Matthew Dicks: Homework for Life

Our interview of Matthew Dicks for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere.

Matthew is a bestselling author, podcaster and teacher. He is also a great storyteller. Matthew is 45-time Moth StorySLAM champion and a 6-time Moth GrandSLAM champion. He has written a book called “Storyworthy” which gives us the tools to tell better stories.

If you are an influencer, Matthew tells us about a technique called Homework for Life. If you do Homework for Life will never run out of ideas for future videos.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

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Jon Pfeiffer:

I am joined today by Matthew Dicks. Welcome to the podcast.

Matthew Dicks:

Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You are an author. You've written five novels. You're also a storyteller, and have written a great book called Storyworthy. The tagline is, "Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling."

Matthew Dicks:

It's a big ask, but yes, that is the hope.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now, we were talking before we started that a fair number of my clients are YouTubers. They struggle to get ideas, on a consistent basis, so they can put up a YouTube video a day. You have a concept that you've given a TED Talk about, you've trademarked, called Homework for Life. Can you tell us about Homework for Life?

Matthew Dicks:

Sure. Well, I was worried about having the same problem as the YouTubers, which was I was taking stages in New York and Boston all the time telling stories, and I wanted to have new stories every time. There are some storytellers that sort of have the same 12 stories. They roll those chestnuts out every once in a while, and I didn't want to be that guy. I wanted to be someone who could always say something new every time he took a stage.

I'm an elementary school teacher as well, and my inclination is to assign homework, and so I gave myself this homework assignment. I decided there's probably stories that I'm not seeing in my everyday life that I need to start finding. What I decided was at the end of every day, I was going to ask myself, essentially, "What is the most story worthy moment from the day? What is the moment that, if forced on a stage, and required to tell a story about something that happened on that day, what would it be?"

Even if, ultimately, the thing I choose is not story worthy and is not something I would ever share on a stage, I wasn't going to skip a day. I was going to force myself to examine my life with the greatest care possible. My hope was to maybe get one new story per month, 12 new stories a year, which I thought would be fantastic. It would have been, but what happened instead, for me, and what's happened for, honestly, thousands of people who do it now, because I hear from them all the time, is that our lives are just filled with stories, and anecdotes, and parts of stories, and interesting things that people would want to hear, but we don't see them.

When we do see them, the tragedy is we let them go. We just toss them aside like they're meaningless. Someone says something that really moves us or makes us think in a new way, and if we're lucky we see it, but we take no effort to ever hold onto it. What we do is we end up throwing our days away. We throw our years away. You can ask someone who's, say, 60, "Tell me about your 30s," and they will have a hard time actually telling you about their 30s sometimes, but that's the way we treat our lives. We just toss every day away like it's spent, rather than what it really is, is a precious thing to hold onto.

By asking myself that question every day, I wrote the answer down, "What is the most story worthy moment?" I never write the whole thing out, because that's a crazy journaler kind of behavior. I don't believe in journalers. I think they journal a lot when they get broken up with, and as soon as they find love again, they put their journal away.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Journaling, yeah.

Matthew Dicks:

I want it to be like brushing your teeth. That was my goal. Like, "I don't skip brushing my teeth. I'm not going to skip this." I use an Excel spreadsheet that's two columns. It's the date on one side, and I stretch that B column to the end of my computer screen, and in that B column, that's where I record my moment from the day, so I only give myself a few sentences.

Over time, I've just discovered that my life is filled with stories, and so it's not uncommon that most days are filled with more than one entry. My current list of untold stories are actually uncrafted stories, material I haven't even really addressed yet. I think it's 685 possible stories that I haven't even gotten around to crafting yet. I've become a person who's just going to run out of time before he runs out of stories. That's a beautiful problem to have.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now, I confess, I have been doing it. You talk about in the book, and I will attest to, it brings up other memories.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes. Yeah, it really does. I always say, "It cracks you open." Once you start examining your life and your day, and you start to see these things that are happening around us already, it's instantaneous the way you make connections to the past. I've had things come up, like memories return to me, that I can't believe I forget. These incredible, profound moments that I just tossed aside when I was 26 like they were meaningless, and suddenly, they're back in my life.

It's really nice because you start to fill in the time that came before, and you start to feel like your life has more meaning than you realized. It was fuller than what you ever thought it was. It's very true.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right. I've heard you say and I agree with this, that things slow down when you do the Homework for Life.

Matthew Dicks:

Oh, yeah. It's very true. We talk about time as if, "I don't know where last week went. I don't know where last month went. I can't believe how quickly this year has gone by." If you're doing Homework for Life, you're actually taking a moment to take account of every day, and so you don't lose a day. One of my favorite things is when I'm flying on a plane, back when we did that more often, if I didn't have WiFi, I would bring up my Homework for Life for a year.

I'd say like, "Well, let me relive 2017." That ends up being maybe a thousand entries, because I have more than one in a day. I would go through those thousand entries over the course of the plane ride, and every single memory, every single entry triggers a memory, brings me back to a moment, and suddenly, 2017 feels enormous and vast, and all those things are back in my mind. It's a great gift to yourself, whether you're telling stories or not. I tell people, "Even if you never plan on speaking to another human being, you should still be doing Homework for Life. It's going to make you feel better as a human being."

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now, I read where you told your first story at the Moth in July 2011.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Then from then until now, you are a 63-time champion, Moth StorySLAM?

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah. It's 51 SLAMs and six GrandSLAMs, I think, right now.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Okay.

Matthew Dicks:

It's a silly number. It's a ridiculous number.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Just to set the scene, can you first explain to the listeners what a Moth contest is?

Matthew Dicks:

Sure. You go to a theater, or a bookstore, or a bar, wherever they're hosting them. They tend to have audiences ranging between 100 to say 300 people, depending on the venue. You go and put your name in a hat. There's a predefined theme for the evening, so you know what that theme is coming in. You've checked the website, you know what it is. You prepare a story based upon that theme.

It's a five minute long story. You drop your name in a hat, and you hope that your name gets picked out. If your name gets picked out, you take the stage and you tell a story to the audience. There's three groups of judges in the audiences. It's always a team of two, or three, or four people who have been assigned as a judge. Essentially, they get some training before the show, and they've had to attend at least one StorySLAM beforehand, so they have awareness of how these things work. When you're done telling your story, you get some immediate feedback in the form of numbers, one through 10. Those numbers are pasted on a board for everyone to see for the remainder of the night.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Just like the Russian judge.

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's actually a really important part of the whole process. I think part of it is we should acknowledge when people are good at things. There are shows that are not competition-based. In fact, I run one of those. My wife and I produce a show, and they're fine, but when you want to know who's best, you really want a place where that can be defined.

As arbitrary as it might seem judging stories, I'll tell you, the best storytellers tend to win more often. In any given night, almost always, I would say one of the three best stories of the night wins. Now, it's not always the one I think should win. I often think I should win, and I don't always win.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Of course

Matthew Dicks:

If I don't win, I always think, like, "Well, that was the second ... That's the one I would have chosen if I hadn't chosen myself." Or in some cases, I think, "He should have beaten me." A couple times that has happened, where I've won and I've thought, "Hmm. He was better" or "She was better than me tonight," but it's pretty good. It's pretty good in terms of how well they determine who was good and who was not.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You start, your first is in July 2011. You didn't have a book called Storyworthy that you could read to help craft stories.

Matthew Dicks:

Right.

Jon Pfeiffer:

How did you learn to craft stories?

Matthew Dicks:

It's a great question. I think part of it is the fact that I was a novelist already, so I was already working in story for a long time. I have been writing every single day of my life, without exception, since I was 17 years old, so I have not missed a day of writing. I have blogged every day of my life. I've recorded a blog every day since 2003, so I have not missed a day there.

A lot of it is just that experience of storytelling, of writing, of constantly examining my life already. I'm also a person who loves movies. I love movies dearly, and when I watch a movie, I'm always watching it in sort of an analytical, deconstructive way. When I was 12, I saw E.T. for the first time. I was so frustrated with a scene in that movie that seemed so ridiculous. It seemed like all the movies I was watching had these one glaring flaw. When I was 12, I wrote to Steven Spielberg and I said, "Listen, I love your movies, but you keep doing something stupid in every one of them."

I was very serious. I really thought this was going to happen. I said, "Send me the movie. Let me watch it before you put it in the theater so I can tell you the one stupid thing in every one of your movies, and we can clean it out." When I was 12, there was no Internet. It was really hard to figure out where that letter was supposed to go, but I sent it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

How did you figure that out?

Matthew Dicks:

In a rare instance, my mother helped me. Now, I think what happened was she just sent it to the production company, or the film company, Castle Rock, whatever it was. I doubt Spielberg ever saw my angry letter about his film, but even at a young age, I was really always examining movies in that way. I think I had a lot of those skills already embedded in me when I took the stage that night at the Moth.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now, I heard in an interview of you that you recently saw E.T. again, and the same scene bothered you.

Matthew Dicks:

It did.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now, I want to know what scene bothered you, and how would you fix it?

Matthew Dicks:

It's the scene in the classroom with the frogs. Essentially, Elliott decides, while E.T. is sort of possessing him, that the frogs that are about to be dissected need to be freed, and so he goes about freeing all the frogs. The problem with the scene is, it's a great idea for a scene, and it could have played really well, but it's the one moment in the film that is so utterly ridiculous in terms of its plausibility. I mean, I know we're dealing with a movie about an alien-

Jon Pfeiffer:

With a glowing finger.

Matthew Dicks:

Right. If we're going to deal with an alien and we're going to realistically accept the fact that this alien is on our planet, there's like a thousand frogs in that scene, if you watch it. There's more frogs than there ever could be, and they get further along than any frog could ever get. It takes the kernel of something that could have been really clever, and sweet, and subtle, and for some reason, he just decided, "I'm going to make it ridiculous by putting more frogs than could ever possibly be in a science room." It just makes me nuts every time.

Jon Pfeiffer:

That's before you started teaching.

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah, yeah. When I wrote my book really, the odd thing about the book is, the way I became a teacher of storytelling was people started asking me to teach them. At first, I didn't want to because I teach 10-year-olds all day, so I figured, why would I want to work with adults at night? Eventually, they convinced me to do one workshop, a six week workshop with six storytellers. I said, "This is the only one I'm ever going to do." That's what I said. I discovered that the way to teach was to take the craft that was sort of already living inside me and to analyze it and deconstruct it.

I had to take the stories I was telling and understand what I was doing in order to present it to other people. As an elementary school teacher, it's what I, fundamentally, have been trained to do. We take large processes and break them into smaller parts. By examining my own process, I actually became a better storyteller too because I realized, "Oh, here's a thing I do in almost every story." Then I said to myself, "Why don't I do it in every story?" Sometimes, it makes sense not to do it but sometimes I thought, "Oh. I really need to do this every time. I got to go fix those three stories that I didn't do that in." I became a better storyteller by becoming a more consistent storyteller, and someone who understood what I was inherently doing. I was able to speak to it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

When was that first seminar, or first training?

Matthew Dicks:

Well, let's see. I started our organization in 2013, so that's when people in my area, Connecticut, starting seeing me on stage for the first time. It was 2014. It was probably the fall of 2014. I rented a room in a library for those six people, so yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

It took another four years for the book to come out. Four years...

Matthew Dicks:

Yes, yeah. Well, the book, is honestly, if you spend a weekend with me, I do these weekend workshops, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 80% of the book is what I say over a weekend workshop. It was my attempt to replicate myself for people who were not willing to come to me. Before the pandemic, I was very resistant to teaching online. It just didn't feel like something I ever wanted to do.

I was asked to do it all the time and I said, "No, no, no. You have to come see me in Connecticut," which is really not a realistic thing for a lot of people to do, although I have people from China, and Australia, and Germany coming to Connecticut to learn from me. The book was an attempt to allow people to access the teaching without having to come to my fair state.

Jon Pfeiffer:

This is my editorial comment, that if you get the book, and I recommend listeners get the book, is get it first as an Audible book, because there are stories in there that you tell, and you get to hear Matthew tell the story, and then analyze what it is. Then, absolutely, pick up a hard copy of the book, or I guess, soft copy, whatever. Just get a paper copy, because then you go back and you get to look at these principles again, but to hear your story told by you as opposed to read it, I think, helps a lot.

Matthew Dicks:

I really appreciate that. It was my first and only book that I've recorded. All of my novels are available on audio, but professional, people who really know what they're doing handle that. I wasn't sure about doing my own book at first. It's not a fun process, it turns out. It is very arduous. When you're reading your own book in a small room by yourself and the director cuts in and says, "I don't think you're really capturing the author's intent here," and I say, "But I'm the author," and they say-

Jon Pfeiffer:

"You're not capturing it."

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah. I said, "I think I'm capturing it." They say, "Well, you're not. We have to talk about it." It's not the most fun thing to do, but I do agree that hearing the stories is very helpful for people. I hear from many, many people who say, "I started with the audio book, and then I also bought the hard copy so I could highlight the hell out of that thing."

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right, right. Now, I'm jumping around, but you also have a podcast.

Matthew Dicks:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jon Pfeiffer:

Which is called ...

Matthew Dicks:

Speak Up Storytelling.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Who is on the podcast with you?

Matthew Dicks:

Oh, it's my wife. My wife and myself, we're the hosts. Every week, we feature a story from someone who has appeared in one of our shows here in Connecticut, or sometimes, I'll deconstruct my own story, occasionally, as well.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right. I recommend, after you've listened to the book and read the book, you subscribe to the podcast because that is a story, but then you talk about what the storyteller did right, and ways to improve the story using the principles you've talked about. It's like show-and-tell almost. You get to see it in action.

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah. Well, we hope always that it's going to be entertaining, because we want our ... I always say, in all storytelling and really in all public speaking that I ever do, you have to be entertaining first. You might as well not open your mouth unless you're trying to be entertaining, so we want the story to be entertaining to people. You get to hear a brand new story every week from someone who is, presumably, very good at what they do. Then, these wonderful people allow us to deconstruct their stories.

Matthew Dicks:

We always talk about the things they're doing well. There's always a few things we can talk about that can be done better but yeah, the goal is ... My wife is also a teacher. She teaches kindergarten. We call that modeling in the education world, so we give you a story, model it, and then take it apart and show you how it works.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah. It works, it works.

Matthew Dicks:

That's great.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I want to get back a second ... Well, no. You had touched on doing seminars via Zoom. I wanted to ask, as a professional storyteller, where you're used to being live and now you're on Zoom, and now I heard, for a while, you were teaching on Zoom. I'm an adjunct to Pepperdine, and I taught on Zoom this semester. What tips do you have for engaging your audience on Zoom?

Matthew Dicks:

Well, if we're talking about performing, telling a story, there's a few things that I've noticed that people don't do well and I try to avoid. One of the most interesting things that people seem to do is they lose their pacing when they're performing. When they say something that they were hoping to be funny and they don't see people laugh and they don't hear it through the Zoom, a lot of times, they repeat themselves, thinking, "They didn't get it. I'll have to say it again," which is always a mistake.

It's hard to make someone laugh in their own living room by themselves. They will often think what you said was funny, but if there's no one around laughing, you essentially just go, "Oh, that's funny," but you don't actually offer a laugh, so they lose their pacing. It's almost as if they think that they're having dinner and telling a story in that way, that leisurely pace that you tell at a dinner table, as opposed to being on a stage where you have the primacy of the audience and the demand to present content in such a way that keeps them entertained.

I always tell people, "Make sure that you're maintaining your pacing, that you're telling the story in the way you fundamentally believe it needs to be told, regardless of what response you're getting from people." In the same way when I do stand-up, if I tell a joke that does not land, I'm following ahead. I'm not allowing them to linger on the fact that I just was terrible. I'm hoping to win them over with the next one. I also tell people, like, "Your physicality is relevant, I think, to a certain degree."

I don't stand up when I'm performing in Zoom. I just feel that's a little odd. I am always on the edge of my seat. Literally, on the very edge of my seat, so I have some motion. I have a little bit of energy to me. I don't want people to feel like I'm relaxed in any way. I'm always telling my story, I'm sure you know this, tell the story to the camera and not to the screen. I'm always envisioning my story. I relive my stories as I tell them, and I'm always reliving them right above the camera. I see them right here, so that's a more engaging way. People feel like that you're making eye contact with them, even if you're not. It's not easy though. It's not a real great format for performing.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Then for teaching, what tips can you give for ... That you've gleaned just from having to do it?

Matthew Dicks:

Well, all of those things apply, to a certain degree. I've discovered on Zoom that you have to chunk things in much smaller groups. Whereas, if I'm in a room with you, I can go for an hour, and keep you really entertained and you won't even feel like the hour's gone by. On Zoom, I'm much more likely to chunk that hour into three 20 minute blocks, and give people 10 minute breaks in-between. There's just too many things that are distracting, and it is really physically taxing to stare at a screen for that long, so everything's chunked smaller.

Whenever I can, I always have someone in the background monitoring my Zoom so that when questions are coming in, people can text their questions into Zoom, and then someone's collecting those questions for me. They're grouping them, so that when it comes time for me to answer questions, they're presented auditorily. I get to hear someone say it, whether it's going to be the person in my class or it's going to be my co-host, my technology co-host, who's handling it. That way, questions make sense.

The worst thing is to get a question about one thing, and then the next question has absolutely nothing to do with the last thing. People just start to feel like you're meandering, that there's no point to this. That everything is being arbitrarily determined by the whim of someone in Wisconsin, and then another person in Hanoi. To have some purpose and some feel to it, I think, is important too.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I want to get back to ask you some specific story crafting techniques.

Matthew Dicks:

Yep.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You have written that you start crafting a story at the end.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

What do you mean by that?

Matthew Dicks:

Well, if we agree on the definition of a story, I think a story is about a moment of change in a human being's life, and the same applies to movies and novels. Ultimately, every real story is about a human being who starts in one place and then some stuff happens to them, and the result of that stuff is they fundamentally shift. It's either, what I say, transformation or realization.

Either you change as a person, or you think differently about something in the world. That is, essentially, what a story is, which really means that stories are often much smaller than people realize they are. Because just the change in opinion is a really worthy story to tell, if you know how to craft it properly. Oftentimes, the essence of a story, if you're watching a person undergo that moment of transformation or realization, it's often invisible. You won't even know that someone is having a deep and meaningful moment, because most of it happens up in our head. So often, we're looking for the thing that happened to us to tell the story, the crazy thing that happened, but we just have to talk about, fundamentally, something that shifts.

We start at the end because that's always the end of our story. The change that happens is the most important thing you're going to say, so it's always at the end of your story. You have to know what you're talking about before you begin your story, and so you have to start with the end because you have to know what that fundamental change is so you can point at it, so all of the things you include in the story conserve that final moment that you're shooting for.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You gave the example, I've heard a couple times, of Apollo 13.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes. I love that example.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Can you tell us what you mean?

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah, sure. One of the problems people have in storytelling is they often feel like they have to tell you a lot of stuff before they tell you the story. Before they actually launch the story, they need to tell you about their hometown and how it's constructed. They need to tell you about their parents and their relationship. They need to tell you about how they ended up in their job. All of that might be relevant to the story, but it doesn't need to be at the beginning of the story, because one of the most precious ...

Actually, I think it is, the most precious territory in any story is the beginning, the first, let's say, minute or two. It's the opportunity to either convince people that this is a journey worth taking and that I know what the hell I'm doing, or it's an opportunity to let people know, this is going nowhere, or it's irrelevant. The test I always love to put to people is, twice in my life, I've been to a movie where the power went out. The first time it happened to me, I did not go back to see the end of the movie. I didn't care.

The second time the power went out though, I remember I was with my buddy. We were there the next day to see the end of that film. That should be the test when you're telling a story. It is, if the power goes out now, will people wait for the power to come back on for me, or will they say, "Oh, well. Moving on"? Quite often, people construct stories in such a way that you will say, "Oh, well. Moving on." Rather than beginning stories with all of this detritus, all of this information you think we need to know, we launch a story and share the information along the way.

The way Apollo 13 comes into it is, for you to understand that film, you have to understand how 1960s space travel functions, how it works, but the movie doesn't open with Tom Hanks on a black screen saying, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Before we begin this movie, you need to know a little bit about 1960s space travel, so please let me spend 10 minutes with you explaining how it works. How did we get men to the moon in the 1960s?" That's how people start stories all the time. You would never start a movie like that.

In Apollo 13, they teach you what you need to know as the movie moves along, rather than throwing everything up in the front. We have to remember that you've got to launch your story and give someone, instantaneously, something to be interested in, to wonder about, to be suspenseful for. Even a laugh at the beginning of a story is enough to get someone to want to hear the next sentence. Something, rather than, "Let me tell you something about my mother," or "Please let me explain my hometown to you for five minutes." None of that is a good story.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You have to tell me. What movie was it where the electricity went out and you went back the next day?

Matthew Dicks:

I have to be honest, I do not remember. My friend, Benji, was with me, so he might remember.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Do you remember the one that you didn't go back to?

Matthew Dicks:

It was a romantic comedy. I was on a date. It was a romantic comedy with Julia Roberts in it, I think. Now, fundamentally, that makes sense that I would not want to go back to that movie, because when you go into a romantic comedy, the end is always predetermined. When Harry Met Sally, if you don't understand that Harry and Sally are going to be together at the end of this film, you're nuts. Right?

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah.

Matthew Dicks:

It doesn't mean it's not entertaining, but certain movies, we just know how they're going to end. So whatever that romantic comedy was, I didn't need to go back because I knew they're going to get back together at the end. The Martian is a great example of that. I loved the book, The Martian. I love the film. I think both were extraordinary, but if you really think that Matt Damon's character is going to die at the end of that movie, you're crazy. Maybe the best version of that story actually is Matt Damon dying, but if you think Hollywood's going to allow that man to drift off into space at the end of the movie, you're nuts. That's a heavier lift for those movies.

For a romantic comedy or a movie like The Martian, they really have to nail it because the ending is already clear to even the dumbest of audience members. They kind of know what's coming, so they really need to engage in storytelling in a magnificent way, which they do.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You talk about, and this is going to transition, you talk about the stakes in a story. You have a great chapter title. Probably one of the better chapter titles I've seen, which is Stakes: Five Ways to Keep Your Story Compelling and Why There Are Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

Matthew Dicks:

Oh.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right?

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

What did you mean by that? What do you mean by stakes? Why are there dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?

Matthew Dicks:

Stakes are why we listen to stories. They are the things that get us to be worried, and to get us to wonder, and to get us to be concerned about our characters. In the case of personal storytelling, concerned about me. They're the things that cause the audience to want to hear the next sentence. They're the things that get the audience rooting for you, or rooting against you, because I tell stories where I'm the bad guy. Because in life, I am, sometimes, unfortunately, the bad guy.

We have to give our audience stakes. That's why we don't say, "Let me tell you something about my mother," as the first sentence of your story, because there are no stakes there. I can stop listening, and I will never care, but if I give the audience something to be concerned about, wondering about, worried about, suspenseful over in the beginning, and I maintain that or even build those stakes, those are the best stories, over time, I'm going to hold my audience's attention the whole time.

Jurassic Park is my favorite example. I just, someday, want to watch that movie with someone else and have them allow me to pause it constantly and talk about what's happening in each moment, because I just think it's so brilliantly put together. In all of Spielberg's movies, or in just about all of them, they're never really about the thing you think they're about. Jurassic Park is not really a movie about dinosaurs. It's, fundamentally, a movie about a man who can't be with the woman he loves because that woman wants to have children and he does not. All you have to do is watch the first 15 minutes of that movie, and you'll see that conflict clear as day.

You don't see it unless you're deconstructing the story in the way I do, instantaneously, but that's what the conflict is, the central conflict of the story. Then as the movie goes on, you find that the man, his name is Grant, what happens to him? Well, he ends up in Jurassic Park with two children, conveniently, despite the fact he doesn't love children. What happens over the course of the movie? He discovers that kids are pretty cool. He finds out that, "This boy is kind of just like me. He loves dinosaurs and cracks jokes all the time." He discovers that the girl is like this old soul, this really wise person who is calm under pressure.

He gets closer and closer to them both, physically and mentally. At the end of the movie, he's actually ... It's not really the end of the movie but, for me, it's the end of the movie. He's in a tree at the end of the movie, holding those kids the way a parent holds two children, as they go to sleep in his arms. The girl says, "What if the dinosaurs come back?" He says, "Don't worry. I'm going to stay up all night." She says, "All night long?" He says, "All night," and damn right he's going to, because he loves these kids.

Through the course of the movie, he goes from a man who thinks children are disgusting, and awful, and expensive, which is how he describes them at the beginning, to the most precious things in the world. It's a movie about a man finding a way to be with the woman he loves, but if I said to you, "Hey, do you want to go see a movie where a guy has to learn to love children so that he can spend his life with the woman he loves?" You'd say, "No. I don't want to go to that movie, Matt."

Spielberg knows this, so what does he do? He puts it in a dinosaur movie, so you go for the dinosaurs and when you leave the movie, you really do feel like, "That was a good movie." You don't feel that way about all movies, because not every movie actually tells a story that means something to us, that we feel, that touches our heart, but Spielberg knows how to do it. He understands, "I have to tell a story, and then I will throw aliens, and dinosaurs, and war, and all of these things around it, which will captivate you, and sell popcorn and soda, and keep you in the seats, but when you leave, it'll be in your heart. It'll be a story you remember," and that's what Jurassic Park ends up being.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I've heard your wife has refused to let you talk when you're watching movies.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes. The moratorium is now, "Don't talk to me during movies. I don't want to know what you see." When we finish a movie, now she'll say to me ... Recently, we saw Wonder Woman. I guess, last year, or a couple years ago. When we left the movie Wonder Woman, we hit the parking lot and she said, "I know you don't like that movie, for some reason. I can feel it like emanating off you, but could I have 15 minutes to think it was good before you tell me why it wasn't good?" I say, "I never have to tell you if you don't want to know." She says, "No. Just let me enjoy it for 15 minutes." That has happened many times, so I don't say anything about a movie until she's ready to hear it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

At this point in your life, is it just that you watch a movie and it's just naturally, you just look at it and that's what you see? You can't help yourself?

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah. I just showed a ... There's a great little clip right now on the Internet. It's called Nobody Is Normal. It's about a minute and 17 seconds long. It's just a little short. I remember the first time I watched it. Someone sent it to me and said, "This is cute. You might want to show your students."

As I watched it, I was absorbing the story, but I was also going, "Oh, I like the way they laid a little Easter egg here, and, oh, transition, and transition, and transition, and oh, I like the way they spun the camera here and then spun it opposite." The whole way through was just a deconstruction, in my mind, of that story, while also enjoying the story.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right. It's like I've sat with football coaches that are watching a football game. They can't help themselves but to say, "I wouldn't have called that play."

Matthew Dicks:

Right, yeah. They see things. I have a friend, a teacher, a co-worker, who played four years of college ball and was in some NFL training camps. When we talk about football games, he sees things that I never see. I'm a Patriots season ticket holder, who's been watching football all his life, but because I was never in the trenches, I don't see what's going on in the trenches.

It's the same thing when I watch a movie. People just don't see the things I see, until I point them out to them. Once I point them out, people go, "Oh, yeah. I see that now, but I would have never seen it unless you had told me to see it."

Jon Pfeiffer:

Shifting gears a bit, one of the things you do is, we touched on it, but you do coaching.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I heard that you coached a group of Santa Clauses.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes, I did. During the pandemic.

Jon Pfeiffer:

What coaching do these Santa Clauses need?

Matthew Dicks:

Well, I think there were about six of them in the room that day. It was an open workshop, anyone could come. I had about 12 people, and half of them ended up being Santa Clauses. This group of, this organization of Santa Clauses saw the workshop, and a bunch of them came. The thing for them was, they end up with a kid on their lap, and that kid is on their lap for anywhere from, let's say, one minute to three minutes, while they're trying to get the right photo.

I understand kids. You can say, "What do you want for Christmas?" and half the time, they're not going to say anything to you. The other half of the time, they're going to say one thing, and now you still have a kid on your lap for one to three minutes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right.

Matthew Dicks:

I think it's just a little awkward to have a kid on your lap to begin with, and then to not know what to say to kids, and so teaching them to tell a story to the kid while that child is on the lap. To be able to actually entertain the child is going to help them smile. It's going to put that kid at ease a little bit. Those stories are one to three minutes, which I can teach people to tell too.

I often tell people, "I'll start you with the five minute version of your story, and then I'll teach you how to tell the three minute, and then I'll teach you tell the one minutes, and then the 30 second elevator pitch of your story." That's a skill that I often do when I'm working with CEOs and people like that. Yeah, teaching Santa Clauses just to tell good stories to these kids so that the-

Jon Pfeiffer:

What kind of stories? Were they like reindeer stories? Were they Mrs. Claus stories?

Matthew Dicks:

Oh, it was a combination. They were. They were stories about what it's like to be Santa Claus, what's going on in the workshop. My advice to them was, if you can take stories that are actually about you, and just sort of Santa Claus up them a little bit, they'll have more authenticity to them. If you say things like, "Oh, when I was a little boy, I remember ..." and tell a story about when you were a little boy, because presumably, Santa was a little boy at some time. You know-

Jon Pfeiffer:

Presumably, yeah.

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah. Or if something happens over the course of the day. A little boy sits in the lap and say, "Oh, you're not going to believe this. Two hours ago, I had a little boy in my lap," and tell the story of the crazy thing that happened with the little boy two hours ago. Real stories, I think, are going to always be better. The authenticity and the vulnerability is always going to be appealing.

Ultimately, I taught them, listen, the beginning and the end have to be opposites of each other. They have to have some kind of a conversation with each other. You have to take the kids on a journey. It can't just be stuff that happened. I talked to them about how to make kids laugh, how to be funny in a story, those kinds of things. There's not a person in the world who I've met, who I don't think storytelling can serve in some way.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right. I heard that you have two books, you either have them in progress or you've pitched them. A follow-up book to Storyworthy.

Matthew Dicks:

Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Then, a productivity book.

Matthew Dicks:

You really do your homework.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah. I do a deep dive on my guests.

Matthew Dicks:

That's pretty good. Yes, I have both of those books. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yes. So when is the next version of Storyworthy coming out?

Matthew Dicks:

Well, it's probably three-quarters of the way done. I would like to think I could have it done in another two or three months. Again, it's all in my head already. It's just a matter of putting it on the page.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right.

Matthew Dicks:

I would imagine it's probably going to come out in 2022. It's called The Healing Power of Storytelling. There's craft in there, for sure, but the book is a lot about how, whether you're telling stories to an audience, or really, you're telling a story to yourself, because we are always, our first audience is what we listen to.

The idea that when you start telling about yourself, really, when you start crafting stories about your life, the benefits are enormous in terms of feeling better, and bringing things to closure. Find ways to put an end to something that's been plaguing you for a while, start to understand yourself better. All of those things. Then, I'm slipping in a lot of craft that I didn't get into the first book, that I regret not getting into the first book, but page count actually comes into play, and-

Jon Pfeiffer:

Go ahead and send a draft to me, and I'll look at it for you.

Matthew Dicks:

I am a person who believes in immediate feedback, and to know what your score is at all times, so I actually have a crew of about eight readers right now, who read chapter-by-chapter. All my books I've ever written, I always have some beta readers who ... I don't wait until the book is done. All of my author friends think I'm nuts because I write a chapter and I send it.

Most of my author friends write a book, they put it in a drawer for six months and finally get the courage to show it to the one person who loves them the most. Whereas, I secretly want to write a book on the Internet and charge people to watch the writing process take place. Because I just think there's something beautiful in getting people to see it while it's being made, just to see the underbelly of what happens.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Which I don't want to leave the topic of the Internet for a second, because you did a TED Talk. What was the name of your TED Talk on Homework for Life? Was it called Homework for Life?

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah, that's the title of it. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Okay. I have one last question for you.

Matthew Dicks:

Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Where can people find you on the Internet?

Matthew Dicks:

Oh. Well, that's easy. MatthewDicks.com is basically where you can get everything. You can find me on social media at my name though, Matthew Dicks on Instagram, Matthew Dicks on Twitter. I'm easy to find. You Google my name. As my students have discovered, my 10-year-old students, they'll come in and say, "You have a YouTube channel." The other day, I heard my kids talking about me. Some kid came in and said, "He has 1,300 followers on his YouTube channel. He must be rich." I thought, "Kid, you do not know how YouTube works."

Jon Pfeiffer:

No. It's not enough to monetize it yet.

Matthew Dicks:

No, it is not, but you can find all my stuff, if you go to MatthewDicks.com, you can find everything from there.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Thank you very much.