The Story Bible
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 9th, 2023
Ever wondered how to consistently come up with fresh content ideas? Well, today’s episode is all about my secret sauce: the Story Bible.
It’s like a treasure chest of your life experiences, distilled into bite-sized tales.
Here’s how it works: jot down memorable moments from your life. These could be as simple as a childhood ice cream adventure with your dad or that time the dog peed on the floor.
The key is to keep them concise.
Then, reach out to friends and family and ask them to share their favorite stories about you.
You can take these stories and weave them into your content.
In my case, as a daily podcaster and content creator, this Story Bible is my secret weapon. I can always turn to it when I need inspiration.
So, start your Story Bible today, and watch your content ideas flow.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Because so many things happened in my life that I wasn’t aware of until I stopped to reflect on them.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
I was working with one of my coaching clients the other day and they’re working on building out a personal brand. One of the exercises I like to do is to create a story Bible, which is just a repository, a journal, where you sit down and you write out all of your life stories that you can think of. And they don’t have to. You don’t write them out in like, long form. It’s just one sentence, a little headline about this time with my dad when I was six, we got ice cream. It made me feel this way, whatever. When I was nine, the dog peed on the floor and my dad got mad and whatever. I like to do this exercise where you just brain dump as many stories as you can think of and then you go to your friends, your family, ask them, hey, can you remember any embarrassing stories that you want to share with me? And the reason this is so powerful is when you start to think of your life and stories, then you can take those and interweave them with different lessons and different takeaways.
Anthony Vicino:
And a couple of weeks ago, somebody asked me, how do you come up with so many different content ideas? Because this podcast is a daily podcast, which means we do a lot of content like this, plus a daily tweet, plus a daily LinkedIn post, plus another three weekly multifamily Investing Made Simple podcasts, plus the YouTube channel. There’s a lot of content coming out. So it’s like, where do these all come from? And the truth is, it comes from my story bible, comes from all these stories that I’ve written down. And when I need an idea, I just crack it open and I look at it and then I try to riff on it and I think, what is a lesson related to hyper focus, to entrepreneurship, to investing that I could weave into this story? And that has been very, very helpful for me because so many things happened in my life that I wasn’t aware of until I stopped to reflect on them. And because I don’t stop to reflect quite often, I don’t do it very often at all. In fact, I tend to have a very weak mental narrative for who I was at different points in my life and what I was doing. My sisters, on the other hand, they’re fantastic at this. They spend a lot of time thinking about their past and so they can remember every little thing from when they were 13 years old and 15.
Anthony Vicino:
And they’ll tell me stories, I’m like, I don’t remember that happening. I just don’t spend much time in that place. And that isn’t a good thing or bad thing. It’s just a difference of personality. And so the story Bible is a way for me to sit, to reflect, put down the ideas, and then when I want to come back and come up with a teachable moment. I can go to that. And so what I wanted to do today was I just wanted to pull this open. I wanted to pick out a single line from the story Bible.
Anthony Vicino:
And I have, like, 300 stories written down in here and just come up and share the story with you, because a lot of these I’ve never actually told. So I’m looking right now. I’m on page 200. I’m holding it up on the YouTube channel if you guys want to check that out. There’s a lot of weird ones on this. Just glancing, I see dad helicopter parachute, which is the story of my dad when he was in the army. He was a ranger. He was gone a lot, and they would do all these Ranger training is like, I guess, crazy.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s like steel training on steroids. And they had to jump out of a helicopter. Him and the guy next to him got tangled up, and they had, like, bayonets or something on their guns, and they got tangled up, and the other guy stabbed him in the leg. My dad was in the hospital for a bit. So that’s a dad helicopter parachute story. That was number 201 on this list. Number 200 is breaking Jet Ski and building a wall, which is this is a funny story because I haven’t thought about this in a long time. There’s a good lesson here, actually.
Anthony Vicino:
Many, many years ago, this would have been probably close to 15 years ago. My roommate at the time in college, we were doing fix and flips, and I was living with him. His dad and him would buy these houses, and then we would demo them, we would renovate them. And in the meantime, while they were doing the fixing and flipping and all the Valuing Add stuff, I got to live for cheap and for free with these guys. I hated it. In fact, I hated the construction side of things. But my good friend Luke, it was an awesome formative experience for the two of us. Now, Luke was dating this woman, Carrie, who many years later he would marry, and we were at Carrie’s dad’s cabin.
Anthony Vicino:
What was interesting about this cabin is I had never been there. I had never met Carrie’s dad before, but it was a very nice, lovely cabin and had Jet skis. And Luke and I were going to take the Jet Ski out, and Carrie’s dad comes up to us, and he goes, all right, boys, only thing I ask is that you do not get too close to each other out there. We’re like, yeah, that’s no problem. Don’t worry about that. We won’t get too close to each other. And promptly within, like, I kid you not, five minutes, we’re in the middle of the lake. We’re spinning circles around each other, and we smash into each other like a couple of numb skulls.
Anthony Vicino:
And this is what you get from, like, 22 year olds, like 22 year old males. We did not mean to do that, but we are idiots, and that is what we did. And so we broke his Jet skis. I felt terrible about it because, again, I did not know this man very well. I knew his daughter very well, but I did not know him many years later. Then they’d get married. My relationship with him would deepen, and I would learn a lot about this guy, and he was a remarkable fella, but this was my first experience with him. So we come back with our tails between our leg, and we’re like, hey, dude, we broke your Jet Ski.
Anthony Vicino:
We did the thing you told us not to do. And he was incredibly kind about it, actually. He could have been a dick. He was fully within his right to lay into us and really take it out on us. But he took a different path, and I really respect him for this, and I look up to him as understanding how to lead people. Because of this, he could tell that we did not mean to do this and that we were young and dumb and that we felt really bad about it and that we wanted to make it right, but that we’re also poor. We didn’t have a way to fix his Jet Skis for him in that moment. And so he goes, okay, boys, you know what? To make this right, you’re going to come back here next week, and you’re going to build me a retaining wall next to the garage.
Anthony Vicino:
And we’re like, okay, cool. I didn’t know how to make a retaining wall. Luke did. And so he told me what to do, and I moved bricks, and we did it. We came back the next week, and we made him a wall. Took all weekend. And the lesson here for me, the thing that I really take away is to recognize that people sometimes fuck up. And that kindness in how you handle those moments with grace and compassion or just understanding is going to do more to position yourselves in their eyes as a leader, whether that’s on a team or your family, with kids or your relationships, than laying into anybody ever will.
Anthony Vicino:
And if you can look for the constructive solution to help them make the thing right. I still remember just how kind I was so worried because my partner Luke and I, we weren’t in a strong financial situation at that point. And I was like, I don’t know where we’re going to come up with this money. It was like, a very stressful thing. I felt so damn bad about it because I knew I had no way of paying him back on any kind of meaningful timeline. So for him to give us this opportunity to make it right by doing something that we were able to do, it gave us a way to earn back respect. And I still just remember it’s such a really cool way of handling it, honestly. So ten years later or so, they would get married right in front of that retaining wall.
Anthony Vicino:
Actually, it was really cool. The wedding was at the cabin. Right in front of the retaining wall was where the reception was. And so it was pretty neat to be able to commiserate with Luke and be able to remember the time we had to build that, because we’re a couple of idiots. But I learned a lot from that. And just the way the guy, he handled it. Dave’s a good guy. Good job.
Anthony Vicino:
Good job, Dave. So that is a story. I’m not saying it’s a good story. I’m not saying there was a strong lesson there. But you can see how in having this written down and then just pulling it off of a list and just riffing for a little bit, you can start to come up with little ideas, little parallels. And I think this is the key. If you want to be like a content creator, if you want to build a personal brand, or if you want to build a content machine for your business, which I think is the best way to build a business, to market it. This is what we did for Escape Climbing, was we really started to tell personal stories about the company, about the people behind the company.
Anthony Vicino:
Not necessarily my partner, Ryan and I, as the builders of the company, it wasn’t about us, but we were trying to humanize and tell stories from the lens of the company. And that did a lot for building goodwill and building relationships with our customers. And so if you want to build a business, if you want to build a personal brand, if you want to be a content creator, any of the above, start by laying out your story Bible and then just practicing. Pull one out every single day and practice telling the story and see if you can tell it in compelling way. I’m not saying I told that story in a particularly good way, but just another rep, another lesson, and this is how we improve. So thanks for being here, thanks for listening to my story, and we’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, guys and gals, stay hyper focused.
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