, Right. Even in terms of how I drop a lot of examples from pop culture and from different scenes. You know, I'm bringing things like Captain Planet and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air to Mad Men and Breaking Bad to MLK and jfk. Like, this is very much my voice, where I'm constantly using other examples and especially examples from pop culture and history to highlight what I'm saying. Then there's a lot of, like, I'm not afraid to curse a little bit. I'm not. Like. I use very clear structure. There's lots of short sentences, lots of different dynamics, so it sounds musical when you read it. And so, like, as I look at my writing, it's very clear. It's also pretty playful. It's pretty informal. I use a lot of contractions. I use a lot of slang. I'll throw in y'. Alls. I'll do things that are true to me instead of trying to be this, like, prim and proper writer that's just trying to get these ideas out there. So that's kind of how I've thought about it going back and looking at. Looking at my writing.

Hmm, cool. Steve's got a good one here too.

Yeah, good question.

Yeah. What's the one thing that took you years to figure out that makes you a great storyteller?

Years to figure out? I think, honestly, the biggest piece of this is how powerful choosing your moments of silence are, and that most people only choose to use silence at the end of something. Oftentimes, your strongest way to use silence is actually in the middle of, like, a sentence. Essentially, what you're trying to set up is, stay tuned. I'm about to deliver a big piece to finish off the sentence. And it almost makes that second half weightier to what you're saying. JFK does an incredible job with this in his We Will Go to the Moon speech that he gave at Rice University. If you ever watch that, you can see that, as well as the other thing I'll tell you, I learned that really changed the way to become a great storyteller is that we oftentimes think about slowing down our pacing and how many words we say per minute, but we should also be thinking about slowing down the words themselves, because there should be certain words that are just elongated and super powerful that you draw out. And in these moments, you can create so much drama by combining that slower pacing of the actual word and those big pauses where people will just. I mean, like, virtually every trial that I tried as a violent felony or child abuse prosecutor and then also defense attorney, I would make people cry. Not because I'm going in trying to make it, but I wanted my words to have that much weight behind them. I mean, I'll never forget one of the worst child abuse case I ever had. I delivered so slowly. I opened up by sitting in the witness chair for 30 seconds in silence. By the end of that 30 seconds of silence, there were three jury members who had started to cry because they recall basically what the witness had basically gone through up on that witness stand. That silence did all the work for me. And then everything I said in there was super, super slow. So there was just tons of weight behind it. And I'm telling his story. I'm telling the story of his past, the present, and where the future can go. And that's another piece I think storytellers need to remember is you're not just telling a story that's stuck in a moment of time. Stories are living, breathing things. We want to show how it played out in the past, how it affects us in the present, and where it's going to take us in the future. And. And if we start thinking about these three different ways, these three different roles, we really start to elevate these stories to do work for us long term.

Reminds me of the. The Mozart quote. Music happens in the silence between the notes, not the notes themselves. So I love that. I love that. That's. That's amazing. Now you're also making me think, too. You know, we talk about this in ship 30 a ton, how you can play with formatting, but combining this idea of voice and elongating words and phrases and white space with formatting, you can do a lot visually to tell a reader. I want you to get through this quickly and I want you to pause here, and I want there to be emphasis here. And I want. You know, I think that's a really cool concept. Jason?

Yeah? Is there a difference in writing to prepare for a speech presentation versus a written piece that you plan on publishing?

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a difference. When we think about things we're writing in terms of a presentation, we obviously have different tools that we can use, so body language, facial expressions, movement, all that sort of stuff that we don't have in a written piece. And so I think that you're having to think through those. I think oftentimes, in all honesty, I can get away with like, a written piece, to me, needs to be much more polished than does a presentation piece. Piece I'm going to go into. And that's more just because I know that I have more tools at my disposal as a speaker, and I'm comfortable also in that chaos if something goes wrong. And as a speaker, too, you're also reading your audience, so you're changing things a little bit on the fly depending on the inputs that you're receiving. Now we do this As a writer too, the inputs we're getting, right? And I think this is one of the things you all do so well using Twitter and using kind of analytics. What do people care about in your writing? What's resonating with them? Like, what are they clicking? Like on what are they clicking? Retweet, what are you getting comments from? What's driving the interest? And so you are getting inputs, but it's a. It's a little bit different turnaround time for writers. So for me, writing has to be a little bit more polished and more well thought out than does a talk, because I can rely on my audience to give me real time signals as to what I need to dive deeper into. So when I write a presentation or a speech, what I'm actually doing is writing what I call blocks. So I'm writing an entire speech and there are blocks. I can basically move in and out of the speech depending on the inputs I'm getting from my audience. So very rarely will I ever deliver the actual speech as it is written out, because I may say, ah, they're really resonating with Block 2, I'm going to go deeper on this and I can just skip block three because, like, they're with me. I don't need to build that up. And then I'll move straight into block four. So you can move this around. And that's how I like to think about it.

Yeah, I really like your, your point on the difference in immediate feedback that you get when speaking versus writing. But I think writers can also leverage that framework for getting small bets out there on things that they want to write. So instead, given that something long form that you want to be nice and polished, you shouldn't go, and if that was a speech, give the whole speech and have no feedback until the very end. You should be testing and getting data and feedback on very small pieces, idea validation, that kind of thing, before you invest the time. So it's really the same thing. You want a tight feedback loop, but the delivery mechanism is different for both of them.

Most of the writing I publish early will be like 700 to 1,000 words. And those are oftentimes I'm testing ideas out to the world, what's resonating with people. And if I know something resonates, I'll build it into a much bigger, what I call pillar piece. But I'm not going to spend the time on a pillar piece until I know it's resonating with people, unless it's just something that I really care about. But that's generally what I think of is like most of my articles are idea testing articles and when I realize one kind of hits with people, I'll dig deeper into that and write a much longer form idea around that at a later date. Mm.

It's all about doubling down on what works. That's it.

We. We don't, we don't have the time to waste, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Or. Or it's all just moving so fast that you don't really have that luxury anymore either, you know?

Yeah, I mean, y', all, y' all are on like what, what cohort now?

We stopped counting.

Yeah, we stopped counting. I think it's seven. I think it's seven or eight.

No, I love it. Look, I mean, it was really interesting to me because I love writing, but sometimes it takes a little bit of a push. I remember I felt a little bit stuck in the mud and that's ultimately why I did join ship 30 for 30 and kind of did that because it reinspired a lot of my writing habits and it got me back into the groove and I wrote a lot of pieces I was really, really proud of and got a ton of great feedback that actually opened up a number of job opportunities that had people reaching out to put me on podcasts and different, different things like that. And that's really where I think writing is so valuable. Putting your ideas out there. Now I'm going to say this too. I'm sure you all deal with this. You put your ideas out there, you're going to get blowback, you're going to get pushed back, people are going to hate on you, you're going to get trolls, you're going to get all this stuff. But the net benefit is so much greater when it comes to writing. Like the friends you make, the people you get to know. I mean, that's how we met Dickie, that's how we met Nicholas. Like, it's just crazy. And the more you can do of that and be willing to put yourself out there and write and refine your ideas, the better thinker you'll get, the better communicator you'll get, and the more opportunities that just kind of come your way.

Yep.

I think, I think that is the perfect place to end it because you basically summarized every thought I have about writing. The importance of it, the greatness of it, how just rich. The richness that it brings to your life. So, Robby, thanks for joining us. Where can we send people who want to read more, hear you speak more, learn from you. All these different places.

Yeah. So anyone who wants to follow me, obviously, on Twitter, it's at Robby Crab. On Instagram, it is at the Robby Crab. And then if anybody is curious about some of the offerings, just, just reach out. We're going to actually do something as a special with ship 30 for 30. So if you're curious about that and you're on this email list, we will follow up with you there. So for the next cohort, it'll be a little bit less expensive as a result of being in ship 30 for 30. Plus, I love all creators and communicators, so stay tuned for that. We can send follow up emails and just get connected there as well. Boom.

Awesome.

All right, everyone, thanks for joining. If you're watching.