Thus, one of the reasons for using stories in our speeches is that stories help us learn and remember things. We all want our audience to learn something and remember what we said.

      Many of us have been to a comedy club and laughed hysterically at the comedian, but struggle to remember his/her name or what exactly was said. We’ve had the same experience with business speakers. When someone delivers information as a series of facts or opinions, it’s hard for our brains to recall them.

      Don’t be that person. Our aim as public speakers is to be more memorable and have our audience spread our message for us. The best way to do this is to make it work the way the brain likes it—by wrapping the information in a story.

      Tell a Story to Build Your Brand

      Stories are great for memory retention, but there’s another reason to tell a story: it connects you with and humanizes your brand.

      Consider the origin of the word brand. It comes from a hot piece of metal people use to mark cows. True brands tell the world a very simple story, like, “This is Dave’s cow.” The job of the other kind of brand is much the same: to influence what people think of when they think of you. Stories are great for that. They give people’s brains a thing to connect you with. They do the job marketers are supposed to be doing by giving people something to think of when they think of you. Yet much of the marketing industry still thinks it can get away with calling colors, typefaces, and canned music “branding.” If those things are elements of a story, great. But without a story? That’s just a random cow.

      Ann Handley is a content marketer who inspires an entire industry. When it comes to storytelling, she says, “Some brands are doing it really well, but storytelling is not a skill marketers have necessarily needed over the last few decades.”³ In an article by Harrison Monarth in the Harvard Business Review, Johns Hopkins researcher Keith Quesenberry discusses the effectiveness of commercials that are like “mini movies.” He says, “People are attracted to stories, because we’re social creatures and we relate to other people.”⁴

      You may not be in marketing, but when you get up to make a speech, you are selling your content, your idea, and maybe even your cow. So you, too, need to develop your storytelling skills to better sell yourself. Whether your experiences tell how you disgusted your host family in Guatemala or how you led your company out of disaster, the same basic principles apply. You are always telling a story.

      While most eight-year-olds were learning how to properly squeeze a lemon, Gary Vaynerchuk was managing seven lemonade stands across his neighborhood in Edison, New Jersey, his new home after moving with his family from Belarus. This kind of hustle has led him to numerous business successes, best-selling books, and TV appearances, and has edged him a few steps closer to his goal of buying the New York Jets football team. He is also one of the best business speakers out there and no stranger to using humor. Says Vaynerchuk, “Quality storytelling always wins. Always.”⁵

      It does not take long to find a compelling example. Airbnb went from a failing startup to a billion-dollar business built on a compelling story that their founders have become masters of telling. Airbnb started in 2007, when Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky were struggling to pay their rent. There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels were fully booked, so they came up with the idea of renting out three airbeds on their living room floor and cooking breakfast for their guests. The site Airbedandbreakfast.com (later shortened to Airbnb) officially launched on August 11, 2008, and initially struggled. With no seed money, the founders hustled to self-fund and keep their dreams alive. They fell back on their design schooling and created special-edition breakfast cereals that capitalized on the presidential election: “Obama O’s” (The Breakfast of Change) and “Cap’n McCains.” The two sold 800 boxes of the cereal (priced at $40 each) in two months, making $30,000 in profits for the cash-strapped founders.

      The reasons why they started Airbnb, combined with the fact that they kept the idea alive with breakfast cereal, made a compelling and memorable story for Joe and Brian to tell. It showed their idea was a solution to a real problem, that they were passionate about it, and that they were willing to do anything to succeed.

      Investor Paul Graham was impressed with Gebbia and Chesky’s hustle and decided to take on Airbnb in his Y Combinator program (an American seed accelerator providing early stage funding and advice for startups), even though he initially didn’t like their idea. They went on to raise multiple rounds of investment with top-tier firms and VCs and, in April 2014, they closed a round based on a valuation of approximately $10 billion.

      Seth Godin is a prolific writer, blogger, and very often hilarious public speaker. He is the author of several notable marketing books, such as Purple Cow, Small Is the New Big, and Permission Marketing, and his ideas have been referenced, regurgitated, and repackaged by just about everyone. Expanding on Godin’s idea that “marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell,” Actionable Marketing Guide blogger Heidi Cohen writes, “In the social media age, your company must build the best product you can because customers will talk about your products and services on social media platforms and in real life. Products need stories to provide context and human emotion. They provide the beginning, middle, and end.”⁶

      Airbnb gave people a great story that clearly explained who the company was, defined the values it held, and directly addressed the needs of those it was trying to serve. For their community of loyal users, Joe and Brian were striving to provide