The best starting point to find good stories is to look in the areas you're passionate about. Being excited about a topic allows you to explore it deeper than anybody else and your enthusiasm for the story can be felt on the viewer's side. If you care about the story you tell, your viewer is going to care about it as well. So let your curiosity be your guide.
1. YOUR LIFE AS A STORY
The idea is to pinpoint the biggest problems and the biggest goals in your life and document your story of overcoming and pursuing those.
This strategy can be applied to all kinds of lifestyles and interests but it works particularly well in combination with self-development because showing your growth as a person is going to add a lot more emotional depth to your videos.
The graph of life consists of many different highs and lows with an overall upwards trend
and the best stories can usually be found between a low point and a high point.
Besides micro stories there are also macro stories that stretch over multiple highs and lows but provide even more depth to your character's transformation.
2. LOOK FOR THE HEROES
Strategy two is to look for the heroes. The idea is to look for other people who have interesting problems and goals and share their journeys of overcoming and pursuing those.
In order to find the right character for your story, you should look for people
with the biggest problems and goals, people with a strong passion for something and people who have a strong character and values they live by.
Every person is at a different stage within their journey of pursuing that singular goal and it is your job to find the most interesting time frame to tell their story.
3. EXPLORE A GLOBAL TOPIC
Strategy three is to explore a global topic. A global topic can either be a global problem that impacts people from all around the world or it can be a global topic that somehow connects to a large audience of people.
There is no fixed type of videos they apply to, but it is all about you telling your story in your own unique way.
I hope that after watching this lesson, none of you still thinks that you don't have any stories to tell.
I believe that these three strategies are great places to start when it comes to finding strong stories which people care about and now your job is to figure out which of them is most appealing to you.
Pick one strategy, open up Notion or get yourself a notebook and start writing down your first story ideas. After writing down those ideas, go through them one by one and pick the one that interests you the most. Don't overcomplicate it, but pick one and stick with it. Because trust me, you're going to tell a whole lot more stories than just one and the art lies in telling that story at its full potential.
LOOK FOR PEOPLE WITH THE BIGGEST
PROBLEMS AND THE BIGGEST GOALS.
LOOK FOR PEOPLE WITH A STRONG
PASSION FOR SOMETHING.
TIP 3
LOOK FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE A STRONG
CHARACTER AND STRONG VALUES.
Success is the point of relief where the character has either solved their problem or achieved their goal. And when you search for people that can be the character of your videos, you have to understand at which part of the journey they're currently at in order to know how you're going to tell their story.
The graph of life looks very similar for most people. They start at a lower place and they end at a better place. But now we're not looking at their whole lives and their happiness,
but most of the times we're looking at their progress of solving a singular problem or achieving a singular goal that determines their success. It's basically the same graph, low after high after low after high, with an upwards trends to achieve what they want.
Basketball Player
The basketball player is probably right at the beginning of his career and has a lot of obstacles to overcome before making it into the NBA.
So here we can either tell a micro story of him solving one problem or achieving one goal,
or we can tell a macro story which spans over multiple highs and lows of his life.
It's up to you as the storyteller to define point A and point B of the story you want to tell about them.
First, write down the three most interesting people in your social circle. Second, draw the graph, which I showed you before, and define where those three people are currently at in their journey to reach their goal. And third, determine the most interesting timeframe for each person's journey.
TYPES OF EVIDENCE
"THE DEATH OF A MILLION MEN IS A STATISTIC.
THE DEATH OF ONE MAN IS A TRAGEDY."
JOSEPH STALIN
Hearing a story about how thousands of people died from COVID has a much weaker emotional impact than telling the story of one person that died.
drama, but the strategy can also be used to explore a global topic that simply sparks your interest. It doesn't have to be about climate change, social media addiction or natural disasters, but you can also create great stories about other topics that apply to a larger audience. Global topics would be things
like languages,
food,
sports
culture
cryptocurrencies
psychology
animals
history
space and so on.
First, write down three global problems which appear very important to you but don't seem to get enough coverage on media. Second, write down three global topics that always fascinated you or make you curious. And third, come up with a way to attach a character's journey to that global topic. And just like that, you have six interesting stories about global topics.
example, strategy one for YouTube videos or strategy two and three for Netflix documentaries. But as you could see with the different examples,
You can create a 34-minute documentary about how you ran a marathon. You can create a two-minute video portrait of a basketball player who wants to make it into the NBA
or you can create a 10-minute YouTube video about how a local fisher is impacted by the global problem of overfishing.
Last changed4 days ago
