Design in Mind: 5 Steps for Telling A Design Story
Over the last three years, I’ve worked with a number of designers who have great ideas, but struggle to get colleagues or potential backers to see the power of their …
Put a Stake In It: 5 Tips for Building Tension in Your Stories
In preparation for Halloween last week, I started watching clips of Carrie, the Academy Award-winning horror film by Brian De Palma. In the movie, Carrie does all sorts of paranormal and frightening …
What A Character! 3 More Tips on Creating Great Characters
As followers of this blog know, I’ve written extensively about Breaking Bad, the Emmy award-winning show on AMC that wrapped its final season a few weeks ago. But I’m not …
Second That Emotion: 3 Tips for Telling Emotional Stories
A few weeks ago, This American Life (TAL) broadcast an episode entitled “How I Got Into College”, which included a story told by a man in his 30’s about his early …
Never Bored Room: 3 Stories to Enliven Your Next Meeting
When I was just out of college, I had a job in which every meeting had the same pointless pattern as Michael Scott’s breakdown of business fundamentals in Season 4 of The …
That’s So Funny! 5 Ways to Inject Humor Into Your Stories
I’m a huge fan of Louis C.K. Louis is a masterful performer whose spot-on observations of the human condition and casually neurotic delivery have won him praise from comedians (Chris …
10 Ways to Use Storytelling to Improve Creativity at Work
It’s Tuesday morning. Your boss shows up at your desk two minutes after you arrive and says that he needs a “creative solution” to a problem. You rub your eyes …