The more you stand to lose, the more the story grabs you.
Here’s a principle that’s almost too obvious to need saying: not all struggles are equally dramatic. How you describe your struggle makes a massive difference — not just to how tense it feels, but to whether it resonates with anyone else.
Consider two ways of framing the same fact: “I needed a change after 18 years in the same business.”
Now consider this: “I spent 18 years building something that worked. Made money, helped people, built a reputation. Then one day I couldn’t ignore the clock anymore. Ageing. The people I’d lost. The awareness that time doesn’t wait around. I wanted to do something brave before it ran out.”
The facts haven’t changed. But the stakes have moved from “professional restlessness” to something universal — mortality, legacy, the fear that we’re running out of time to matter. That’s a different story.
This is what raising the stakes means. You’re not lying or exaggerating. You’re identifying the real stakes beneath the surface facts. Action. Ageing. Death. Legacy. These are the things that make people feel something, because they connect to what everyone is actually worried about.
The trap is creating false stakes. Making your struggle sound bigger than it was, just to sound more impressive. That’s not raising stakes — that’s manipulating, and people can smell it. When I say “we’re in the reputation building business,” I mean it. The stakes have to be true. They have to match the actual significance of the work.
But within the truth, there’s always room to dig deeper. To find the bigger story underneath the smaller story. To ask: why does this actually matter? Not just to you, but to the part of the audience that’s also mortal, also wants legacy, also wants to do something that means something.
That’s where the real stakes live. In the universal stuff.
Find it, and your story won’t be about you — it’ll be about them.