My Recipe for Great Stories
Before I share my recipe, I need to tell you about a college friend of mine. Let's call him Tim. Because that's his real name.
Tim is an Irishman, and I'm Italian. This led to a lot of jokes between us over the years. He'd poke fun at the "olive oil" in my hair (it wasn't), and I'd tell him his skin wasn't white as much as it was clear (it was). If Tim went trick-or-treating with a sheet over his head and two holes cut out for eyes, he'd look more alive than before, you know what I mean? Like when Tim goes to the beach, he doesn't burn. He cooks.
Incidentally (I write, very intentionally) that would be the only time I ever saw Tim cook. (Side note: I’ve also never seen Tim Cook.)
While my friend has a lot of things to offer, culinary skill isn't one of them. I'd always kinda known that about him, but one moment made this fact inescapably clear, and it made me want to do a murder straight to his big dumb face.
Senior year, I lived just off-campus in an old rickety house with six other guys, including Tim the Sunburnt Ghost. Every time my parents would visit, my mom would drag with her a giant blue cooler full of Italian food, including (and here I'll switch to writing in proper Italian-American) fresh mootsadell, thinly sliced proshoot, homemade madigot, and chicken parm. (There's no fun slang for chicken parm. Bummer.)
Given my heritage, the two most important things in the world to me are family and food, but despite all the deliciousness that would tumble out of that blue cooler, one thing felt more precious, like the perfect overlap of Being an Acunzo and Eating Italian: the sauce.
Despite simple ingredients (tomato, garlic, basil, oregano, parsley, salt, black pepper, and maybe some sausage, meatballs, or chunks of pork), every Italian family has a unique-tasting sauce. That's because each family benefits from decades of work from countless Nonnas & Nonnos and Nonnies & Poppies and Grandmas & Grandpas and "Yo! Ma!" & "Heyo! Dad!" — all of whom spent years simmering sauce with simple ingredients to elevate your dinner. Or your lunch. Or the piece of crusty bread you snagged from the pantry just to sneak a taste from the pot before it was served.
Mangia!
So my mom would bring a cooler full of food, and while my roommates would get samples of various cheeses and meats, I'd stash the sauce in the back of the fridge. As the house chef and our resident, oily-haired roommate, the good stuff was mine to use at my discretion ... and mine alone.
Except one time.
One time, as I was leaving campus for a weekend, I turned to Tim.
"Hey man, I think there's a little of my mom's sauce in the fridge. I'm gone until Monday. You can use that if you want." Then I left.
When I came back, I noticed a pan on the stove with some dried red stuff along the edges, and I thought, oh good, Tim finished the sauce. But then I glanced inside to see some kind of bright, neon orange goo caking the pan, twisting around the deep red goodness that was my childhood memories I mean my sense of self I mean my mom's sauce.
"Tim," I said, voice shaking, "did you do something to my mom's sauce?"
"Oh yeah!" he said. "I needed more of it, so I just melted in some Velveeta cheese."
My body froze. My brain took a second to process. I heard the words again, distantly this time, as if through a layer of wool.
"I needed more of it, so I just melted in some VELVEETA CHEESE."
My left eye started twitching. I ground my teeth so hard, they squeaked. I slowly turned to face my former friend.
"What... what did you just say?"
They never did find Tim's body.
* * *
I've told that story dozens of times, typically on stages, but it's been years since I shared it in a speech. I think the last time I delivered it was the opener to a speech in 2015. From 2013 to that year, I’d given talks mainly on the side or to promote brands where I worked as a marketing leader. After that, I began to give speeches for a fee, earning a living from the stage, and now today, I teach it, coach others, and run bootcamps and a membership, all to help others become stronger speakers and storytellers.
In my travels, both literally on the road and through various client engagements and public appearances, I've learned about an awful limiting belief that prevents people from telling stories. It twists around our brains and our voices, like old Velveeta, and as a result, we either don't tell stories or we produce stuff that feels generic, manufactured, and as obviously fake as the "cheese" Tim used to violate my childhood I mean my identity I mean that pot of sauce.
The limiting belief is that there’s any “right” way to tell stories—and we better find it before we speak up and share anything.
We tell ourselves we need to get a story "right." We need to know the best way to find and capture ideas and the right story structure and the right details to include or omit and the right lesson to pull from the story and where to deliver it or whether we should spell it out or not. We want to get things right ahead of time, in our heads, and avoid the trial and error of it all. Because we are afraid to act like Tim.
The thing is, YOU are going to do something with your work which Tim never would with his food. You’re trying to master it. You’re planning to do it again and again. YOU aspire to be a chef. All Tim wanted to do was soak up a few cheap beers at the end of the night by making something equally cheap on the stove. So he took a shortcut.
We are surrounded by people who seek shortcuts in their work, yes, but you and I are not among them. We resist. We refuse. Which means we must get comfortable with something others never want to embrace and our own inner narrators tell us is too scary: trial and error.
This work is mostly, if not entirely, trial and error.
As I said, I've told my sauce story before, but it's never the same. It's also never "correct." As an English major in college, writing essays meant to be judged and graded, I was forced to embrace that simple fact: you can always make changes and always improve something creative. There's no A+ and there's no getting things 100% correct. Because “correct” doesn’t exist, which means it’s on each of us to decide when something is worthy of shipping or merely done and ready to go out. To do this kind of work consistently and professionally, you have to learn to stop seeking the right answers and execute anyway. Anyone who tries to offer you a means to get a story absolutely or objectively “correct" is ignoring the most important aspect of storytelling and all creative work.
Your taste.
You need your taste more than anything when you cook something delicious.
Before I share my recipe for telling great stories, just think of what it’s like to cook a great sauce.
1. You start with some basics. You grab the tomato, the herbs, the salt and pepper. [In our work: you know your audience, your message, your lesson to teach today. You have expertise and some how-tos in mind, maybe even an overarching premise for your work. It's there on the table. It's there in your mind. Time to cook!]
2. You heat the ingredients in a pan with a little oil. [It's all in there, but it's not good. Not yet. That's okay. No chef in their right mind would toss stuff in a pan, give it a quick stir, and expect the sauce to taste good. That’s for later in the process. So why do YOU judge your initial attempt at something, your initial drafts, immediately? That makes no sense. You only just started the process. That bad draft, that mess of making? That's exactly where you're supposed to be. Don't judge it. Just keep cooking it.]
3. Let it simmer. Something tasty takes time. You can't rush it. [If you did rush it, you'd use shortcuts. You don't do that, because you don't want to serve gloppy, disgusting goo to others. So give it some space. Step away from the screen, get a coffee, go for a walk. Just a single minute of time might even be enough to see things more clearly or let the ingredients coalesce into a stronger whole.]
4. Now give it a taste. It still won't be good yet. You're tasting it to understand what it needs. You're tasting it to learn what, specifically, is NOT good. So you can make it better. [Continue withholding judgment about the piece or project. It's not done cooking, silly chef. Why would you expect it to be good? Scan the outline, the mess you made. Read the draft. Watch or listen to the rough cut. What felt good or bad? What jumped out? What does it need next? Some restructuring? Some new ingredients? The best creatives freely muck around, leaving placeholder reminders to go get a new ingredient—FIND EXAMPLE HERE; Data from Acme Inc report; Details needed in this part of the story. Figure out what the dish needs. Then move to the next step.]
5. Make adjustments. [Trust your taste. Add, subtract, tweak, improve.]
6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 as needed. [And when it's ready, if you can do it, let it simmer for hours and hours. You’ll be surprised how much better something gets when you step away from the “final” draft for a longer stretch, then return to it later. That's when the sauce becomes more than just a sauce.]
You can't skip the trial and error.
You can't use a tool, can't take a course, can't listen to a podcast or read a book or follow an influencer who can help you skip the pieces of this that require the trial (attempts) and error (not yet successful) and adjustments (yet more trying) and further fixes (error after error).
That's what this work ... is.
If you want to be creative, if you want to make things that matter to your career, company, or community, then you have to embrace this fact. There's no getting around it. It’s what the work is.
If you want to live on Earth, you have to breathe oxygen. If you want to create, you have to exist in this constant state of trial and error.
* * *
In truth, this essay isn't about Tim. This piece is about my grandmother. My dad's mom, Philomine Acunzo. She was a proud and lifelong educator, local community leader, and family matriarch. Her final moments were spent in a room overlooking the beautiful Connecticut shoreline, surrounded by her family as we held her hand, cried, shared stories, and laughed. She was 96.
I remember when I graduated college, I asked her for a recipe for her homemade sauce. I'd grown up eating an incalculable amount of sauce-covered meals in her kitchen. She even owned one of those giant ceramic bowls you might imagine when thinking of an Italian grandmother serving dinner—big and beige with hand-painted vegetables running around it. She'd hold in one arm while scooping pasta onto our dishes with her free hand. (Grandma, I am seven years old and so skinny a slight breeze could knock me over. I just ate three pounds of pasta, I can't possibly eat any—oh you gave me more, cool.)
When I asked my grandmother for her recipe, instead, she gave me something that resembles the things I like to share with my audience when some people (not you) ask me for precise recipes (never you) for how to do their work (okay fine, sometimes it's you).
She replied with palmfuls and pinches.
A palmful of this, two palmfuls of that. A pinch of this, a pinch of that. There's no science here. There’s no real correct way. Get the stuff in the pan in a way that feels roughly right to you in the moment, then taste it, adjust it, taste it some more.
Recipe, you say?
There is no recipe.
My Grandma was guided by taste. So was my Nonnie. So is my mom. So is my wife, and so am I whenever we cook a sauce.
So are the best storytellers.
Without further ado (and zero orange goo), I give you my recipe for great stories. I know what you expected heading into this piece, but trust me a moment, so you can trust yourself for a lifetime: this is far more useful…
My Recipe for Great Stories
1. Pour some desire to serve others into the bottom of a large pot and set it to medium-high emotional stakes.
2. Add a character or two, cooked quickly in the pan, just to give it some color. If you don't have any good characters, you can use a logo, but you'll need to increase the emotional stakes a bit and double the pinches of personality you add, as logos are much more bland than characters.
3. Now that your character has a nice golden color in the pan, add in several cups of juicy, ripe expertise. In my opinion, the best expertise is grown over time in your own garden, but you can also buy some good expertise at Whole Internet. Just be sure it's organic, not AI-generated.
4. After your expertise has been added, add three palmfuls of forward action and three palmfuls of reflection. I like adding one at a time, alternating between action and reflection, as they complement each other nicely.
5. Measure out (but do not add yet) two palmfuls of tension. You'll want to sprinkle that in over time to really bring out the flavor of the story.
6. Combine together a palmful of fresh quirks, tone of voice, and personal style. (If you use dried personality traits instead, just be careful to reduce the amount by about half.)
7 . For a bit more spice, add a pinch or two of strongly worded opinions or emotional rally cries. You can also squeeze in a few drops of inside jokes. I also like adding a full stick of callback, which really helps coalesce the dish, especially by the end. When you get really experienced, feel free to experiment with a few parenthetical asides tossed in there (though use them wisely, as these can distract from the core ingredients if done poorly or used too often).
Serve your story with a strong opening and closing moment, ideally on a dish owned by you and not Meta.
* * *
Telling better stories isn't a matter of correctness or preciseness. It's less like baking, more like cooking. Rules or structures are just guidelines and suggestions. They can help you, but relying on them too rigidly always creates something ... predictable. Something noticeably chemical or manufactured.
The sauce story I told to open this piece felt familiar, but at the same time, I had to feel my way forward during a lot of the telling to create today's version. I wasn’t repurposing so much as reinventing, which it to say, inventing much of it for the first time. Some of my original version came back to me. Most of it felt new. All of it felt like … the thing this work really is. Trial and error.
Did I tell it better last time? Did I tell it correctly today? Yes. No. Maybe? Seven. Twelve. Who's on third? What's the question?
Enough.
Stop looking for answers to justify creating. Create to find your answers.
Put yourself on a weekly deadline. Imagine you have a ticket to a train that leaves every week at the same day and time. No matter how you feel, you’d find a way to pack your bag and be on that train. When does yours leave? Be on it! (My newsletter train leaves every Friday morning; my podcast train, every Monday morning.)
Or maybe you can make the work a game or give yourself a quota. Arbitrarily invent and try one. The phrase “10-4, good buddy” pops to mind. Okay, fine, run with that. For your next 10 opinion pieces or how-to articles, episodes, or videos, try to open each with a story. Then turn your 4 favorites (remember, 10-4) into short-form social posts, because retelling a story makes you a stronger storyteller everywhere, not just in that moment.
However you do it, you have to do it. It won’t be done correctly, because that isn’t a thing that exists. Sometimes, most times, all the times, it’s trial and error.
I can't give you the exact recipe for telling a great story, and the thing is, people who try and sell you on that stuff can’t either. All they're handing you are possibilities. What will you make of them? What will you make WITH them?
Next year will be my 20th telling stories on the internet. I've learned a lot about this craft, but the most important thing I’ve learned is to stop thinking in rules and start thinking in palmfuls and pinches. Rather than be guided by someone else’s answers, I’m guided by my own taste. That taste begins with or leads to questions. Then I try to answer them. What do I notice when sampling the work? What does the work need? It's trial and error. It always is. It always will be. May as well get used to it.
More than anything, storytelling is an exercise in trusting yourself.
# # #
In memory of my Grandma. So much of what she did in her life helped make others' lives better. May we all remember to "be of use" as she was and to live our lives in service to others, whether we write, speak, design, podcast, shoot video, take photos, teach, parent, coach, console, celebrate, build, or lead. But whatever your gifts, remember to bring a big bowl—and always offer seconds.