You have to live up to your promise. If you make me a promise, you better deliver. It needs to be honest and genuine. You can't just say, doctors cure cancer in the headline of your article to get me to click on it. And then I show up and I say, Oh, well, they didn't actually cure cancer. They're just researching it that feels like there's a classic term for it.

It's called clickbait in digital. Now, this exists through all storytelling. If you live up to your promise, your audience will trust you. If you don't, they drop off, and they might never come back to you or listen to you ever again. And these days, audiences are really, really smart. If you're making a promise and a big why up top, you've got to live up to it.

Now the pressure is on me. I made a promise saying I'm going to make a better storyteller out of you, no matter who you are, and under an hour. I know I can live up to that. And I'm striving to do that every single moment. Speaking of which, how am I doing on time? We've got a little bit of time left, okay, I better keep moving.

But before I get to the second fundamental lesson of storytelling, I have to take a quick aside and introduce you to The person who is responsible in my eyes for really honing in what the elements of story are. Stay with me