I Was Asked What *One* Thing I'd Tell Students About Storytelling. Here's What I Said.

I've been enjoying a lazy end to my summer, letting projects drop and work slide to the back-burner as I spend time with the family. My only new, public facing initiatives have been ​my book announcement​ and slowly, carefully interviewing new members for ​the Green Room​.

But then I received a very kind DM from Sarah:

Hi Jay,

I was able to catch one of your sessions way back in 2023 at Content Marketing World and it left a real impression [...] I will be adjunct teaching a class at Minnesota State University in the fall called Multimedia Storytelling, and I'm hoping to use your ​Six-Way Storytelling method​ as a framework to help the students think about how to find and structure good stories.

We'll be working through the process together using stories they bring to class, but I wanted to reach out, first, to say thank you for such an incredible tool, and second to see if you might have some advice/words of wisdom for students diving into this kind of work for the firs time.

Best, Sarah

Needless to say (he says, before saying it), I am very honored by all of this! As for what to say to the students? I mean, what can you say? What ONE thing do you say? I took a page from Ted Lasso and decided to listen to my gut, and on my way down, I checked in with my heart. Between those two things, you tend to figure out what's what.

So here is what I said to these students in a quick video. May it serve you equally well! I think it's a reminder all of us, myself included, need to hear from time to time...

***

Hey, I'm Jay Acunzo, and I've been a lot of things creatively in my career. I started out trying to be a sports journalist to write stories about athletes and different sports that I loved. I pivoted into marketing and worked for many different companies, big and small, companies as big as Google, as small as tiny little startups. I've traveled the world giving speeches, written books, hosted documentary series, hosted podcasts.

My mission today is to help people make things that matter to them and to others, because I think when you make better things, you tend to make things better.

And I think the most important advice I can give you as a lifelong storyteller myself as you embark on your storytelling journey is this: separate out the process of trying to be good from the process of just being honest and making a mess. That part has to go first.

We want to be good. Absolutely. But when we start drafting something or creating anything, and we're trying to force it to be good ... and it's not ... that's where a lot of problems arise. And I assure you, most times, if not every time, it's not going to be good right away.

You are not going to be good right away, and also that thing is not going to be good right away.

And that's true regardless of who you are.

Just think: the fastest runner in a road race is dying just the same as the slowest runner, but they die at different speeds. When you push yourself creatively to make something awesome, when what you're doing is not rote or some kind of cheap commodity or copycat thing and not some lazy use of AI, and when what you're doing is supposed to matter to you and others, it's not gonna come out good right away. It takes time.

So you have to separate the process of trying to be good from the process of just being honest. That goes first. Your first attempts need to come from the heart. They need to capture the feeling of it more than the right structure or words for it.

This means a willingness to make a total mess on the page, but it's in the mess, you find your best. You find yourself and your style and your voice and your quirks, that little turn of phrase. "Oh, I said it that way. I could use that!" or "Wait, that was interesting. That just came out of me." Different moments and metaphors and moments of clarity and creative jolts. It's all found in the mess.

And then what do you do? You do the work of making it good after. You clean it up. You rearrange it. You add. Subtract. Because writing is really rewriting. You get it as close to good as you can get it, then you ship it, and then you do it a little bit better the next time.

But you don't skip the mess ever. Don't question whether or not something is wrong with you if you find yourself making a mess all the time—because that's what we all do! That's where it begins for all of us: you make the mess every time, but then you become more comfortable in the mess. You become more joyful in the mess. You become more confident sorting through the mess on the path towards something good.

The thing is, telling one story and experiencing this process of separating the honest phase and the good phase, the mess from the rest—that's just a microcosm, writing a single story, of the entire arc of a creative career. Because if you want to be creative, your whole career comes down to practice. It's reps. It's trial and error.

You try something, you taste it, you adjust it, you taste it again, you try it again, over and over and over again. Nothing causes creative people to plateau or to stop like believing it should all go smoothly or that it should just come out great immediately, or that they should be great immediately.

And listen, I think it's okay that you put greatness on a pedestal. There are people and projects that you admire, so you put them on a pedestal. But you have to understand that those pedestals are not made of gold. They're not made of marble. They're made of crap!

Tons of really bad work got them there. Lots of bad ideas, lots of bad drafts, lots of things that they shipped publicly that were also bad. You don't see or at maybe simply don't remember the bad stuff. You see a very small percent which was good, which causes you to put them on the pedestal.

The truth is, we all have to create a body of work—most of which will be bad—and the difference is that those people we admire were willing to persist. They kept creating and they did not dilute their ideas or their voice or their approach to try to make it fit in with what was deemed to be broadly acceptable. They didn't follow somebody else's generic "best practice" or blueprint.

The dividing line in this work is always the willingness to practice. You want to be good, but you know you have to be bad a while. You want quality, but it's the quantity that gets you there.

Never forget that your reaction to creative excellence is irrational and unnatural compared to others. Most people look at creative things, and they have a rational response. They see something great and they go, "That's awesome, and I could never make that," but we are the weirdos who go, "That's awesome, and I'm gonna make that!"

Don't lose that spirit. The world and especially the business world will try to beat that out of you, that motivation to make things just because, make things your way, make things that truly light people up (including yourself). They'll convince you there's a right way and a wrong way in some absolute sense, and it's all BS.

And so now, we zoom back into your storytelling right now, as you loo to create one story next. Have a vision, get the feeling out, get the feeling right. Make it honest first, which is to say, make it yours. That part happens first. Then we busy ourselves with making it good. Then we do it again and again and again.

That's how you make something that matters.

Good luck.

Keep going.

Keep making what matters.