The perfect first sentence is the one that makes your audience want to read or hear the second one.
Sounds trivial, but is it?
I mean, just look around – let’s say at a couple of speeches you listened to recently. How did these begin?
How did yours begin?
Just because every other speech begins by going through the agenda, yours doesn’t have to.
A huge part of what makes a great movie compelling is that you don’t know what’s going to happen but want to find out.
But then again, why is it that you’ve watched your favorite movie a dozen times although you know what’s going to happen?
These movies keep the tension regardless. You’re glued to your seat and can’t help but want to follow the story a fifth time.
This time, tension works in a very different way, though.
When you’re watching a movie for the first time, tension is to a large degree created by what we don’t know. We anticipate what’s going to happen and tension is created by the uncertainty about whether that’s actually going to happen.
But when we’re watching a movie repeatedly, tension is created differently. This time, we already know what happened.
Crucially, we already know what we felt. And so this time, what we anticipate is the repetition of this sensation. It’s the certainty of what we’re going to feel that creates the tension. (Just observe how often you’ll say something like: “Wait, now comes the best part!”)
Music works this way, too. You can hear a piece for the 100th time and it still creates tension, sometimes even more, when you’re waiting for that climactic moment to finally arrive.
What does your audience anticipate?
Storytelling is rather simple if you follow this advice from writer Elmore Leonard:
“A story is real life with the boring parts left out.”
Simple, right?
Just leave out all the boring parts and voilà: your story is ready.
But.
What if you can’t leave out the boring parts? Because, let’s say, it’s a really dry topic … with lots of facts …
Sounds like bad luck, doesn’t it? I mean you can’t just leave the facts out when it’s about the facts, do you? You’re basically doomed to be giving a boring talk.
Well, unless the premise is wrong.
Which it is: Facts are facts. In and of itself, a fact is neither boring nor exciting.
But if the facts relate to our lives, if the facts have an impact on our lives (even if it’s just an impact on your business’ bottom line), then we’re back in Leonards domain: Leave out the boring parts, i.e. those facts that don’t relate to the point we’re trying to make about our lives.
Facts make for a boring story if (and only if) you write real life out of the story and if you waste your time on the facts without making the connection to real life.
Stories are powerful.
Which is why they are often misused. The more emotional, the greater the potential for misuse.
A couple of years back, at a conference, I listened to a speech about water problems in mega cities. The speaker started with a story about a poor family who suffered some severe diseases due to contaminated water. It was a touching experience. She really made us feel the pain.
Which earned her harsh criticism during the coffee break.
Because it turned out that she had been misleading us. The problem: The story wasn’t representative of the situation. Not at all.
It was a story that was meant to evoke emotions (which it did). But it was a dishonest story in the sense that the speaker had picked a very specific, very special situation that painted an unusually dark picture. One that wasn’t representative of the situation at all. It was purely there to evoke emotions while not making the proper point.
That’s a crucial difference: The best stories are such that they are representative of the whole picture despite highlighting only a specific part of the picture.
Skilled communicators pick stories that paint a vivid picture.
Great communicators pick representative stories that paint a vivd picture. A story that is powerful because it evokes emotions and captures the essence of the complete picture.
A golden rule in storytelling is that anything the author spends much time on will amount to something in the story.
If it didn’t, the editor would certainly have cut it out. It’s just bloat that makes the story longer but not better. It adds detail without adding meaning.
Now, look at your website. Does anything you spend much time on amount to something in your story? Or is there content that makes the page longer but not better, information that adds detail without adding meaning?
A good editor would cut it out.
Almost everyone has been Rocky at one point in their life.
You just knew that you have what it takes … if only the world was at bit more fair and didn’t throw all the mess at you while treating the already big fish with (even more) money, (even more) relationships, and (even more) luck.
When someday luck would call you – just like Apollo did with Rocky to give him the opportunity to fight for the world championship, you’d prove that.
Haven’t you been Rocky? You knew that if only luck would call you to give you the opportunity to show the world that you really have what it takes, you would prove them right? Just like Rocky did? (I know that many of you actually have.)
That’s why Rocky resonates with so many people – even those who would never watch a real boxing fight. It’s not the boxing why people love Rocky. It’s the journey.
Rocky, just like any good story, is a canvas, a canvas we project ourselves on. We look at the hero, but it’s us who we see. If it’s a great story, we derive lessons from what we see and implement them for our own lives.
The same principle works for business stories.
Unfortunately, most business stories work rather differently. They are not designed as a canvas but as a spotlight. A rather bright one, in fact, so that the audience can appreciate the hero and cheer for them.
The problem with that is that audiences already have a hero to root for: themselves. They don’t need you to replace that hero.
A better way to tell a business story is to think of it as a canvas so that – even while we’re speaking about ourselves – it’s the customer who recognizes themselves in the story.
Can you point to a business story that does that for you? I’d love to hear it!
Some marketers treat us as kind of dumb.
For example in the way they try to persuade us by hiding their cons and exaggerating their pros (if not downright inventing some).
Let’s call them the “selfish marketers”.
The fascinating part is how much effort selfish marketers invest into this. They spend huge resources on inventing promises that sound irresistible or stories that create buzz – not to mention all the money they throw towards marketing agencies who give them more of that.
By doing that, they try to decorate a product they don’t trust in themselves to be good enough if they told us the truth.
In my experience, your effort is better spent in telling a true story and making it work. That involves refining your product so that you can actually trust it to be good. It also involves listening closely to what your customers actually want (and need). It doesn’t stop with the quest for clarity to find the words that make your customers see what you see.
The selfish marketer starts from building something and puts all their effort in crafting a story on top of that something.
The honest marketer starts with empathy, uncovers what matters to the customers, builds a special thing that delivers exactly that … And then they tell a true story about it … using words they trust in and believe, themselves.
The best products are those that customers love even more when they know the complete truth. They are not irresistible because the promise sounds irresistible but because it is. And so, your customers support you in creating the buzz.
What’s a product where that’s the case for you?
In chasing the “wow effect”, many businesses overlook the “of course effect”.
The of course effect is what makes it a no-brainer to choose your product. It’s what makes people wonder why no one else had that idea before.
The of course effect makes people get accustomed to a product so quickly that they would miss it after the first use should someone dare to take it away from them.
The central locking system on cars was an of course effect. The skip intro button on Netflix was an of course effect. The double click to zoom on iPhones was an of course effect.
Of course effects are way stronger than wow effects.
What’s the of course effect in your offering?
Want maximum effect from minimal work?
That’s why I use cutout. It’s the quickest and easiest form of animation that I know. – Terry Gilliam (Monty Python)
The quote is taken from this clip and dates back to 1974:
Compared to what Pixar does today, Monty Python’s animations were crude. Paper cuts, made from actual paper with actual scissors, very, VERY roughly animated.
And yet, for Monty Python’s fans they worked. Terry Gilliam, who was responsible for all of the group’s animations, explains why:
The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn’t really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.
It’s easy to get lost in perfecting your technique. Using the latest and greatest methods to make shiny trailers that look professional, take an awful amount of time to make and, well, fail to make the point.
Terry Gilliam was more interested in making the point rather than using the fanciest technology. “Whatever works is the thing to use.”
He started from the story, not from the technology. Once he was clear what story to tell, he was looking for the easiest way to tell this story. For him, it was paper cuts. For you, it might be something completely different.
Whatever it is, start with the story and then use whatever works to tell it.
Do you trust you customer with the decision to buy from you? In other words: If they knew everything you know, would they buy?
If not, then why not?
The best way to find out whether your product is breathtakingly good, is to tell a brutally honest story about it (even if it’s just to yourself). Then, observe what happens.
The best products are those which people fall in love with even more after they’ve been told the complete truth.
