Speaker

Matthew Dicks

Matthew Dicks

Matthew Dicks is the author of Storyworthy, a storytelling teacher, and a 59-time Moth Story Slam winner and nine-time Grand Slam champion. In his day job he is a fifth-grade elementary school teacher in Connecticut. He also teaches storytelling and communication to corporate teams at companies including Slack, Amazon, Lego, and Salesforce through his company Speak Up.

He is the author of more than ten books, including fiction, rock operas, and a comic book. He is working on a business storytelling book.

Key ideas

  • The five-second moment as the atomic unit of story: every story turns on a single instant of transformation or realisation, and all other content exists to deliver the audience to that moment with maximum clarity.
  • Homework for Life: a daily practice of recording one moment from the day in a spreadsheet. Dicks started with 1.8 moments per day in year one; after twelve-plus years he finds 7.6. The practice builds a lens that reveals story-worthy moments invisible without training.
  • Stakes tools: Elephant (opening urgency), Backpack (sharing your plan), Breadcrumbs (hints), Hourglass (slowing down at the peak), Crystal Ball (predicting a bad future). Spread across the first half of the story; never front-loaded.
  • Say yes: refusing an opportunity assumes knowledge about what lies behind it that you cannot possess. A yes can become a no; a no can never become a yes.

Wiki appearances