 Howdy, so I'm going to share a couple of things before I get deep into my topic. This here, GoDogGo, which is actually a Dr. Seuss book, this was my favorite children's book. Now, I'm going to own up to this because I don't care. Not only was this my favorite children's book when I was a child, but it was my favorite children's book into my early teens. I don't know why it was just something about it, maybe because I like dogs, you know, all these dogs in here, but this was one of my favorite children's stories. This here is Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. If you don't know who Guy Kawasaki is, you need to go and look it up. The guy's written tons of books. He was basically the guy who helped Apple become what it was because he knew marketing and all this other kind of stuff. Anyhow, this is a brilliant guy. I hold this up because, one, this is an autographed copy of it. Stupid lighting. Anyway, I got an autographed copy of it and I'm in the book. It's hard to see, but I'm kind of, well I'm in one of these, somewhere here, because I helped to edit the book, which was really a lot of fun. Now, I'm talking about both of these because the first one I told you was a children's story. The second one wasn't really a story and yet it's told in story form. You know, most of the time when you're writing about something that you know, you should be thinking about it as if you're telling a story. In this book, this is exactly what he did. He had all these different stories. He had ideas of things that he came up with, trying to make illusions to one other thing. He said, you know, like this is something like this, or can you imagine that someone did this and whatever, but it's told in a story form. And you know, I have people always asking me about, you know, how I write and I've done, you know, previous video on writing tips a couple of years ago. Actually, I guess it's 2013, we'll say a few years ago. When I talk about writing all the time, and I like to talk about blogging, and I tell people in person and I write about it in the blog, but I don't necessarily talk about it in the videos, how every day I see everything as a story. When things are going good, I see it as a story. When things are going bad, I capture it as a story. Oddly enough, it keeps things from getting too tense when things are bad, and when they're good, it's even funnier. You know, so I like that idea of being able to tell stories. And I think that if more people could figure out how to be conversational in their blog writing, that they would probably do a lot better. People would certainly react to it a lot better, and they'd get better comments because there is a way of breaking things down in a story. Think about it, you're sitting around on a Friday night with a bunch of friends. What's going on? People are telling stories. If you're meeting someone out for dinner and it's just the two of you, what are you doing? You're telling a story. You're always telling stories. Even in school, in between all that other stuff that you really didn't care about, sometimes you didn't care about, sometimes you did, there was a story. So we love to tell stories. We love to hear stories. Maybe there are some stories that we've heard way too often, like the stories my mother tells about me as a child that, okay, I've heard that story, mom. Do not tell the lady in the checkout the story about something I did at age two. It may be cute, but she doesn't care. At least I hope she doesn't because I'm standing right here. I don't need to have that story again. So I like to think that you can tell a story. Now, here's the thing about telling stories. A story is both as short or as long as it needs to be. So one of the things that I think of every once in a while is, like, I wrote this post a few weeks ago talking about 31 things people do wrong in blogging and social media. Not the exact title, but we'll just run with that for a while. And it was actually was 31 things. So I basically sat down and I wrote an outline for 31 things. 16 about blogging, 15 about social media. So I wrote this thing. And then I went in thinking that I was only gonna have a post about 1,000 words and ended up being over 4,600 words. Why? Because with each thing that I put down, I had a little story to tell. They weren't overly long stories because it had never been my intention to expound three or four pages worth on each one of these categories. But still, I thought of every single one of them as a story, as something personal, short personal because I just wanted to hit it and quit it. Okay, we just went James Brown, I don't know why. But I think of these things as stories and it makes it easier to tell. I did another video a long time ago where I was talking about speaking in public and how I never write speeches. And what I do instead is I write out an outline. I write up my points because I know what they are and then I can talk about them and I can expound on them because, in essence, I'm telling stories. Even if it's a teaching moment, if I'm talking about and this means nothing to most of y'all. If I'm talking about a healthcare finance thing, and I'm telling people how to research revenue codes and match them up with diagnosis codes so that they can get their bills paid. Well, there's a story in there. I mean, the way I'm telling it because this is something I've experienced. It's something that I've worked with other people in doing. So even though it's a teaching moment, like I said, it's also a story. So I think that a lot of writing has to do with mindset. And if your mindset is I don't know what to say, well, I'm betting you've told a story. Everybody I know tells a story. Even people who are shy as anything, once you get them talking, they can tell stories. They may not be the best at it, but they can tell a story. And you can tell a story as well. That's why I say, you know what, you might as well do videos. If you're gonna do a video no matter what you're talking about, do the video as a story of some sort. Anyway, that's what I got for you today. Tell a story. Write a story. Think about it as a story. Let me know your thoughts. Tell me a story. Bye.