to maintain entertainment throughout it I’m always thinking: stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor. Those are sort of the four Mount Rushmore ways to maintain interest regardless of what you’re doing whether you’re telling a story like what I’ve just done or I’m working with a marketing team on a deck that they’re building and it is completely absent of stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor which is why nobody ever pays attention to any anything anyone ever does because instead of being entertaining we’re trying to be informative when informative is important but only if people are actually listening.
And that first part - how are we going to get people to listen - is the one nobody ever pays any attention to. They somehow think that their information is going to be interesting to people. The world is filled with information - the internet exists - you’re competing against every bit of information that has ever existed on the planet so you’d better give me a reason to listen.
So I’m always thinking of that throughout that story constantly asking myself: do I have stakes, is there a suspense,. am I preparing for a surprise, and is there a place where I can drop in some humor.
