This is my 5 year story about becoming a far better storyteller.

Goal: Tell a story as well as Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It started with me podcasting to share stories with friends. Every time I spoke, however, I sounded lifeless like a stressed-out amateur.

Why?

I tracked down great storytellers to learn from them.

Unexpectedly, even the best could only articulate *some* of the ingredients that make them great.

There was something intangible underneath their explanations that they couldn’t address when pressed.

That sounded like a treasure hunt to me:

Collect the hidden ingredients needed to tell a remarkable story charismatically.

I would finally become a storyteller.

Because these ingredients were hard to identify, I used the process of “learning by inversion.”

This is where you learn how something works by studying its bad examples. Then you do the opposite of them.

So I watched a lot of bad storytellers on YouTube.

Thanks, TED.

It became clear that there are two ways to tell a story:

1. In whatever way suddenly comes to mind
2. *Strategically*