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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.

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 o