Story, Teach, Tool
Or: How to influence people in the digital age.
Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.
Most weeks, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.
This week I’m going deep on a single topic that’s helped me a ton over the last six years. In trying to make what follows as clear as possible, I wrote and edited for far longer and am posting this edition of TWPL much later than I would like. C’est la vie.
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Let’s nerd out on craft today.
A story can be as idiosyncratic as the person writing it, sure, but most stories follow a formula, or, more generously, a guiding template of sorts that’s particular to the platform on which the story appears.
A hard news story tends to follow an inverted-pyramid structure.
A magazine feature tends to be structured around a Great Lead Anecdote into Revealing Nut Graf into Supporting Anecdotes and Scenes.
A movie tends to follow a three-act structure.
Most books, if they’re one continuous narrative, and regardless of whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, tend to follow The Path from Ignorance to Enlightenment: where the protagonist starts the story ignorant of some truth of the human condition and ends the story understanding that truth and acting on it in some way.
I’ve written about a lot of the above in TWPL. I’ve never talked about the framework which I believe influences and persuades others:
Story, Teach, Tool.
The first thing to say about Story, Teach, Tool is that it can exist on more than one platform. It works well for keynote addresses. It works well when you need to get people to see your rhetorical position, whether in a board meeting or in a written essay.
It works particularly well here, when writing a newsletter.
Oh no! Is this a newsletter edition about writing newsletters?
No, not at all. Because here’s the reality, friend. Institutions have failed us, especially the literary ones that supported our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Newspapers and magazines will not hold aloft our writing careers. Half of Hollywood’s writers are now unemployed. Academia pays crap: Wages for liberal arts professors have been stagnant for well more than a decade. Book publishing has always been an Every Writer for Himself game.
These trend lines will not reverse either. With institutions failing us we have entered the Era of the Individual. Now it’s about holding people’s attention: on your social media channel, your YouTube page, within your own newsletter.
I believe you hold people’s attention by helping them.
And you help them by relying on the Story, Teach, Tool framework.
Let’s build up from the basics: Why help others?
Because when you help others, they like and trust you. When they like and trust you, they’ll be more likely to buy something from you: a book you’ve written, a subscription to your writing you’re offering, some merchandise you’re selling on your YouTube page, some service you offer.
You may say, I didn’t get into writing so I could get into sales.
Fine, starve.
Or, to put it more diplomatically: I didn’t get into writing so I could get into sales either, but we must deal with the world as it is (see above re: institutions). The writer in the 21st Century must do many different things: Pursue her creative and literary dreams and also be a marketer, a saleswoman, above all an entrepreneur. If that sounds exhausting, it is. It’s also how writers’ lives functioned from pretty much the 17th- through early 20th-centuries, until the post-World War II boom allowed writers for roughly 50 years a more lucrative and leisurely and institution-reliant life.
(For a great comparison of how the writers of today mirror in their day-to-day lives the writers of, say, the 19th Century, read Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. The post-World War II boom was such an aberration. Another great book that takes an even longer view of how creatives have thrived—Michelangelo’s entrepreneurial success is a case study—is Jeff Goins’ Real Artists Don’t Starve.)
What you’ll have to figure out is how you, as a writer, will help others without throwing up in your mouth as you do it.
My advice?
Rely on what you already know.
There’s some aspect of your skillset that can be helpful to others. Maybe you’re a writer and editor who can edit other people’s work. Maybe you’re a health reporter who knows how to guide people through a workout that’ll help them lose weight. Maybe you just want to pass on the wisdom you’ve accumulated across your multi-decade career.
Whatever it is, you have some knowledge that’ll be useful to others, helpful to others, if they knew it, too.
How you relay that helpful information and thereby build influence is via Story, Teach, Tool.
It’s pretty simple.
At the heart of Story, Teach, Tool is the lesson you want to relay, the bit of knowledge you want to pass on. That knowledge is the Teach in Story, Teach, Tool.
Here’s the catch, though: People don’t want to learn lessons. Lessons are boring. Lessons are homework. So, before you give the audience the lesson you must give them a story.
People love stories. Yours will complement or illustrate the lesson.
So the progression here is the Story you tell that illustrates the lesson or the Teachable moment you want to relay.
You’re not done, though. It’s not enough to tell the audience a story and then teach them something. You have to show the audience how they can implement what they’ve learned in their day to day lives. That implementation is the Tool of Story, Teach, Tool.
Let’s use an example.
Let’s say you’re that health writer wanting to help others lose weight through a better exercise routine.
You first tell some Story in your newsletter about how you yourself couldn’t shed weight until you came across a HIIT workout that emphasized sprinting over jogging. Suddenly, the extra pounds fell off.
You then share (or Teach) the particulars of that HIIT workout with your audience: five 50-yard sprints and three hill or stair climbs (or whatever the workout is).
To overcome your readers’ doubts that your workout can benefit them, too—they’ve been bamboozled by exercise or diet plans in the past—you show them the Tools they’ll need to succeed. Your HIIT workout isn’t an hour’s worth of running five days a week. No! In 20 minutes a day, three times a week, they’ll get even better results than what they’ve found jogging. And: all they’ll need is a stretch of asphalt or a treadmill at a gym that can go up to 10 miles an hour. Plus, if they wake up a half-hour earlier and get their HIIT workout in before work, they’ll have an endorphin high until noon.
The wake-up-early bit and the 20-minutes-a-day, three-days-a-week, on the stretch or asphalt or on the treadmill at the gym—all that stuff is the Tools they’ll need to succeed.
That’s Story, Teach, Tool: the story into the teachable lesson into the tools to implement the lesson.
Why should you care?
Story, Teach, Tool builds influence with others: In your social media posts, in your newsletter, whatever.
Just writing that last sentence makes me throw up a bit in my mouth: build influence with others via social media.
But here’s the truth: You need influence these days because no one is coming to save you. Or me. Institutions have, again, failed us. We have to find ways as writers to help ourselves so that we can also do the creative work we love. Story, Teach, Tool helps us by helping others.
When you help others, they’re more likely to buy something from you.
Again, that something could be some book you’ve written. Could be your subscription on Substack. Could be, if you’re that health reporter, an online community you create where for $100 a month you hold other newbie HIIT runners accountable. And why would that health reporter create that community? Because Women’s Health pays like shit these days and our health reporter has a new book she wants to write and she has two kids to put through school. Fifty newbie HIIT runners at $100 a month is $60,000 a year for our health writer, $60,000 for hosting a forum on a topic she knows a lot about, and loves to talk about, and takes far less time than reporting a Women’s Health piece for shit pay.
Story, Teach, Tool gives our health writer influence. Influence leads to people buying from her. Buying leads to a modicum of freedom for our health writer.
To be clear: I didn’t invent Story, Teach, Tool. I learned it from Tony Robbins when I took a course of his on entrepreneurship about a decade ago. Story, Teach, Tool, he said in that course, had been one of the hallmarks of his success as a speaker and entrepreneur.
I myself have mixed feelings about Tony Robbins, but Story, Teach, Tool in the last six years I’ve been my own boss has been just as foundational to my own entrepreneurial ventures. Any success I’ve had there has allowed me to write the books I want, the magazine pieces I want, without worrying about how to support my family of six.
You may still have institutional support as a writer. May it always be there for you. The trend line, however, is not in your favor.
When you enter the Era or the Individual, willingly or otherwise, know that you have tools at your disposal.
You have Story, Teach, Tool.
You’ll actually have more than that, too. I’ll have more to say on this topic next week—a new offer for you, too.
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Then, when you’re hungry for a longer read, please consider buying one of my books. Publisher’s Weekly says of the latter you’ll be “riveted from the first page to the last.” The New York Times says, “The richness of Kix’s dramatis personae simply staggers.” The book was named to Amazon’s and The New York Times’ and Kirkus‘ respective Best Books of 2023 lists. To the extent that matters to you.
Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.