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A vast majority of "storytelling" books are perfect for keeping your local sanitation worker employed. 📚🗑️

Most storytelling books are garbage. I’ve read a ton of them—most are filled with vague theories, marketing jargon, or Hollywood formulas that don’t actually help you tell a great story in real life.

And StoryBrand? Don't get me started....

I get why people love it. It’s clean. It’s structured. It gives businesses a way to slap a ‘story’ onto their brand messaging like a cheap sticker. But here’s the problem—it’s not actual storytelling.

StoryBrand is storytelling for people who don’t want to take the time to learn how to tell great stories. It’s a fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs approach that sucks the life out of real human experiences and turns everything into a bland, predictable ‘customer journey.’

The fact that whole corporate marketing departments run StoryBrand as a "system" in their business, should tell you all you need to know and if you’ve ever sat through a corporate keynote that made you want to stab yourself in the eye with a pen, you’ve probably already heard a StoryBrand story.

A light at the end of the storytelling book tunnel. 🚂

After years of being frustrated by what all these authors and gurus were peddling, I reluctantly took a recommendation from a friend and found Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks.

No fluff. No overcomplicated frameworks. No marketing templates pretending to be storytelling.
Just raw, real, ridiculously good advice from a guy who has won more MOTH storytelling competitions than I can count. And once I learned his approach, I could never look at storytelling the same way again.

The Big Realization—Why Storyworthy Confirmed Everything I Knew

Before I read Storyworthy, I already knew most ‘storytelling advice’ was complete nonsense. I saw it everywhere—marketers, business coaches, and self-proclaimed storytelling ‘experts’ teaching people to strip all the humanity out of their stories and shove them into soulless, formulaic templates.

And no book represents this problem more than StoryBrand. People love it because it’s clean, structured, and makes storytelling feel ‘easy.’ But here’s the problem—it turns every story into a lifeless, templated sales pitch. It’s a glorified marketing framework that sucks all the realness out of storytelling and replaces it with something so predictable, so corporate, that it might as well have been generated by an AI bot trained on TED Talks.

Most storytelling books are the same. They focus on Hollywood screenwriting formulas, obsess over ‘story arcs’ like they’re a requirement for every human interaction, and act like storytelling is some mystical art that only ‘creatives’ can master. They completely ignore what actually makes stories connect—real, unfiltered human experiences. YOUR experiences.

I always believed great storytelling wasn’t about plot points or brand messaging—it was about the smallest moments, the awkward pauses, the way something felt rather than just what happened.

So when I read Storyworthy, it wasn’t some shocking revelation. It was validation. Matthew Dicks wasn’t teaching storytelling in a way that felt ‘new’ to me—he was proving that I was right all along.

His wins in the MOTH storytelling competition weren’t because he followed some marketing-friendly template. He won because he understood something StoryBrand and every other bad storytelling books ignore:

And Matthew's incredibly powerful tool Homework for Life? That wasn’t some revolutionary technique to me—it was just putting a name to something I already knew worked. The idea that small, overlooked moments hold more storytelling power than most people realize? That’s something I’ve always believed.

This book didn’t just teach storytelling—it proved why everything else was wrong!

Why This Matters—Storytelling Is Your Secret Weapon (If You Do It Right)

Most business owners, professionals, and creators are unknowingly making themselves forgettable. And it’s not because they lack expertise or passion—it’s because they’re following the wrong storytelling advice.

They’re told to slap a formula onto their ‘brand story’ like it’s a PowerPoint presentation. They’re taught that customers need to ‘see themselves as the hero’ (blah, blah, blah). But if you actually want people to pay attention, remember you, and trust you, you have to tell stories that feel real... because they ARE real.

This is even more critical when it comes to video content. People don’t connect with scripted marketing fluff. They connect with YOU—your experiences, your struggles, your honest moments.

The biggest mistake I see in video content? Entrepreneurs and professionals treating storytelling like a marketing tool instead of a connection tool.

You don’t need a ‘customer journey’ template—you need stories that make your audience feel something. That’s what Storyworthy gets right. That’s why Matthew Dicks wins MOTH competitions. And that’s why most ‘storytelling frameworks’ fail.

So here’s my challenge for you:

Try this—spend one day noticing the small, meaningful moments in your life. Not the ‘big’ things—the tiny, human things. A conversation. A mistake. A feeling you didn’t expect.

WRITE THEM DOWN.

That’s where your best stories are. And that’s the difference between real storytelling and corporate nonsense.

Get Storyworthy, Try It, and Tell Me Your Story

If you’ve made it this far, do yourself a favor—get Storyworthy. It’s the best storytelling book I’ve ever read, and if you create content, speak on camera, or just want to be remembered, this book will change how you tell stories forever.

👉 https://amzn.to/3EGR0Nu 👈

And don’t just read it—use it. Try Homework for Life for the next 7 days.

At the end of each day, take just 2 minutes to write down the most story-worthy moment you experienced. Not the biggest or most dramatic—just the most interesting, surprising, or meaningful thing that happened.

It could be a small conversation, a moment of frustration, something funny, or a thought that caught you off guard. Over time, you’ll start to see storytelling gold in moments you would have otherwise forgotten.

At the end of the week, you’ll have a list of real, meaningful stories—and I guarantee they’ll be better than any templated ‘brand story’ you’ve ever tried to force out.

One more thing—when you notice your first great story moment, reply to this email and tell me what it is. I want to hear it.

See you on the other side,
​
Dan Bennett

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