How to turn 20 years into... just a few minutes??

“I’m buried for the next few weeks, so I need your help with Carey and Christine’s talk,” Brian Miller (my partner-in-crime) tells me. 

“Sure. What’s the talk about?”

“How they took down the multi-billion dollar greyhound industry. By themselves.”

🤯

Christine Dorchak was hit by a train and her dog saved her life. 

That’s what made her decide to save the lives of thousands of dogs. 

Carey Theil was committed to the same cause. 

And they did it. 

It only took them… 

20 years.

So I meet them, and they start trying to tell me how they actually did it. It’s anything but simple: 

There were false starts. 

There was them meeting and falling in love. 

There was advice and help from unexpected places. 

There’s who they were (Carey was a chess prodigy; Christine was a firebrand activist). 

There’s some of the crazy things they’ve done (Christine became a lawyer when they realised they couldn’t afford one!). 

As they tell me their tale, I despair we’ll ever get that into a short talk. 

“Well, that’s why we wrote a whole book about what happened…” Carey says. 

I ask Brian, 

“So, how committed are we to keeping this around 12 mins?”

“Very. Most people won’t watch anything longer. If it’s 13 it might as well be 3 hours.”

But it turns out we’re wrong. 

The final talk is just over 14 mins… which hasn’t stopped 157,000 people from watching it since it came out a month ago. 

Even though I know the script word for word, it still makes me tear up. 

So… how did we do it? 

Every moment a lifetime 

One of the most important storytelling techniques is to avoid timelines (“When I was 10, I did this… then a few years later it happened again… then after that…) and, instead, pick one moment in a time that can stand for all the rest. 

My favourite example is this: 

• If you want to tell me about how crazy your family is, don’t tell me about your whole childhood; tell me about one Christmas dinner

But Carey and Christine couldn’t do that. Picking just one moment in time would not do their journey justice, and it would also not work: there were too many different things to represent. We’d have to lie or twist the truth to make the whole thing feel thematically unified–so we didn’t. 

What we did instead was find specific moments that could represent what was going at the time: 

• An activist anecdote to show their early days (and display their personalities) 

• Their first major legislative defeat 

• Christine finding out about a dog caged in China (one of their main inspirations to keep fighting) 

• A long shot attempt when it looked like they’d never pull it off

Each moment represents years of struggle, a different challenge, or it shows something about who they are. 

Could we have done that with less show, and more tell? Sure. That would’ve cut down the time substantially. But it wouldn’t be engaging. It wouldn’t be memorable. And it definitely wouldn’t have been inspiring. 

So it doesn’t matter how many years you’re trying to cover, the way to tell a better story is still the same: find a moment that serves as an example of what you want your audience to see, and let that show them how everything else was. 

Maybe you just need one, maybe it will take a few. 

But that’s how you change the world… 

One story at a time 🤘

-Francisco 

PS. You can watch Carey and Christine's talk on “How to be an activist who creates real change” here.

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Getting clarity through your story to stand out from all the other coaches, speakers and entrepreneurs out there 

2. If you dream of speaking on the Red Dot, take this Scorecard and instantly discover how likely your idea is to be accepted by a TED-style organizing committee

3. If you (or your team) got any storytelling challenges, I’m sure there’s something we can do together ;-)

Thanks for reading! Reply any time.