May 20, 2024
Alex Hormozi has discovered the formula to go viral on social media.
Within 40 months, he has gained 7.8M followers on social media.
And his audience just keeps growing.
So what does Alex know that we don’t?
To find out, I’ve spent the last 21 days watching hundreds of his videos.
54 pages of notes later, I realized that his most viral videos all had one thing in common.
They had stories.
But more interestingly, I realized that this guy has a 4-step formula for his viral stories.
Today you’ll uncover the storytelling formula that has helped Alex go from being a nobody to being worth 100Ms.
And the first step is by far the most important.
Alex Hormozi faces a problem. He knows that he’s competing with millions of other videos and that people click away the moment they get bored.
So he does something to hook you from the first second.
He says something like
When we hear this, we’re like “wow, I wanna know what that one conversation was that changed his life.”
He uses one short sentence before his actual story to sell his story – to get us excited about what is to come.
But even though he has initially gained our attention, he knows that he could lose our attention in a second.
He understands that this is not a TED talk. He can’t spend minutes elaborating on the story as he’d lose people immediately.
That’s why his second step is so crucial.
When I watched the videos, I noted down how long each story was and how much time he spent on each part of the story.
What I found, blew my mind.
His stories are on average 29 seconds long.
29 seconds. That’s nothing.
He sets the scene or gives background information in just one or two sentences.
He doesn’t tell us the back story of “It was a warm summer day in Las Vegas. Birds chirping. Light fog in the air.”
Instead he shares the context in 1 or 2 sentences.
That’s all the background information he gives.
He knows that he needs to move to the third and most important step as quickly as possible.
Only a few seconds in, Alex shares the challenge of his story.
That challenge can be anything – a surprising conversation, a difficult decision, an emotional challenge, a physical challenge. Any problem that he or someone else faced in that moment.
But how does he share that challenge?
In 90% of his stories, he uses one specific technique:
Alex shares the dialogue of that exact moment.
He uses the exact words that were used in the crucial moment of the story.
His dialogue is so incredibly effective, because it’s unexpected, catchy, and simple.
But that would have been boring.
Instead, Alex used much catchier dialogue.
But not only that, in a lot of his videos, he also often changes his voice and posture when sharing that dialogue.
He impersonates the other character.
Up to this point, the story is about himself.
But Alex knows, in order to make his story land really well, he needs to make it relevant for his listeners.
And that’s where he moves into the last step.
In the last step, Alex Hormozi shares what he has learned from that experience.
Notice: He doesn’t say, “here are my 10 takeaways from that story.”
He knows that if he shared 10 takeaways for each story, he’d overwhelm his listeners.
They’d forget all of them.
Instead he shares just 1 thing that he learned from that experience. That’s it.
He also doesn’t say “the moral of the story” because he doesn’t want to come across as a preacher.
Instead he says, “What I learned” or “What I realized is XYZ.”
It’s a much more subtle, much more inviting approach to sharing his wisdom.
This is the 4-step storytelling formula that Alex Hormozi uses to tell viral stories.
But he also uses very specific techniques to spice up his stories.
If you want to tell stories like Alex, you may want to check out this next article, in which you’ll learn how to turn any moment into an incredible story.
Enjoy!
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