A 40 billion dollar t-shirt

There’s a great lesson in storytelling from a talk Seth Godin made in 2013 at a conference named Inbound.

As he opens the talk:

We are right at the cusp of something huge.

I need to start by making an announcement, which is… Professional wrestling is fake.

Wait, what are we on the cusp of? But he goes into a thread about professional wrestling.

Then he does it again.

Inside this box is a t-shirt that at one point was worth 40 billion dollars. And I keep it there as a reminder to myself about what happens when you don’t see.

In 1991, I had access to the internet. I was using to work on cover stories…

Hold on. How was it worth 40 billion dollars!?

Then he does it again.

I was asked to bring: What’s your number one marketing shortcut?

But before I tell you that…

Seth is a wonderful writer and orator. You can learn a lot from watching him and this entire talk. But there’s a key storytelling principle he shows off brilliantly in just the first 5 minutes:

Keep your audience curious. Keep presenting mysteries. You’ll have our attention - we love discovering what happens next.

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