How to articulate your story like the top 0.01%

Most people are forgettable.

And they don’t even realize it. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a big problem. As you get older, though, it becomes catastrophic.

I experienced it firsthand. I tried to climb the corporate ladder by keeping my past secret. I didn’t tell anyone about the $50M a year eCommerce business I used to run with my brother. Or my extreme battle with mental illness.

I felt embarrassed. I thought people would judge me.

Then I reached a point in my life where I’d finally had enough. I was sick of asking for permission, waiting for promotions, begging for opportunities, working for free to get mentorship, and always being broke and only having $50 left after payday.

One silly little experience changed my mind.

I went to a Toastmasters event – it’s where amateurs practice public speaking. I went because every time I had to give a talk, I nearly pooed my pants (no joke). But the first time I went I didn’t talk. I was too scared. I just watched.

A guy named Bharat gave a short 7-minute speech that blew me away.

I had goosebumps. I felt inspired. I felt like I could do anything.

After the speech I spoke with him. It turned out he had migrated to Australia and didn’t speak English well. He had a strong Indian accent and experienced a lot of racism. He grew up in a poor family too.

But that speech he gave made him stand out. And his cultural differences were instantly forgotten.

I found out he was off to the world championships of public speaking. On the side he had a business coaching high performers to give powerful speeches. Fast-forward to today, and Bharat is a titan of the tech world.

He earns insane amounts of money. Gets invited into rooms most people could only dream of. And spends his day deciding which inbound opportunities he will accept.

Bharat’s secret: basic storytelling.

Once I saw what he did, I couldn’t unsee it. I became obsessed with storytelling and practiced it every day. It’s how I joined the top 0.01% in my field just like Bharat.

It’s the hidden secret of high performers. And it’ll take you to a place in life that you’ve been trying to reach for decades.

Here’s how to articulate your story, so you can do the same.

“A good storyteller with a decent idea will always have more influence than someone with a great idea who hopes the facts will speak for themselves.” – Morgan Housel

Your stories will get ignored if you don’t do this

I’ve personally taught storytelling to 6000+ people. I see one mistake repeatedly.

Most stories are boring. They are cookie-cutter. They feel like “Once upon a time” type stories which put people to sleep. I used to do the same. Then I learned a strategy that fixes the problem.

Every great story has a surprise.

If there’s no surprise it’s just facts, a report, or a journal entry. So… to articulate your story well, you must start with something interesting. If you start with this, it’s easier to tell stories.

Another option is to start with something weird. For example, I used to work in a strip club. That’s weird. That detail alone is a great place to start a story. It instantly and ethically gets attention. Or another example: I ended up dating one of my co-workers and we joined a cult together and fell in love.

Everyone has interesting or weird parts of their life.

The trouble is most people hide them, so they leave them out of their life story. And nobody’s curiosity is piqued so they end up getting ignored.

The hero's journey makes you sound like a douchebag

The insufferable personal branding folks talk about articulating your story too.

They tell you to create a hero’s journey of your life as if you’re Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie. This advice seems smart when you first hear it, but it’s dumb if you think about it from the audience’s perspective.

Telling a story about how you were in a dark place and became a hero makes you sound like a giant douchebag. It ends up just stinking of ego from 50,000 miles away. And people tune you out because you sound like another self-promoting knobhead with a $17 course to sell at the end of the TED Talk. No thanks.

Where the hero’s journey framework goes wrong is it focuses too much on you and all your successes. But success highlight reels are boring. They hide the truth. The opposite is even worse: highlighting all your failures like you’re Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness, living in a public toilet with your 5 year old kid.

Too much success = bad Too much failure p*rn = bad

The real goal of articulating your story is to be honest, humble, authentic, and most importantly, to tell the f*cking truth. This is simple but not easy to do.

I find if you focus on being a storyteller and sharing the raw, unfiltered truth, you’re most likely to tell an engaging story that doesn't turn you into a caricature of yourself

What you can learn from the most powerful sentence ever used in a story

Arguably the most famous sentence in storytelling history is one from Hemingway:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Those 6 words tell more of a story than the entire database of Amazon fiction books written in the last 100 years. It’s proof that less is more.

When I first read those 6 words, I felt a wave of emotion. I had a newborn baby at the time. I imagined her in those words. I thought to myself, “What if my little girl didn’t make it?” That’s what sharing emotion does.

I’ve had over 1B views on my stories. And this is the hidden technique I’ve used to hit that milestone.

The stories that move people to action contain emotion.

If people don’t feel anything, your story means nothing. The way to extract the emotion out of a story is to start with “How did this event, person, or thing make me feel?” Here’s an example…

In 2001 I was in high school here in Australia. I came to school one day and found out two planes had hit the World Trade Center.

My good friend Abdullah was locked in a classroom with the other Muslim students for the rest of the week. It was feared the non-Muslim students would retaliate and either punch, or even stab Abdullah with a knife.

To the adults, locking him away seemed like the logical choice.

I was 15 at the time. I didn’t understand the madness. All I knew was I wanted to play soccer with my friend Abdullah and now I couldn’t. It made me sad. At the same time, several of my American family friends lost loved ones in the attacks.

It was the first time in my life I felt grief for two things at once: for the people my family friends had lost, and for my friend being treated like a suspect. I truthfully didn't know how to hold both.

4 weeks ago, I bumped into Abdullah at the shopping centre. 25 years had passed, but I instantly felt the same thing I'd felt that day in 2001. It was the first thought that entered my mind.

Then I noticed a pram behind Abdullah's wife. Inside was his newborn baby. Abdullah looked joyous. I thought to myself, “Perhaps it all worked out in the end.”

But it doesn’t end there…

2 weeks ago a client sent me a text. “Sorry Timbo, I gotta bail man.” I asked him why. He said his PTSD had taken over.

He did a tour of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 2001 attacks. What he’s seen still haunts him. He has dark thoughts. The pain he feels will last a lifetime. He can never be free of it, and that’s the ultimate price he paid.

Weirdly, he said he wouldn’t change anything. He’d do it all again. I got goosebumps reading that message. Some people are so damn selfless, it’s hard to comprehend.

What you just read is raw emotion. Perhaps it made you feel something. And that’s what your storytelling should do.

Recounting emotion creates emotion.

Write your stories down first for this little unknown reason

Articulating your story starts with writing.

Why? Because writing is thinking. Writing your story down forces your brain to think deeply about the events and characters. And it’s how you join the dots of your story to your main point or overarching takeaway.

Stories that aren’t written down first are a jumbled mess.

As you write the stories down, the goal is to write like you talk. No filters. Lots of spelling errors. Dialogue. Slang. Say “mate” if you’re Aussie like me. SMS language. Acronyms like BTW and LOL. This is personality. It’s authenticity.

Once you write your story down it needs an edit with 3 goals in mind:

1. Say less using fewer words

2. Make the story simpler

3. Use 5th grader language

The best stories aren’t the smartest. They’re the stories people actually can understand.

Become a maniac by using non-linear timelines

Telling stories makes you a curator.

The goal isn’t to tell the whole story. The goal is to inspire, entertain, persuade, or teach the reader something. You also want to save the reader time, so it doesn’t take your 20-hour memoir book on Amazon (that no one reads) to tell the story. Non-linear timelines are how you do this.

Chronological timelines are boring as f*ck. They’re predictable.

You can salsa dance around the timeline of your story if you want. You can delete entire decades too. Non-linear timelines create unpredictability. And that makes the audience curious. It gives them dopamine too.

Don’t give a f*ck about opinions

Thinking about what people will think of your story is holding you back.

Haters make you think about hate. They don’t make you articulate a story that helps people. What you focus on becomes a reality. I find it’s better to write a story as an email draft in Gmail and picture myself sending it to a close friend.

Not only should you block out what people will think of your story, but you should go the opposite direction and intend to piss a few people off.

Pandering to people or trying to not offend anyone leads to intellectual poverty.

Good stories challenge people. They make people think. They spark comments. They move people. They present new ideas. They bring back old ideas that got cancelled, and allow for new debate.

What people think of your story is none of your business.

Never wait for story inspiration

A blank page is a knife up your butthole that makes you bleed all over the floor.

Document all your stories in advance. Build a library. I have a section in my note-taking app of every story from my life. I add to it daily. The weird part is the last 3 years of my storytelling library is mostly full of stuff about my two daughters. Ohhhhh….. how times have changed.

The best storytellers are observers.

When you make it a habit to note down your stories you tap into this cheat code. Because when a story happens, you’ll forget it in a few days. And even if you don’t forget it, you’ll forget the tiny details.

And the tiny details of a story are what make it stand out. What you were wearing, where you were, the smell of the air, the feelings, the background characters, the weird objects on the table.

The tiny details make a story come to life. They make it real. They smash any hater who dares say 'that didn't happen' right in the face."

Have a feeling before creating feelings

If you haven’t already got the gist of it, emotion is the #1 goal of a good story. Without it, you have lifeless text and a bunch of empty paragraphs no one will care about. You’ll sound as interesting and as human as a Wikipedia entry from 20 years ago.

One way to create feelings is to first have feelings.

Practically, that means reading an essay or watching a YouTube video that makes you feel something before you get ready to write down or tell your story on stage. I did this just now. I re-read an essay about a man who tries to use AI to save his dying wife of cancer and loses the battle.

It gets me every single time. Especially when he mentions his kids with no mother.

Only after a feeling like that would I dare use stories to create feelings for others. This technique is a superpower. Emotion is a contagious virus worse than the 2020 bat flu.

When you feel something it infects everyone else too. Use it and you’ll have people talking about your stories for decades into the future (and even after you’re dead).

Why most storytelling advice is bullsh*t (including mine)

Wait, what? This is what the storytelling gurus in their white fur coats skip over.

Ready?

Everyone wants to be a somebody, but nobody wants to be the butt-naked person in the middle of the desert with no water, no friends, and wondering if they’ll make it out alive to see their newborn baby.

That’s where stories come from though.

You first have to live the story, which is why so few people have stories to tell. They’re not living. They’re just existing. I got good at storytelling not by reading books or watching storytelling videos on YouTube from famous writers. No. I learned storytelling by having real stories to tell.

I took big risks. Did fake job interviews. Worked in a strip club. Tried to be a famous DJ. Changed jobs every 1-2 years. Went through many romantic breakups. Had $1.2M stolen from my wallet. Started many failed startups. Quit my job. Got fired. Told my boss to F off. Got attacked by 1000s of trolls on LinkedIn, and made it into the LinkedIn Lunatics hall of fame (a place where strangers ridicule you to get likes).

The best storytelling comes from living first, then observing what happened. If you don’t actually put anything out into the world, there’s no story to tell the world.

That’s the detail the gurus skip over. Now you know.

What this all means for you

I always thought storytelling was for broke, romantic writers.

Now I realize that mastering storytelling is how you stop selling, and start subconsciously persuading people to do things you want them to do. This superpower can be used for good or evil. Obviously, I recommend you use it for good like I do.

When you master storytelling, you have opportunities come to you instead of having to ask permission for them. This alone is worth the time it takes to master the skill. And in a world of AI, storytelling is how you stand out. It’s no longer a nice-to-have.

It’s a survival skill.

So…

Articulate your story like the top 0.01% by starting with an interesting idea, adding emotion, and wrapping it in your life experience. You become unf*ckwithable and powerful when you do. That’s the cheat code to life you probably didn’t know.

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— Tim