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Learn to tell it the way he did
Steve Jobs was not a natural speaker. This book takes apart what he actually did on a stage and turns it into ten steps you can practise.
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01 The premise
No one is born able to do this, and Jobs was no exception
Steve Wozniak said his friend was forced to become an expert in marketing and communications because he knew very little about engineering. In 1987, filming his first television interview, Jobs looked anxious on set and admitted he felt like throwing up.
Payne is clear about what does not do the work. Confidence alone is not enough, because even the most confident speakers buckle under pressure. Knowledge alone is not enough either, because how much you know about a subject does not tend to move listeners.
What carried Jobs was passion for the thing he was selling, plus a decision to keep practising the one skill that mattered: connecting with an audience by sharing his vision as many times and in as many ways as possible. Payne compares it to learning to dance. Anyone can memorise a few steps. Only a few master rhythm.
You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.Steve Jobs, quoted by Selynna Payne
Memorise only your opening and your closing. Those are the two parts an audience keeps. Leave the middle as bullet points on a card so you can still improvise.
02 The spine
Every story you tell is doing one of three jobs
Payne names three purposes for storytelling: to teach, to inspire, and to influence. Some stories do one. Some do all three. The point is that you decide which one before you write anything.
Teaching means putting a big idea into common language and shared experience, so that a room of people from different backgrounds can meet on the same ground. Inspiring means giving listeners a narrative for a change they could make, so they act on it. Influencing goes further. The aim is that listeners do not leave the same as when they came in, and that your message becomes something they live by.
The 1984 Macintosh address shows the choice in action. Jobs told the story of IBM passing on xerography, then dismissing the mini-computer, then dismissing the personal computer. He cast IBM as the villain, Apple as the underdog who becomes the hero, and computer users as the innocent victims. The speech was not really about IBM. It was about who Apple was for.
It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.Steve Jobs, cited in Villafañe, 2014
Write the one sentence you want a listener repeating tomorrow. Then mark which of the three jobs it does. Payne’s test is that a key message contains a verb. If yours does not, you have written a topic, not a message.
03 Step 1
Write for the third of the room that already leans your way
Andy Paige, a stylist on the American channel TLC, said you need to find your one third. A third of the people you meet will never like you. A third will be indifferent. A third will be fierce supporters. Payne’s advice is to write for the last third and let the other two go.
You can spot them while you speak. They make direct contact, they gesture to show they are following, they ask questions or offer feedback. What they want in return is a sense of belonging, and once they have it they validate your message and make you feel steady on stage.
Apple did exactly this in 1997. The company was heading for a second profitless year and the board asked Jobs to return as CEO. The Think Different campaign cost $90 million and aimed at only three groups Apple had already won: home users, educators and students, and desktop publishers and designers. In April 1998 the company recorded its second consecutive profitable quarter.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.The Crazy Ones, narrated by Steve Jobs, cited in O’Brien, 2017
Answer Payne’s five audience questions in writing before you draft: what do they expect, how much do they already know, how do they feel about the topic, what fears might block them, and what is the room like.
04 Step 4
Reframe the problem before you sell the solution
When Jobs was splitting his time between Apple and Pixar, he asked two questions in meetings. To one person: what isn’t working at Pixar. To another: what is working at Pixar. He alternated between them until he had a real picture of the company.
Payne tells a story about a couple swimming at a lake. They rescue a struggling child, then another, then two more, until the husband asks how long they are going to keep rescuing children. They walk along the lake to the highest point and find a damaged boat wedged between two rocks, with children jumping overboard one by one. Same problem, different place to stand, completely different solution.
Framing is not decoration. In a study of cancer patients, the same operation was described two ways. Told that the one-month survival rate of surgery was 90%, 84% of patients opted in. Told there was a 10% chance of death in the month after surgery, only 50% did. The numbers were identical. The sentence was not.
If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.Albert Einstein, cited in Sturt & Nordstrom, 2013
Write your problem twice, once as a loss and once as a gain. Then list as many “How might we” questions as you can, and keep only the three most compelling.
05 Step 5
An anecdote carries what a statistic cannot
An anecdote is a short account of a real incident with a practical purpose. It is not a full story with a premise, a plot and several characters. It is a piece of your life, told because it earns its place.
In one study, people were given a Save the Children pamphlet. One version had facts and figures only. The other added a story about children facing malnutrition alongside the same facts. Everyone was handed $5 and asked whether they would donate. Those who read the story gave nearly twice as much, $2.38 against $1.43.
The 2005 Stanford address was built from three anecdotes: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. Each was short, each ended somewhere, and each left the graduates with a takeaway. Payne’s method for building one is to cut rather than add. Lead with the action instead of the backstory, ask “so what?” after every sentence and delete the ones that are not building, keep it succinct, and give it a clear resolution.
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.Nassim Nicholas Taleb, quoted by Selynna Payne
Before you tell a personal story, run Payne’s three checks. Does it carry a message for them. Are you far enough past it to tell it without distress. If other people appear in it, do you have their permission.
06 Step 6
Build the ask into the story instead of bolting it on
The iPod launch in 2001 was one long sales pitch, and it did not feel like one. Jobs had to move people from a $50 CD player to a $399 device, so he did not open with the device.
He opened with music, and how it belongs to everyone. Then his tone changed and he named a problem dressed as an opportunity: a very large market with no leader in it. Then came the features, five gigabytes, a thousand songs, ten hours of battery, syncing with iTunes on a Mac, which is how he justified the price. Then the demonstration, scrolling the wheel, playing Bob Marley and the Beatles, so the room could picture owning one. At the end he told everyone present they were going home with an iPod loaded with his twenty favourite songs.
Payne’s point is that nobody wants to be told what to do. The audience should feel the decision was theirs. She sorts listeners into four groups and shapes the ask for whoever is in front of you: doers want a task, suppliers want something worth passing on, innovators want an idea they can modify, and influencers want to be equipped to persuade other people.
And because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market, all around the world. It knows no boundaries. But interestingly enough, in this whole new digital music revolution, there is no market leader.Steve Jobs at the iPod launch, cited in Guglielmo, 2021
Take your closing ask and rewrite it as a scene the listener is already standing in. If it still reads like “buy now” or “sign up”, it is sitting outside the story rather than inside it.
07 Step 7
Charisma was measured, and it turned out to be teachable
Researchers ran computer analysis on two Jobs product launches, the iPhone 4 in 2010 and the iPad 2 in 2011, studying the introduction, the market analysis, the product features, the demonstration and the closing remarks.
They found a high pitch, high enough that it would usually be recorded in a female speaker, and classified as high variable, meaning he shifted between high and low registers. He projected, speaking loudly and passionately for emphasis. He spoke relatively fast but took many pauses and enunciated well, and his speeches ran shorter than a typical talk. He used emphatic words at a rate of 5.4 a minute, expressions like “That’s amaaaazing!” and “Very very bad.”
Their conclusion was that charisma is a teachable skill, at least where voice control is concerned. A high pitch is not the problem and neither is volume. Monotony is. Payne’s exercises follow from that: massage the jaw and lower it while making a sound, run two-octave scales, hold a pencil in your teeth and read aloud, bring the voice to the front of the mouth, and use pauses in place of filler words.
Record two minutes of your talk and listen for two things only. Does your pitch move, and do your sentences rise at the end like questions. When Pearson asked 700 managers about that rise, 85% read it as a sign of insecurity.
08 The whole book
Ten steps, three jobs, one storyteller
The ten steps are scaffolding. What holds a talk up is deciding which job the story is doing before you write a line of it.
Teach
Put a big idea into shared language so a mixed room can meet on common ground. Give the story a theme, a character they can stand inside, and words they actually use.
Inspire
Give listeners a narrative for a change they could make. Help them imagine it, show it has been done against the odds, then hand them one simple challenge.
Influence
Aim at transformation rather than a single decision. Share the vision, be honest about your own strengths and weaknesses, and speak to values you genuinely share.
Jobs closed at Stanford with a line he had borrowed from the back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog: stay hungry, stay foolish. For a speaker it means staying unsatisfied with the skill you have, and staying willing to look like a student.
Adapted from How to Tell Your Story Like Steve Jobs
Selynna Payne · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 82 cited sources in the source edition