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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matthew Luhn
Read between
October 14 - November 27, 2025
Yes, we had created more movie hits in a row than Warner Brothers, Universal Studios, Paramount, and MGM. How did this happen? It was more than just great computer animation or character designs or color or music. It was because of great storytelling. Story is king at Pixar. Throughout the years—while working as a story guy on Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, UP, Cars, Ratatouille, Monsters University, and as a writer and story consultant at other companies—I’ve come to realize that great stories not only make for great novels, plays, movies, and television, but also for
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without a great story to create an emotional pull, the information will be forgotten by your customers, clients, or fellow employees at your next board meeting. Here’s the thing, when you deliver that same information to people with a story or event woven around it, people remember it. They actually retain more of the information. According to Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, facts are 22 times more likely to be remembered if they are part of a story. It even works with the driest of facts. Adding a story may seem like a subtle move, but it begins to change everything.
Great leaders and speakers use this technique of tension and release all the time. They know how to take an audience on a ride from the ordinary world, up to what things could be, back to the ordinary world, leading to an epic ending that seals the deal.
If you want to tell a story that is memorable—and moves people to act—you must take your audience on a roller-coaster ride of emotions.
Big or small, our decisions are made on the right side of our brain, which is triggered by our emotions. Yes, later on we’ll rationalize these decisions with the left side of our brain, deciding if we made a good choice or not, so it’s important that the product, solution, or idea has substance as well. And when a story is memorable and impactful, whoever is telling the story, whether the author of a novel, the actor on a screen, or the CEO of a company, a personal connection is made with that storyteller.
Research tells us that the attention span of the average person is eight seconds. You have eight seconds to convince people that you’ve got something worth hearing about before they zone out, tune out, or check out. Be it a pitch to investors, a company presentation, or an advertisement, if you can’t catch the attention of your audience within eight seconds, you’ve already lost.
You need to catch people with something unusual, unexpected, action-driven, or that raises a clear conflict.
A hook is not a story. It’s just a taste of what your story could be. In order to transform your hook into a story, you will need to create a logline, which contains the four elements that have been used in storytelling for thousands of years: 1.A hero 2.A goal 3.One or more obstacles (sometimes this involves a villain) 4.A transformation
When stories are done right, they can generate a powerful dose of empathy. What exactly is empathy? Empathy occurs the moment we imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes, adopting their point of view, which creates a personal connection.
Don’t overleverage yourself. Even though Toy Story was a wild success, if we spread ourselves too thin, too fast, we would risk losing it all. We needed to focus on making really good animated family films. Steve knew the best way to communicate this message to us was by sharing a story about characters facing change and learning a lesson. This is what great storytellers and great stories do.
The desire for love and belonging is one of the six universal themes that have been used in storytelling for thousands of years. The six themes: 1.love and belonging 2.safety and security 3.freedom and spontaneity 4.power and responsibility 5.fun and playfulness 6.awareness and understanding
We cannot relate to perfection. Allowing yourself and characters in your stories to be vulnerable to an audience creates empathy and authenticity. When sharing with others what your company is about, or your role within the company, or the products or solutions you provide, don’t forget to share the obstacles you have faced along with the successes. When people feel connected to your humanity, they can really begin to root for you.
Next time you give a presentation, lead a board meeting, or deliver a pitch, use personal anecdotes and reflections drawn from your own experiences that show you are vulnerable. CEOs and leaders and salespeople of all kinds often forget that this is what makes a great leader and/or hero. It’s not only about strength or raw talent but also being human and authentic. It’s not perfection that creates likability and authenticity, but instead, vulnerability and persistence.
It is worth repeating a thousand times that the key to creating authentic stories is not to be clever, but instead to be honest and share what you know and feel. Your life and personal experiences, and the way you relate to them are the best material you have when it comes to developing authentic experiences.
So you need to be vulnerable and honest to create authentic stories, but you must also exercise restraint when delivering your message. Sentimental not saccharine. If you hammer home the conclusion you want the audience to reach too overtly, your story will feel preachy or moralistic.
Let your audience discover the message on their own. “I want to give the audience a hint of a scene,” said Orson Welles. “No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion, and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”
Strive to create authentic stories, warts and all. Stories that are vulnerable and honest, with characters that are likable and relatable. Build a stronger relationship with your audience by inviting them to an experience, not a mission statement. Because in the end, people will forget what you said or what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
The very first written stories from ancient Sumeria, over four thousand years old, tell us about Gilgamesh, a man who fights evil, becomes corrupted by his greed and search for immortality, and eventually redeems himself. In these early stories we recognize the universal structure—beginning, middle, and end—but they also give us a hero, Gilgamesh, going through a transformation.
No matter our origins, we all see ourselves as the main character of our own life. It’s an important part of our human psyche. Just as we share the same set of organs, instincts, impulses, conflicts, and fears, we also all see ourselves on a personal journey through the beginning, middle, and end of our lives. No matter what culture or time in history we’re born into, we have always cast ourselves as the heroes, in our own stories; our own lives.
In fact, the ancient Greeks venerated great warriors as heroes no matter which side they fought on. Heroes are the vessel that we use to tell a story. The hero’s struggles and movements, and their point of view, reflect the egocentric reality of our own lives because we only truly witness life from our own perspective.
Your protagonists must be true to themselves or be on a journey to becoming true to themselves, or they will not be likable. One technique that screenwriters use to create likable heroes is setting up a “save the cat” moment at the very beginning of their story. “Saving the cat” is when you show a character performing an act of kindness for a lower status character.
When leaders give up on their dreams and goals, the audience begins to dislike them. You must communicate to your audience that your hero will keep fighting for what he or she believes in, till the bitter end. As Walt Disney said, “The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.”
Discovery often leads the hero to an epiphany. In UP, the hero, Carl, has his epiphany during the “crisis” in act 3, when all is lost and he chooses to look through his deceased wife’s book of memories. As he turns through the pages, he reflects on their wonderful life together. When he reaches the last page he discovers a handwritten note from his wife that reads: “Thanks for the adventure—now go have a new one! Love, Ellie.” This is Carl’s epiphany moment. He realizes that he has to let go of his wife in order to continue living. As a leader you must share epiphanies with your employees,
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People read, watch, and tell stories, not because they are enthralled with the outline or the story structure, but because they are invested in what will happen to the main character and other characters in the story. This is the true emotional juice of what drives a story. Without this juice, the audience will lose interest.
Business is about service. Good businesses exist to serve people well in the course of their lives, lifting them up to do their best and often boosting their livelihood. Instead of assuming that you are the hero, rescuing customers from a lesser existence, what if you cast your customer as the hero in your story? What if “saving the day” or “getting the treasure” wasn’t about you landing their business, but about them achieving what they want out of life? In sharing their own stories, companies forget that their products are not the real heroes. The customer is the hero. (One exception: when
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Your customers have goals too. They want to be healthier. They want to spend more time with their family. They want to make money, look good, drive a safer car. When you cast them as the hero, you put business in its proper place and respect the agency and authority of your audience.
Anything that stands in the way of a goal or has opposing values can be a villain. Villains don’t have to be mustache-twirling creeps. In the movie Inside Out, there is no traditional villain. Joy wants life to be happy, and it is only sadness that keeps her from it. Classic villains include Voldemort, Darth Vader, and the Wicked Witch of the West. Villains can be a group of people, an institution, or a government. An opposing force doesn’t even need a face. Many movies involve man against nature.
Archetypal characters (heralds, guardians, mentors, allies, tricksters, shapeshifters, shadows, etc.) show up often enough that we should look for ways to include them in our personal and professional stories.
The public may say they want more of the same, but they don’t always know what they want until you give it to them. Innovate before a grocery store clerk moans, “You guys aren’t making another buddy film?”
By allowing your employees to use their creative talents outside the company you will keep them happy and in return, they will bring that positive experience back to the office. Many top companies do this. Even if it creates competition for them in the marketplace, a good employee losing touch with their identity and passion is a far worse trade-off.
