Personal Storytelling: How I Begin to Incorporate My Stories as Metaphors

Here’s an inside look at how I’m approaching this theme of personal storytelling — specifically, how I’m including a personal, lived moment which seems pretty mundane or topically irrelevant to my audience. Yet I want to use it as a metaphor about something my audience cares about: differentiation.

Watch the video below, and note the final essay + outline from the video beneath that.

From the video:

1. Read my full essay to see how it turned out.

2. I also pasted the outline that appears in the video below (unedited, in all its messy glory)

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Outline from the video:

1. Lakers score / spoiling the Knicks

2. That’s the thing about… (topic we care about… possibilities/imaginating, etc.) + (the insight or meaning I am revealing which was previously hidden, and seems nonobvious)

3. I call that… Schrodinger’s Content (brief line about why)

   1. Just as I had all the possibilites taken from me by seeing the score, we often have possibilities removed from our own imaginations byb seeing teh best practices. the examples in our space. the echo chamber content.

   2. Differentiation gets easier if we DONT spoil it for oursleves. If we keep a braod view on things. If we start with what eels right, or what feels like our personal prespectives and tasttes… rahter than color our view or narow it with eveyrhting everyone else has already published. Then we get STUCK playing comparison games.

4. So how can we differentiate, when we’re so informed by — and our ideas maybe even feel spoiled by — the conventional wisdom around us? How can we get our own creative fingerprints and personal vision into the work so we stand out easier and resonate deeper?

5. The XY Premise Pitch

   1. TEMPLATE

      1. Examples…

   2. The key here: The Y can’t be a comparison.

6. We’ve all experienced shows or other projects or creators who do that.

   1. Marketing podcasts: We ACTUALLY get… practical, etc.

      1. That’s not true differentiation.

      2. Hold up the premise… hold up the content… competitors would freely admit, that’s not us.

   2. Unfortunately, we get so stuck in our echo chamber, or we have possibilities spoiled for us, we take a narrow view on what could be. We get STUCK on competitor content, STUCK on sameness, or at least we start there, so the Y, the hook, the thing that’s meant to differentiate us and help us own an idea outright, is anchored to the competitive set we’re in. We start by looking extenrally for the answers, instaed of internally. What can YOU create? What do YOU have to say? WHere do YOU plan to lead us? …and why?

7. XY Premise Pitch developed with our personal perspectives in mind.

   1. Interactive or “real time” premise development. Taking a show that feels bland.. and evolve it, from forgettable, commodified stage of the premise… to the differentiated-by-comparison stage… to the true original, capable of being among the choice few things that feel irreplaceable to the audience. “The choice few things that feel irreplaceable” is another way of saying… there favorite.

8. Revisit the beats

9. Close with something pithy about our work

10. Call-back to the Knicks score or Schrodinger’s content/cat