skills to better sell yourself. Whether your experiences tell how you disgusted your host family in Guatemala or how you led your company out of disaster, the same basic principles apply. You are always telling a story.
While most eight-year-olds were learning how to properly squeeze a lemon, Gary Vaynerchuk was managing seven lemonade stands across his neighborhood in Edison, New Jersey, his new home after moving with his family from Belarus. This kind of hustle has led him to numerous business successes, best-selling books, and TV appearances, and has edged him a few steps closer to his goal of buying the New York Jets football team. He is also one of the best business speakers out there and no stranger to using humor. Says Vaynerchuk, “Quality storytelling always wins. Always.”5
It does not take long to find a compelling example. Airbnb went from a failing startup to a billion-dollar business built on a compelling story that their founders have become masters of telling. Airbnb started in 2007, when Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky were struggling to pay their rent. There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels were fully booked, so they came up with the idea of renting out three airbeds on their living room floor and cooking breakfast for their guests. The site Airbedandbreakfast.com (later shortened to Airbnb) officially launched on August 11, 2008, and initially struggled. With no seed money, the founders hustled to self-fund and keep their dreams alive. They fell back on their design schooling and created special-edition breakfast cereals that capitalized on the presidential election: “Obama O’s” (The Breakfast of Change) and “Cap’n McCains.” The two sold 800 boxes of the cereal (priced at $40 each) in two months, making $30,000 in profits for the cash-strapped founders.
The reasons why they started Airbnb, combined with the fact that they kept the idea alive with breakfast cereal, made a compelling and memorable story for Joe and Brian to tell. It showed their idea was a solution to a real problem, that they were passionate about it, and that they were willing to do anything to succeed.
Investor Paul Graham was impressed with Gebbia and Chesky’s hustle and decided to take on Airbnb in his Y Combinator program (an American seed accelerator providing early stage funding and advice for startups), even though he initially didn’t like their idea. They went on to raise multiple rounds of investment with top-tier firms and VCs and, in April 2014, they closed a round based on a valuation of approximately $10 billion.
Seth Godin is a prolific writer, blogger, and very often hilarious public speaker. He is the author of several notable marketing books, such as Purple Cow, Small Is the New Big, and Permission Marketing, and his ideas have been referenced, regurgitated, and repackaged by just about everyone. Expanding on Godin’s idea that “marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell,” Actionable Marketing Guide blogger Heidi Cohen writes, “In the social media age, your company must build the best product you can because customers will talk about your products and services on social media platforms and in real life. Products need stories to provide context and human emotion. They provide the beginning, middle, and end.”6
Airbnb gave people a great story that clearly explained who the company was, defined the values it held, and directly addressed the needs of those it was trying to serve. For their community of loyal users, Joe and Brian were striving to provide an experience, a home, and a sense of belonging that people don’t get from traditional hotels. Their story also saved them a lot of marketing dollars as media and user attention spread their tale far and wide. The hotel industry had a new competitor, and this competitor had creativity, passion, hustle, and a story worth telling. People don’t invest in your business or product. They invest in you and your story. If you want people to remember what you say, tell a compelling story.
“People don’t invest in your business or product. They invest in you and your story. If you want people to remember what you say, tell a compelling story.”
“Storytelling is everything,” says Barbara Corcoran from ABC-TV’s Shark Tank. “Show me an MBA and your sales numbers, that’s fine. But tell me a great story about how you got started and your vision, and we’ll talk.”7
The same logic could easily be applied to stand-up comedy. Jokes that tell a story, that immerse the audience into the scenario, are much more likely to get them to invest and laugh along.
How to Craft Your Story
So how do we craft a great story? Whether it’s business or not, the story always needs a personal element. Make it your own. Audiences respond better to a story that features the storyteller. Include stories from your own life experiences before referencing those of others. Nobody knows your stories better than you, which also makes telling them a lot easier. Remember, better public speaking is the goal here, and stand-up comedy is our means of achieving it.
The best way to be more engaging, memorable, and funny quickly is to tell a story that contains a few essential elements. “Who wants what and what stops them from getting it?” This, according to Golden Globe–winning writer and three-time Emmy nominee Bill Grundfest, is the secret sauce of all stories in its most simplified form. Yet what makes stories great is the detail we add. We need to put meat on the bones of our story by including the following elements:
Have a hero/protagonist.
Decide who will be the central character of the story. Often people remember the characters more than the story itself. Loose contenders so far in mine are Shakin’ Stevens, Mustafa, and some experimental comedian called Irish Dave.
Describe what your hero is up against.
What challenges does the character have to overcome? What do they want and what is stopping them from getting it? This can be as feisty as Guatemalan food or as terrifying as public speaking. This is your story’s source of tension.
Build in a specific transcending emotion.
You need something that breaks down barriers; love, lust, greed, passion, and loss are perfect.
Include a clear lesson or transformation.
Make sure your characters move toward their goal, objective, or solution to a problem. Even if it’s just finding a bathroom, or omitting words without laying an egg.
Add twists and turns to the story.
Try not to make it predictable for the listener. Introduce a question or challenge and don’t be too quick to solve it.
Make it believable.
It is essential that your story allows the listener to suspend their disbelief by listening to what you are saying rather than questioning the truth of your words. Vulnerability and jokes at your own expense work well here. Tell people how you really felt. Leave some of yourself on the stage. If something was scary, nobody wants to hear how confident you were in overcoming it. If your hands were like a partially defrosted mackerel, tell them.
Have a clear incident that makes the story really take off.
Often referred to as the inciting incident, it is a concept popularized by the master of story, Robert McKee, in his famed three-day “Story Seminar” given all over the world. It is described by Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The War of Art, here: “The inciting incident in a screenplay or novel is that event that gets the story rolling. In The Hangover, it’s the moment when the guys wake up in their trashed villa with no memory of what happened the night before—and realize that they’ve lost their friend Doug. With that, the story kicks into gear. Everything before that is just setup . . . Ask yourself of your project, ‘What is the inciting
