Ramit Sethi advises that to be memorable you should tell stories and keep a "story toolbox" of short, emotional, and long/funny stories to use in different social settings. He emphasizes repeatedly testing and refining stories—paying attention to audience reactions and trimming or discarding parts that don't land—comparing this process to how professional comedians iterate on jokes.
One thing you can do to be extremely memorable is to tell stories. Now in my dream job course, I talk about having a story toolbox. This is basically having a few stories ready you can just pull out of your pocket at any given time. So whether you're in an interview, whether you're at a bar, whether you're at a birthday party, meeting people for the first time, you can have like a short story, a very emotional story, a longer really funny story. And you can kind of hone and test these stories until they are razor sharp. Any professional comedian, for example, Louis ck, Chris Rock, any of these guys, they practice their jokes over and over and over again. By the time you see them on a stand up special, they are finely honed, perfected jokes. You can do the same thing with your own stories. Okay, so I'll give you an example. I was recently teaching a class and I told a story about how I used to write a comedy column. And I told this story and a few minutes later someone said to me, hey Ramit, you're always talking about testing stuff. Have you ever tested anything on us right now as we've been here for the last couple days? I said actually yes. When I was telling that story about writing a comedy column, I was testing it to see if it hit and it totally bombed. No one smiled, no one laughed. It was just dead crickets in the room. And I said, I'll never tell that story again. Let's take a look. I used to write a comedy column in my college newspaper. It was called Two Guys who Were Better Than youn. I actually have a thing for names. It's like very, it's not too modest. Anyway, and the funny thing was we took these photos the first day. They took photos of us and, and we did like normal photos and then we did these really weird ones cause the photographer, well, they were supposed to be a friend of ours. So we did these really weird photos like ah, stuff like that. And they actually accidentally ran the really weird photos. So people were like, seriously, what kind of guys like put these photos in the newspaper? So from then on we just ran with the weird photos. There was a question about whether you test your stories. Yes. Listen, I, who here, you've heard me tell some of the same stories twice. You guys aware that by the time you see Chris rock or Louis CK they've taken the same joke and tested it 50 different ways? Are you aware of that? Just like that. I test stories. So I have a story that I think is a great story and I'll tell it and I'll know. And I've told stories today and I know and I've told them in slightly different ways than ever before. And I'll notice where it hits and where it doesn't. For example, did you guys notice that as I told that Stanford Daily story, I talked about my photographs with my friends, my friend. And did you notice that it didn't really hit? You guys didn't really get it or laugh. At the end where I talked about how they ran the weird photos only being here in the room, could you notice from this perspective that that part of that story did not hit and I will never use it again. So in this case, I. I realized that the story was so bad that there was no chance of salvaging it at all. Usually if I get like one little laugh, I'm like, alright, this person's got a good sense of humor. But in this case it was just dead. In other cases I have stories where it's really good, people are engaged and then their eyes start dropping and that means it's a little too long. Okay? So you have to really be socially receptive to look at the person as you're telling the story and kind of gauge where are they interested, where are they not, where are they laughing, where are they not? That is more of an advanced technique that you can use as you tell stories. That's exactly what comedians do, right? They're noticing not only the volume of the crowd, but the tenor of the crowd. Is the person laughing in the middle of the joke? Are they laughing at the end? How long are they laughing, what kind of laugh? That determines whether the joke earns its way into their special.
