Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…ent to slow time down. You load your story with details because suddenly you know have the audience on the edge of their seat, and you want to leave them on the edge of their seat as long as possible. When I know my audience wants to hear the next sentence, that is when I prolong the arrival of the next sentence by I say turning over an hourglass and letting the sand run for a while, and making them wait for it. There's crystal balls where you can predict a future. You don't have to predict an accurate future. You can just predict any future. So I could have said something in the Eileen story like, "If I get this wrong, Eileen is going to begin to cry. She's going to cry in front of 22 kids, 22 kids who for the rest of the year will continue to stare at this girl, and remember the moment she cried." That's a crystal ball. That's me predicting a terrible future. Because I put that terrible future in the audience's mind, now they're worried. So that is a stake. I have planted a false stake, a false future, but they're going to be worried about it because it's also a realistic future. So all of those things are used to continue to get the audience to wonder what's going to happen next, which is a little different than surprise. Surprise is just that beautiful, delightful, amazing moment where the audience didn't see something coming, and then it was almost like it was inevitable. Surprise happens, and they understand why it happened. I think it's the best thing you can ever offer an audience, is a moment of surprise. And every story has a surprise, at least one. Because whenever we suddenly realize something for the first time, I hate the word suddenly, but what happens is we used to not think something, and then we think a new thing, and that's often a surprise for us if we make it a surprise for the audience too, that's a delightful thing. So surprise is so powerful, and wonderful, and always ruined by storytellers. I was just listening to an interview with, I think his name is David Mamet, and he made this point that endings of books and movies always has to be both inevitable, and also complete surprise. Yes, both of those things. So inevitable means there has to be enough information placed earlier in the story so that when the surprise happens, the audience goes, "Yes." But also you have to be clever enough to plant that information in such a way that the audience doesn't see the surprise coming. You build information into the audience's mind that will allow the surprise to land in an inevitable and yet surprising way. That is the best surprise you can offer someone.…

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