Best of Storytelling: Donald Miller

20:29Don Miller:So we've got a hero who wants something and has a problem. What's the third element?

20:35Matt Dicks:Third thing we want to do is we want to position ourselves as the guide, not the hero. The customer is the hero in the story. We are the guide. So the guide is Gandalf. The guide is Obi-Wan Kenobi. The guide is Yoda. The guide is Mary Poppins. The guide is the character in the movie who has the wisdom and enlightenment to help the hero get what they want. The biggest mistake people make as they play the hero. You go back and you look at this recent campaign. Kamala Harris did three things wrong that I can think of from a messaging perspective. She didn't have a clear offer. Her offer was basically, I'm not Donald Trump.

21:06Matt Dicks:You try building a restaurant on, I'm not that burger down the street and see if it grows. People go, what do you serve? Well, I'm not that burger down the street. Well, do you have fries? Well, I'll tell you their fries stink. Well, can you tell me anything about yourself, please? And when we just bask in the resentment that we have toward our opponent, you're going to fail. You've got to have an offer that's really differentiated. Second, she offered way too many things. He offered make America great again, make America healthy again, make America safe again. He had sound bites that people could remember when they went to the polls.

21:35Matt Dicks:I don't know a single thing she offered. And then her tagline was, let's win this. What is this? So I can either let's win this or I can make America great again. You choose. I only say this to say the stakes are very high. And when you position yourself as the hero, the story is about you. When you position yourself as a guide, the story is about the customer and they want the story to be about them.

21:55Don Miller:In a lot of situations, let's say in the investment world, the problem is investment returns or some type of investment return, but there's actually a person who's also making the decision. How do you think about how to address the person or the hero in the story?

22:10Matt Dicks:So the investor is the hero. The person managing the money is the guide. And there are two things that the guide needs to do that if they do these things, the hero will automatically say, that's my guide. One is empathy. So there's a soundbite that the guide writes down or intuitively understands that they need to listen to the customer's problem. What has been your frustration with investment opportunities in the past? Well, I just never got a good return or they were never transparent or I was always losing sleep worrying about my money. At that point, when you hear a customer say that as the guide in their story, you want to stop and you actually want to spend a good bit of time there.

22:49Matt Dicks:You want to say, tell me about that. And then when they tell you about it, you want to say, that sounds very frustrating. And that actually isn't fair. In fact, I would say that's not right. You are empathizing with the pain that the customer has. And when you do that, they sense you care about me. Now, the second thing that you have to do after you empathize is you have to demonstrate competency. You have to say, all of my clients have had that problem and that frustration. And let me tell you how we delivered so they could never feel that pain again. So the guide is competent and caring. And those two go together to create you and my subconscious as the person that I'm going to do business with.

23:27Don Miller:So in that situation where, let's say it's a complex proposition, how do you decide what to focus on and what to let come in the background?

23:37Matt Dicks:You need what's called a brand script. So that's That's a soundbite on the character, a soundbite on the problem, a soundbite on the guide, a soundbite on the plan, a soundbite on the call to action, a soundbite on the success and failure. Those are the seven soundbites that you need. And when you're talking to an audience, if I'm running for president, I'm talking to the teacher's union, my character is going to want more pay and more respect as a teacher. Their problem is whatever that problem happens to be that the union doesn't like. So I'm going to tailor that brand script for that audience.

24:08Matt Dicks:If I'm talking to the general public, I'm going to try to find several problems, but I'm going to create a brand script for each one. Taxes are going to be one. The rising price of college is going to be another. So I'm going to pick my message, my brand script for each audience. So if I'm running for president, I've got an overall plot brand script, and then I've got what I would call subplots. The teacher subplot, the debt subplot, the religious liberties subplot, healthcare subplot, and I've written brand scripts for every single one of those. And then the key is to stay disciplined and repeat those sound bites over and over and over until the audience that I am talking to has them memorized.

24:49Matt Dicks:And when they have my talking points memorized, I'm going to smoke the competition. So I can't go into a room and just answer questions willy-nilly and show people how smart I am. I've got to give them sound bites to memorize. So that's the key. When it gets complex, you have more brand scripts.

25:04Don Miller:So you've got the hero who wants something, they've got a problem they're encountering, and you are the guide. What happens from there?

25:11Matt Dicks:Usually if it's a complex sales process, there's a three-step plan. And the three-step plan would be, let's use the example of an at-home chef. So let's go away from investments. If I'm talking to somebody who's an at-home chef and I say, hey, what do you do? They should start by saying, you know how most families don't eat together anymore? And when they do, they don't eat healthy. Yeah, I know exactly how that feels. So he's just stated a problem. Rather than saying, I'm an at-home chef, notice he didn't answer, I'm an at-home chef. He started with a problem. Then he says, I'm an at-home chef.

25:41Matt Dicks:Now he's just positioned himself as the solution to the problem. And then he gives you a three-step plan. Working with me is very easy. I usually do an intake session. I find out about your dietary restrictions, what your favorite foods are. That's step one. Step two is I cook one meal for you and your family. Step three, if you like it, we enter into a retainer. Would you like to have an intake session. So I just gave them a three-step plan, and then I invited them to take the first step. I broke it down into baby steps so it's all really easy. And there's also no cognitive dissonance. When you're selling something that's complicated, for instance, you coming into my house and cooking meals, I don't know how this is going to work.

26:16Matt Dicks:I don't know if you're going to smell up the kitchen. I don't know if I'm going to like the food. I don't know if I'm going to like you. I don't know if I want you around my house. All that is subconscious, but it's cognitive dissonance. There's something that's not right here. But when I actually give you baby steps, we can do an intake session. I'll cook one meal. I just made it really, really safe to take the first two steps. And if we do take those first two steps, we're much more likely to take the third and fourth and do business together. What's the next step in the story? The next step is calling people to action.

26:44Matt Dicks:It's asking for the money. And I'm not somebody who likes asking for the money. It is not natural for me. But I learned to do it a different way. I was doing messaging for an archaeological dig, the city of David. And I was leaving Israel, and in the airport in Tel Aviv, they had a watch kiosk. They were selling watches. And I told myself after my company passed 10 million, I'd buy myself my first nice watch. So I'm there. It's been two years. I still haven't bought the watch. And I'm holding a watch in my hand. And the guy says, tell me why you want this watch. I said, well, my company passed a certain point, blah, blah, blah.

27:13Matt Dicks:He said, can I box this up for you? I said, no. I said, let me think about it. I hand him back the watch. And he gave the best answer I've ever heard that changed my life. He said, Don, do you like that watch? I said, yes, I like that watch. He said, can you afford this watch? I said, yeah, I can afford this watch. He said, you have a good reason to buy it. Your company passed a certain point. He said, I think the right decision is for you to buy this watch. Would you like for me to box it up for you? And I said, yes. I think he also had a pocket watch that he was swinging and brainwashing me.

27:40Matt Dicks:But I realized what he did that was so different was he gave me permission to do what I already wanted to do. And he also clarified the offer and made sense of it for me. He came back and said, your company passed a certain point, you have the money, and you like the watch. This is, in fact, a good decision. Because what I was wondering is, is this a good decision? And as soon as he laid it out and said, this is why it's a good decision. And by the way, as the expert, let me tell you this is a good decision. I did what I wanted to do, which was buy the watch. And I still have that watch to this day.

28:09Matt Dicks:I'll give it to my kids. So I've learned that if I'm working with somebody on a consulting gig and I say, okay, your tagline is really bad. Your messaging is really not very clear. We can get on the schedule together and you can't afford my services. Yeah, I think that we're going to see a significant revenue increase if we work together. I believe this is the right decision. Let's see if we can make it work. So that I believe this is the right decision for you is the key line. So you want to call them to action. There's two more things that you want to do. You want to sound by saying what their life will look like if they do business with you, which should be what we call in screenwriting, the climactic scene.

28:44Matt Dicks:And there should be a foreshadowing of the awful, terrible, horrible thing that will happen to you if you don't. You are going to keep trying to make meals. They're going to taste terrible. Your family's not going to eat together. You're never going to connect because you can't sit around the table because you're constantly doing dishes or whatever. And twice a month, if you hire me, you won't. By the way, if you do hire me, you're going to connect with each other. You're going to actually have time to talk. You're going to eat really healthy, great tasting food at least twice a month. So I've just laid out what's called the stakes, the vision of a better future and the vision of a worse future dependent on whether or not you do business.

29:18Matt Dicks:So those seven soundbites that I described make up a brand script. And then once you come up with your brand script, you actually want to repeat those soundbites over and over in everything you do. In your marketing, your messaging, some of them on your business card, on the side, on the wall of your business, in your proposal, in your talking points and keynote presentations. You come up with a campaign and then you repeat the same words over and over until you're blue in the face.

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30:25Don Miller:That's why customers call it miraculous, game-changing, and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at ridgeline.ai. And now, back to the show. I'd love you to take me through an example of a company you worked with all the way through the seven steps.

30:49Matt Dicks:I'll take everybody on this call through an example of their company because storybrand.ai, it's actually free. You answer, I think, five questions about your business, and it gives you the seven soundbites. And then you can revise each of the soundbites if you don't like them. So you just go there and type in your own stuff. And it'll also give you a tagline, not unlike Kids Love Aquariums. It gives you four to choose from and four different categories of taglines. There's one that's called the call to action tagline that I almost always prefer. So I just want to tell everybody there's four. But storybrand.ai will do that for you.

31:21Matt Dicks:Let me give you one for storybrand.ai. The way that you were talking about your products is confusing and you're unable to connect with customers. So our character wants to use clear messaging, but their problem is their message is confusing. So we've already got the first two soundbites right there. I have studied messaging for about 30 years now and have a knack and a system for being able to help you clarify your message. I know how painful it is to sit there looking at a blank cursor blinking on a screen and not know what to say. So that's empathy and authority. Now I position myself as a guide.

31:52Matt Dicks:The way you actually clarify your message, you go to storybrand.ai, you answer a few questions about your business, and it spits out the sound bites for you. That's the three-step plan. The call to action is, if you would like a clear message and you're tired of confusing customers, the right decision is to just go storybrand.ai and use it. And then the success and failure is, if you go to storybrand.ai, about seven minutes from now, you can be looking at a crystal clear message and it costs you nothing. And if you don't go to storybrand.ai, two things are going to happen. One is you're going to continue confusing customers and your competitor is going to go there and they're going to smoke you in the market.

32:27Matt Dicks:So that's success and failure. So forgive the infomercial sales pitch, but that would be a good example off the top of my head. And by the way, storyband.ai would have done that equally as effectively in about half the time that it took me to answer that question.

32:39Don Miller:How do you think about the science compared to the art of coming up with that messaging?

32:45Matt Dicks:There is some intuitive ability to it. I've written, gosh, 13, 14 books now. I don't know how many thousands of hours that I've spent trying to figure out the next sentence. So that has done something in my brain that is just different. And then it's an age-old debate. Are you channeling something or is it coming from your subconscious? The rest of it though is science. And by science, I mean, you want to start every sales letter with the problem. And then you want to position the product as a solution to the problem. So for storyband.ai, I wrote over 120 pages of single space rules behind the scenes that always start with the problem, always make it less than 12 words, always do this.

33:19Matt Dicks:So I think that without the science, the art doesn't work. I remember I played tennis in high school. And back there at my alma mater, Alvin Community College, home of the Fighting Dolphins, I played with the tennis team. I got to be very clear in case I'm fact-checked. I was not on the tennis team because I wasn't good. But I remember the tennis coach saying to me, you're really good. I wish you would have learned the proper form because that should come first. You should know the physics of the court. You should know to bend your knees. You should know to stay on the balls of your feet. You should know that you need to get down when you hit a backhand.

33:53Matt Dicks:You don't know any of that stuff. So your tennis is very, very limited. You're going to be able to beat some amateurs, but you'll never be able to beat anybody who learned from the very beginning the actual form. And then once you understand the form, you can play with it and get really artistic and creative within the form.

34:11Don Miller:When you get to that last step, the commitment, when a product or service has a long sales cycle. How do you think about applying the methodology to getting that commitment?

34:22Matt Dicks:Well, I'll share one bit of it, and that is trust equals value over time. One of the most important things if there's a long sales cycle is that you're sending really helpful, valuable information to whoever's considering that every week. People will forget about you very quickly. So the most important thing in a long sales cycle is certainly give them the information they need to make the right decision, but stay familiar. Because the more times they see you, interact with you, the higher the trust is. I remember when I dated my wonderful wife, who's a gift and somebody I don't deserve. I dated her.

34:58Matt Dicks:I moved to DC to get to know her better and to start dating. After a few months, I was like, this is the woman I'm going to marry. She's great. She sat me down one day and she said, Don, you are a quality time guy. And I thought, okay, I think that might be a compliment, but I'm not sure. What are you saying? She goes, well, you just get to know people really fast. You make decisions very quickly. They tend to be good decisions. You trust people very quickly. You have a strong intuition about who is worth spending time with and who isn't, and you can do that quickly. And I said, well, that's wonderful.

35:27Matt Dicks:Thank you. Yeah, that's a compliment. She goes, I'm not a quality time girl. I am a quantity time girl. And I said, what are you saying? She goes, this is going to take you a minute. I need to spend a lot of time with you in random situations. I need you to meet my friends, my family. I need to see how you deal with conflict. Just hold your horses. We're going to be dating a while, is what she said to me. I said, are you breaking up with you? She said, no, no, no, please, please. I'm not breaking up with you. I need quantity time. And I gave her the quantity time and now we're married. I went back and looked at my sales funnel data and discovered that 85 % of my customers bought from me long after the sales cycle was done.

36:02Matt Dicks:And they'd gone into what's called a nurture email sequence, just random information, random helpful stuff. Sometimes a year after the sales sequence was done, they finally trusted me and placed an order. And I realized, oh, human beings are not actually quality time people, by and large. They are quantity time people. So what that means is your emails going out to them, them seeing the occasional social media post, them seeing something on YouTube, them hearing about you at a cocktail party is very important to gain trust over time. So I would say that's the biggest advice I have for closing long-term sales.

36:33Matt Dicks:You got to get them the information they need. Your sales reps are continuing to meet with them, but they're also hearing about you in the background quite a bit.

36:40Don Miller:What have you learned that's improved the approach between the original Building a Story Brand and the new book coming out 2.0?

36:47Matt Dicks:We added a lot. We added the storybrand.ai component, and I added 10 ,000 words of stories of people who've succeeded, because I think people learn really well through stories. But we added one thing to the book that wasn't in the first book. We added the idea of a controlling idea. That every campaign needs a controlling idea. The controlling idea is the idea that I'm going to submit to as I write this story. For instance, the controlling idea for a rom-com might be a man meets the woman of his dreams and soon discovers she's engaged to his jerk brother. Okay, so if that's the rom-com, I have to then submit every single scene and every single word to that idea.

37:27Matt Dicks:Because if he's also trying to make the football team at Notre Dame, we have two different stories. And now I'm causing the audience to burn way too many calories trying to figure out what the story is about. And remember the rule number one that we talked about was don't make anybody think. So there needs to be a controlling idea around your company. There needs to be a controlling idea, I think, around every product. And then your messaging needs to submit to that controlling idea or else you will confuse people.

37:53Don Miller:What have been the stories that have most resonated that you added to 2.0?

37:59Matt Dicks:Gosh, the kids love aquarium story is in there that I've repeated over and over. I remember working with a woman who had a company called Gardenary. She helps mostly women build kitchen gardens. She's paid a million dollars a year in her consulting to help you figure out your garden. And the word gardenary is a made up word. And it came from her saying that she wanted to make gardening ordinary. So she put gardening and ordinary together and came with the word gardenary. And I said to her, Nicole, Nicole Burke, follow her on Instagram, by the way. She's amazing. Nobody has ever woken up in the morning and said, I want to make gardening ordinary.

38:34Matt Dicks:Not a single person. In fact, you might be the only one. Millions of people have woken up saying they want to start a garden. So why don't you buy startagarden.com and become the start a garden lady? Well, she did that. And what do you think happened? So there's just stories like that all over the place where what you're saying is great. It's just that people have to stop, pour a glass of whiskey, sit down, light a cigar and try and figure out what the heck you're talking about and nobody is doing it. Nobody. They need to understand it while they're driving down the road. And as soon as you say it, they need to go, I want to start a guard and I'm going to get that woman's book.

39:06Matt Dicks:And once you hit that, it's like striking oil. You put the straw on the ground and things start flowing.

39:11Don Miller:How about on the other side of it, of something that you really thought was going to resonate and then just didn't? That's mean.

39:19Matt Dicks:That's a mean question. I could give you a thousand examples, except I've chosen to forget them all. Things that aren't working. We had a tagline for StoryBrand.ai that was and still is, say it clearly. And we brought in some of our own certified community to sit in the conference room and test it the other day. And somebody said, what's it? I said, shut up. So I make as many, if not more mistakes than everybody listening to me right now.

39:46Don Miller:You know, a lot of our audience in the asset management industry, there are a lot of, say, products that are similar to one another. And when you have a structure of an industry that has a lot of products competing for the same customers, how do you think about that differentiation?

40:02Matt Dicks:You've got to find the one thing that differentiates you. In fact, it's one of the questions we ask in a lot of the prompts at StoryBrand.ai is what makes this different? And a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that because everybody's doing the same thing, they can't really talk about a differentiator. But the reality is as soon as you talk about something that everybody else is doing anyway, you have just differentiated yourself because nobody else is talking about it. It's the difference between reality and perception. If my competitors aren't talking about this thing and I start talking about it, it looks like I'm the only one who's actually doing it.

40:36Matt Dicks:And by the way, I deserve to win because they weren't smart enough to talk about it. They assumed the customer knew and the customer didn't know. So it's really important that you don't get caught up that we're all doing the same thing. The perception is if they're not talking about it, you are, that you're the only one doing it.

40:53Don Miller:How about a different situation where you only have one client? So it could be a single family office or it could be an endowment for one university. How do you think about the importance of describing your approach or what it is that you're doing to serve just that one client?

41:09Matt Dicks:That's a great question. And I'd love more time to think about it. So this is an off-the-cuff answer. When you're with that single customer, you want to continue to position yourself as the guide in their life. And you do that with statements of empathy and statements of competency. It's not good enough to understand what the problem is. You have to go back and say, hey, if I heard you correctly, this is what you're frustrated about, or this is what you're struggling with. That sounds terrible. You certainly shouldn't have to struggle with that. That statement right there positions you as the guide.

41:38Matt Dicks:You almost want to create a little checklist. And when you get back in the car, you hang up the phone, you look at the checklist, ago, did I make a statement of empathy? What's really beautiful about that is your heart will follow your mouth and you'll begin looking for places. And one of the family values that we have, we have four core values in my family, the three of us, me, Betsy, and Emmeline, three and a half year old. One of them is attunement. So we talk about all the time, the importance of being attuned. And what we mean by that is the importance of understanding what the people around us are feeling.

42:09Matt Dicks:Now imagine a three and a half year old who grows up in a home and we're constantly talking about attunement. Hey, what do you think our friend was thinking? You know, she's six months pregnant and she hasn't gotten over the nausea and it's really frustrating her. What do you think she's feeling? So if my daughter goes, that would be terrible. Emmeline, that is so great. That is such an attuned thing to say. Millers are attuned. We are setting her up to win. So I think the number one thing that we want to do with people is be attuned. And then you cannot lack competency. You can't. It is incredibly important that you know what you're doing and you know how to get people out of that.

42:44Matt Dicks:In fact, in screenplays, if the guide expresses that they don't know what they're doing in the area in which they're helping the hero, the story is ruined. If you watch the king's speech, Daniel is the drama teacher who's teaching the king how to not give a speech without stuttering. The king actually confronts him at one point. He said, you're a doctor, you're a PhD and you're not. We had you checked out. And he said, I never said I was a doctor. You assumed I was a doctor. Perhaps I shouldn't have let you assume that, but you assume that. I didn't. And by the way, if you don't think I have competency, I helped so many people after World War I with the challenge of post-traumatic stress become effective communicators.

43:21Matt Dicks:So don't you for a second question my credibility. That was an incredibly important scene because if he would have said, look, I'm sorry, I lied. The truth is I don't have any competency, but maybe we can do this together. That movie does not win an Academy Award. The customer is putting their faith in your competency and you've got to have it. and they also won't put their faith in your competency unless you actually care about them. So that empathy and authority are the two things, even if you just have one client, that you constantly want to be thinking about and demonstrating.

43:49Don Miller:I have to ask, what are the other three rules of the family?

43:53Matt Dicks:Grounded. So Millers are grounded. By the way, these are all aspirational. We're trying to become these things. We aren't them. We're grounded. So we're able to stay calm, and we know who we are, and we don't think too little of ourselves or too much of ourselves. That's what grounded means to us. We are helpful. We do not carry the burdens of the world on our shoulders, but if there's something that we see and we can help, we do it. We actually take action. And then the last one is fun. When there's an opportunity to have a good time, we're going to do it. Our mission statement is, in a world tempted by cynicism, we believe life can be beautiful.

44:28Matt Dicks:So we have an enemy. My house has an enemy. By the way, it's very important that every story has a villain. And the villain is cynicism. We just fight cynicism. And we point it out when we're being cynical about something. And then we have a tagline because memorization is everything. Life can be beautiful. So the mission statement tagline and the four core values are the story that we're inviting my daughter and ourselves into.

44:49Don Miller:The importance when you're working of businesses of putting themselves as the guide as opposed to the hero is this interesting concept because ultimately you're doing that so that you can win. How does that guide then not translate to the hero?

45:03Matt Dicks:Oh, yeah. I had a health scare and there was eight days when I thought I had one to five years to live and that health scare ended up not being credible. But during that eight days, what amazed me was all I cared about. I didn't care about writing another book. I didn't care about money. I cared about my wife's wellbeing, my friend's wellbeing, and my daughter's wellbeing. That's all I cared about. And that was very comforting to know that I'm not a complete jerk. But it also said that the meaning of life, I think, for all of us is really to play the guide, not the hero. And I remember this guy named David Gentiles.

45:34Matt Dicks:My second book was dedicated to him. He was like a father to me. And David was always poor. He worked at a church in Austin, Texas, at the end of his life that only had about 100 people attending it. His career got smaller and smaller the older he got. And he got more into the trenches with people and less famous. While that was happening in David's life, I was getting famous. My books were on the New York Times for like 40 weeks in a row. And I remember thinking, this isn't really fair because David is such a better human being than me, but nobody knows who he is. And there was a guilt there for me.

46:07Matt Dicks:So David died in an accident and they called me and said, will you deliver the eulogy? And I said, I would be honored. And I assumed there wouldn't be a whole lot of people at his funeral because he never wrote songs or wrote books. Instead, he was living at homeless shelters and people were living in his house and he was doing things that were incredibly sacrificial. He's guide-like. And they called and said, it's going to be at this church, the church that has a hundred people. And I said, great, I'll be there. I flew into town. And they called me and said, hey, we can't do it at the church.

46:33Matt Dicks:It turns out we're getting a lot of calls. We're going to do it at this other larger church. I said, great. I wrote down the address. They called back and they said, we actually have to do it at this mega church. And I said, okay, that's a big church. Then they called back and said, we can't do it indoors. We're going to do it at a baseball stadium. I show up to deliver the eulogy at this man's funeral, and there's probably 4 ,000 people in the audience. There are two news trucks with satellite dishes covering this man's funeral. And I realized that you can get famous playing the hero, but you get loved and respected by playing the guide.

47:05Matt Dicks:I would submit that that is the actual point of life, is to play the hero so that you can figure out how to be the guide and help other people win in their life. And I remember interviewing Pete Carroll. I interviewed him for a book once and he was coach of the Seahawks. He had yet to win a Super Bowl, but he'd won a couple of national championships at USC. And I asked him, was there a point early on when you felt like you were special? And most people say, no, they're trying to be humble. Pete said, oh yeah, yeah. I knew I was special. I said, really? He goes, yeah. I was a scrawny kid, but I was really good at athletics and I knew I was bigger than my body.

47:37Matt Dicks:I knew that I had more potential than my body was giving me. And he said, Don, but the reality is I had the luxury of succeeding early. I said, that's an interesting thing to say. What do you mean the luxury of succeeding early? He said, well, when I succeeded in athletics, I had the luxury of doing that early because I realized it doesn't mean anything. It's ultimately not fulfilling. In fact, there's a diminishing return on success. And I said, that's fascinating. He said, yeah, you can get really depressed the more successful you get. And he said, what happened was I figured out that helping other people win was actually more satisfying than winning myself.

48:09Matt Dicks:And there's no diminishing return on helping somebody else. And I just thought that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. And it feels true in my life too.

48:18Don Miller:All right, Don, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of fun closing questions. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?

48:25Matt Dicks:I have a group of friends, guys, we call ourselves the Lions and we go fishing. We go fly fishing once a year, and then they all come to my house for the college national championships, about 15 of us. And there's some of them who live in Nashville, and some of them travel in sometimes. But my favorite thing to do is get together with those guys, smoke cigars, and listen to music. I have an Oswald's Mill audio system, and we sit around and listen to vinyl records and music. And it is absolutely my favorite thing to do. What was your first paid job? Popeye's Fried Chicken. I was the biscuit maker at Popeye's Fried Chicken.

48:58Matt Dicks:What'd you take out of it? I took out of it that life is extremely hard for a lot of people. I will never forget watching a guy who I really liked, older than me, probably 50-something, and I was 17, scraping the plates and eating the food as he was washing dishes. And I took from it. I'm really lucky. What's your biggest pet peeve? I think, this sounds so judgmental. I guess any pet peeve is judgmental. But a human being who is the pinnacle of God's creation, every human being is, who has no vision or ambition for their life. They don't want something. And I just think that's a wasted experience.

49:33Matt Dicks:You're not a wasted person. You're the pinnacle of God's creation. But you're wasting this. This is a really beautiful thing we get to do here. And you're wasting it. Pet peeve.

49:41Don Miller:Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?

49:45Matt Dicks:Blake Snyder passed away, sadly. I never got to meet him. But he wrote a book called Save the Cat that explains story and story structure for screenwriters. And that's been the most influential book and his teachings and thinking, and he's been the most influential. And then nobody has changed my life more than my daughter, Emmeline. She's three and a half. Nobody ever will. I really liked life before I met her, and life became very important to me after I met her. And who I was as a human became very important to me. My favorite role in life is a husband and father, but father is the most important one.

50:18Matt Dicks:I really like being a husband, but the father one is like, gosh, so much is dependent on you. People don't clarify their message, honestly, who cares? You're going to have less money. But if she doesn't have a good dad, there could be very bad endings in that story.

50:32Don Miller:What's the best advice you've ever received?

50:34Matt Dicks:Best advice I have ever received was about a book. When I was writing a book, I had a friend named Jeff Baldwin, who had just written a book. And he said, Don, nobody will care about your book as much as you do. And what he meant by that is do not trust an editor to fix it. You fix it. And when he said that, it applied to every aspect of my life. You can't outsource excellence. You got to do it yourself.

50:58Don Miller:What's a mystery that you wonder about?

51:01Matt Dicks:My faith is a faith of percentages and they fluctuate. For instance, if you say, do you believe in God? I say 80 % right now. Do you believe there's an afterlife? 72 % certain. And then you talk to me five minutes later, 73. It's just up and down. So, I mean, I had a health scare. I remember being in a cold plunge, crying my eyes out because I thought I was not going to get to watch my daughter grow up and that she was going to grow up without a dad. So I wondered a lot about near-death experiences, what the afterlife is like. Now, I'm 100 % certain there's a God. There's just no other explanation.

51:33Matt Dicks:Whether or not we get to meet him, I don't know. I'm 72 % sure at the point of this conversation. Why am I so important that God would want to meet me? I don't feel that important. Those are the things I spend a lot of time thinking about.

51:45Don Miller:What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?

51:50Matt Dicks:Resiliency. That the number one characteristic of the successful is not a skill or a trait or a philosophy. It's just the ability to get back up and keep going. And if you do that, you're going to make it to the top of that mountain if you just don't quit. I wish I learned that early on.

52:06Don Miller:Don, I have one more for you. What brings you the greatest joy?

52:09Matt Dicks:When my daughter loves me back, and she does. She does all the time. She clearly loves her mother more. I get up every morning, nine out of 10 days. I'm the one who goes into her room. I open the shades. I say, Emmaline, it's a beautiful day and you are a beautiful girl and I love you. And I can't believe we get to do today together. And she looks up to me with a big smile and she says, where's mama? So that's my life.

52:35Don Miller:Don, thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom about telling great stories. Ted, thank you for having me. It's an honor. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time. All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

53:09Don Miller:Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.