My buddy John, a veteran cop, got kicked out of his house recently. He’s a tough guy, but I’ve never seen him so down in the mouth. Things don’t look good. His old lady just accepted a job on the [...]

I’m slowly introducing my daughter to the Disney movies of my youth. But it’s tough to get my hands on them all because of the dratted Disney Vault. You may know that Disney only sells their best [...]

My nephew recently asked me how The Flash got his super-speed powers. My answer: “Barry Allen was struck by lightning while standing in front of a shelf of chemicals. The combination of the [...]

When I was a teenager, I stood in a long line to watch the first Jurassic Park. I had just read the novel in one big gulp and I was dying to see real dinosaurs on the screen. I wasn’t alone. The [...]

A few years back I followed my buddy to a multilevel marketing event for a health supplements company. It was a big event, designed to bring curious seekers into the fold. Presenters talked up [...]

You can ramp up the intensity of the stories you tell when you insert one basic theme. My friend Michael Hauge revealed this to me recently. According to him, nearly all stories in the world [...]

My wife came across a story about a man who slipped a $1500 tip to a waitress at Denny’s. Why? He saw she was a struggling single mother. Plus he picked up the tab for 7 families to the tune of [...]

“Story sells…” “Your customers connect with stories, not features and benefits…” “Thou shalt not bore thy customers…” If you study sales copy, you’ve no doubt heard [...]

Walt Disney failed for years. Until he overcome a fatal weakness. First, he tried desperately to draw comic strips for newspapers. Rejected. Then he attempted to bluff his way into a job on a [...]

The 60 Second Sales Hook can ignite a timid prospect into action. Or it can freeze ‘em faster than the Ice Bucket Challenge – if you’re telling the wrong story. In a sec, I’ll give you a simple [...]

Ray Bradbury fumbled his early stories. They took him a long time and were boring to read. Until in his twenties he stumbled upon a “trick” that gave him an endless supply of story ideas … [...]

Wanna be happy in your work? Apparently, here’s the secret: Just do one thing well. That’s the message of Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism. When you pursue too many things at once, you burn out. [...]

In today’s hyper-connected cyber world, we’ve become “copy blind.”   People are reading so much copy… they tune out, go numb, and become blinded by the sheer number of ads they encounter day [...]

I’m six years old and everyone is staring at me. The whole class is restless. Mrs. Brown, at the back, nods her head in encouragement. I see Eric in the third row fidgeting in his seat. He’s [...]

The STORY Let me tell you about my first lesson in marketing. (It was painful.) See, when I was a kid, I wanted to be in pictures. The moving kind. And one windy day in Chicago, I got my shot: an [...]

The STORY When I was 19 years old – the age of a man’s sexual peak, I’m told – I watched a play about inappropriate touching. The play unfolded during a religious retreat meant to mold young [...]

Want to engage your audience with story — but without breaking a sweat? We talked about the extreme short story, the parable. Parables make storytelling easy because you don’t need any [...]

You should always be clear in your marketing, right? Not so, my friend. Sometimes you want to throw a little confusion into the mix when you tell a sales story. Hollywood knows how it’s done. The [...]

The STORY After Steve Jobs got canned from Apple in the late 1980s, he was licking his wounds, deciding what to sink his fortune in. After buying a small computer division from Lucasfilm (called [...]

Last column I reprinted the Wall Street Journal’s classic “Two Young Men” story and talked about the power of parables. Brief, punchy stories. Short on plot but long on meaning. Another lesson to [...]

The STORY Last column I proposed you write a book to sell your message. I admit: that’s a lot of work. So today let’s be lazy. How does a couple of paragraphs strike ya? Very short stories – [...]

Let’s take a virtual walk-n-talk, eh? I have a little exercise I think you’ll like. It’s about how you can really connect with the people you’re trying to reach. But first, I’d like to tell you [...]