TJ Walker says great storytellers are lazy: they listen to real conversations, notice what makes people's eyes light up, and retell those moments with the original characters and dialogue intact. Pick stories that matter to your specific audience, not just ones that get laughs.
Chapters
So how do you become a better storyteller if you want to go from being a good presenter communicator to a great one? The secret actually is to be lazy. It's hard work to write perfect stories. Staying up late at night writing, rewriting, editing, that's hard work. The best storytellers are not necessarily creative at all. They're not spending more time writing and rewriting and rewriting. No, all they're doing is, is listening. They're listening to actual conversations. They have things they say to people when they're stopped in the hallway or having a drink or having a meal they share with someone and they see that person's eyes light up. Wow, that's interesting. And they make a mental snapshot of it. So when they're giving a speech, a presentation, a briefing, what they're doing is simply reliving actual stories they've already told people in real life. And sometimes they're recounting a story a friend, a colleague, maybe a family member told them. Now you have to do it with certain screens. You don't want to just get up and tell stories, to tell stories. Because then people are comparing you to Will Rogers or famous storytellers or famous comedians or Jerry Seinfeld. I don't know about you, I don't want to be compared to a world class comedian. So you can't tell stories just to be funny or to be a storyteller. Your story needs to have a message that's interesting and relevant to the audience you are speaking to. Doesn't matter if it is graduate school sociology students or if it is, is a bunch of suppliers in the cement business. You've got to figure out what messages are important to me, interesting to the audience, useful to the audience that they need to understand, remember? So they take the actions I want. Then you need to go back and select the relevant story. But the best stories of all are ones where you're reliving it. It's so easy on your mind because you're seeing it. You're just sharing an experience. We all have stories all the time that we tell with family members about the worst vacation ever. And it could have happened 30 years ago, but you can tell a cousin or someone younger who wasn't there the whole story because it's memorable, because you can see it. You can see where you were. You remember who you were talking to. You introduce the characters you're talking about, exactly what you said to them, what they said back to you. You talk about what the problem was. And we had no hot water for a week. Whatever it was, you explained the problem. You talk about how you feel, and then we felt cold. We were freezing to death because we had no hot water. You telling people about how you felt and then you talked about the resolution, that's all easy. Doesn't require memory, because you're reliving an experience. That's really the number one way to go from being an okay storyteller, where you've kind of thought about it and processed it and write it, tweaked it, to a great storyteller. Great storytellers simply reuse their own life experiences. But they do it in a way where they make sure it's a hundred percent relevant to their audience.
