Ep 27 Am I Interesting? Storytelling for Personal Brands
This was a really fun deep dive to crack into as ive been obsessing over it the last couple of weeks as ive been leveling up my story telling.
The frameworks came from studying Shaan Puri, a writer and storyteller who's style i froth.
I kicked off with a fun coffee machine story that has happened to me recently that we used as reference to illustrate some of these points.
Here's what makes a story land:
The fundamentals:
- Every story needs a hero with a clear intention and something standing in their way. At any point in the story, you should be able to answer: what do they want, and what's blocking them? Lose that thread for five minutes and you lose your audience.
- There has to be a five-second moment of change — one specific turning point where the character flips. Not a vague epiphany. Something concrete that triggered it.
- Keep the stakes low. Everyday frustrations are more relatable than near-death experiences. The emotion does the heavy lifting, not the drama.
- The end needs to be the opposite of the beginning. Anger → bliss. Hated it → fell in love. Every good film follows this.
- Zoom into moments, don't summarise. Don't say "I was struggling" — show what struggling looked like. One specific image does more work than a paragraph.
- Show the effort, not just the result. Audiences invest in how you try, not whether you win.
- Have four or five signature stories ready. Stories someone could hear and know everything essential about you.
Voice and writing style:
- Write like you talk. School taught you to write for an audience that doesn't exist.
- Write to one person, not a crowd. They're reading it alone on their phone.
- Break the fourth wall in writing — call out what they're probably thinking before they think it.
- Interesting thinking beats interesting writing. Substance first, packaging second. You need both, but the thinking comes first.
- Build a binge bank — a library of content so that when someone gets curious, they can go deep. One post doesn't need to go viral. It just needs to exist. Fifty engaged people beats a million who don't care.
On humour:
- Humour is always a surprise. If they see the punchline coming, it's not funny.
- Contrast creates the comedy — drop the emotional register of a piece suddenly in the opposite direction.
- Rem made a great point: AI hates this. It smooths everything out. The drama of opposites is exactly where human writing beats generated content.
- Theo Vaughn's trick: practice finding five or six ways to say the same thing, each progressively weirder. These analogies and renamings make you sound sharp.
- You don't need to be the funniest or the smartest. A bit of both is the combo.
Your task before next session: Write a signature story. Something you'd tell someone and they'd immediately understand something true about you.
See you next week.
Luke
47:22
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Ep 27 Am I Interesting? Storytelling for Personal Brands
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