The Very Best Speeches All Have These 2 Things in Common

The following is adapted from Story Like You Mean It.

The very best speeches inspire and connect us. And while there are lots of ways they do that, there are two things they all do to achieve these goals: they find the “dots” and then take the audience on a journey to show how the dots form a cohesive, powerful whole.

Crafting a speech like this is a lot like crafting a compelling story that builds a connection with the listener. I call that kind of story a PeakStory, and I developed a method to help people create them—and, it turns out, to create powerful, compelling speeches too. 

#1: They Connect the Dots

After I’d constructed the PeakStory method, I became aware of how the best speeches validated it. While certainly not the only one, one of the best examples was the Stanford Commencement Speech given by the late Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation. 

Jobs literally said, the first story is about connecting the dots. 

Oftentimes, we use that phrase, but we don’t appreciate what it means. For some people, it suggests randomness. In fact, we’re derandomizing, just as the PeakStory method teaches.

#2: They Have the Right Type of Stories

The best speeches don’t just connect the dots, either. They have the three stories the PeakStory method asks for. 

Look at Jobs’s transcript here or watch his video. You’ll find he has the hero story, the collaborative story, and the virtuous story, just like the PeakStory method teaches and the most compelling speeches and PeakStories have.

The Heroic Story

The first story Jobs tells is about dropping out of Reed College after six months. He stayed around for another eighteen months because what he really wanted to do was drop into classes that he found fascinating versus being in classes that didn’t really mean anything to him. 

This was heroic because when Jobs was adopted as a young child, his biological mother made his adopted parents promise he would someday go to college, which neither of them had done. That was a requirement before she would sign the adoption papers. 

Seventeen years later, not only is he in college, but he has also naively chosen to go to a college that is almost as expensive as Stanford. It cost nearly all of his working-class parents’ savings, but they were going to honor their commitment. Imagine the pressure on him; being heroic for him was staying in college, so as not to blow his mother’s and father’s hard-earned money. 

Eventually, he stumbled into a calligraphy class, and he got interested. He learned about typefaces and about varying the amount of space between letter combinations. It didn’t seem like it had any application in his life, but ten years later, when he was designing the first Apple personal computer, the connection was made. He changed the way computer fonts look and came up with the first computer with beautiful typography. 

The Collaborative Story

Jobs’s collaborative story happened when he started Apple in the garage with Steve Wozniak. A decade later, it became a $2 billion company. 

Then there was a negative collaborative moment when he got fired from Apple. But, in fact, it was the best thing that ever happened to him because, in his words, the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. 

The Virtuous Story

The virtuous moment was starting another company. That company, Pixar, went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature. Maybe you’ve heard of it: Toy Story. It’s now the most successful story in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Jobs then returned to Apple, where the technology he developed is still at the heart of the company’s renaissance. 

Jobs’s speech connects more dots, but those are the ones that mattered most. He goes on to talk about having cancer. By then, he had figured out years earlier that if you live each day as if it were the last, then someday, it will be. So for thirty-three years, he would look at the mirror and ask himself, “Is this what I want to do today?” 

Whenever the answer was no for too many days, he would know that he needed to change. 

A Purposeful Life

When I stumbled across this speech, I actually shed a tear because it was such a beautiful validation of the PeakStory method. Jobs was so obviously connecting dots to create the arc of his life story. 

So when Jobs gave this speech, he was already six months over his life expectancy from the doctors’ prognosis. But the speech is not about dying. It is about living a meaningful, purposeful life—even though his life looked very disconnected at one point. 

So let’s get to living by getting to discovering and leveraging these tools in your own life. It’s almost like a call to get to work. 

For more advice on how to use the PeakStory method to create a powerful speech or tell your own PeakStory, you can find Story Like You Mean It on Amazon.

Dr. Dennis Rebelo is a professor, speaker, and career coach. He is the creator of the Peak Storytelling model, his research-based method for crafting the narrative of who you are and what drives you and why, utilized by former professional athletes turned nonprofit leaders as well as entrepreneurs, CEOs, guidance professionals, and advisers throughout the world.

Dr. Rebelo, former president of Alex and Ani University and co-founder of the Sports Mind Institute, recently received the 2020 Thomas J. Carroll Award for Teaching Excellence at Roger Williams University. He currently resides in Rhode Island.