Most people think storytelling lives at the surface: crafting sentences, choosing words, editing for rhythm. That’s Level One. That’s where the polish happens. But it’s also the shallest, easiest place to work.
Here are the three levels, stacked from bottom to top.
Level One: Tools
Rhetorical techniques. Editing craft. The architecture of narrative. How to place a comma. When to start in medias res. Which metaphor lands harder. These are real skills and they matter—they make the medicine go down easier, as they say.
But they don’t change the medicine itself.
Level Two: Truth
This is where most people get uncomfortable. Truth means dropping the mask. It means showing the parts of your story you’d rather keep hidden. Your doubts. Your failures. The time you were completely wrong. The fear that still wakes you at three in the morning.
Truth is harder than tools. You can learn tools from a book. Truth requires vulnerability. It requires deciding that what you stand to gain—real connection, real credibility, real trust—is worth the risk of being seen fully.
Most people think deeper storytelling means better tools. They’re wrong. Deeper storytelling means more honesty.
Level Three: Live a Better Story
This is the one nobody really talks about, which is a shame because it’s the only one that matters at scale.
It’s not about words. It’s not about technique. It’s about becoming the person whose story is actually worth telling.
I’ve done over 1,200 podcast episodes starting from literal zero—no audience, no platform, just the decision to show up and talk into the void twice a week for years. Not because it was a great idea. Not because there was an immediate payoff. Because that’s the story I wanted to live. And that lived story—that commitment to keep going when nobody was listening—is infinitely more powerful than any technique or confession could ever be.
You can’t fake Level Three. You can’t workshop it or edit it into existence. You have to live it.
Here’s the useful bit: most people spend all their energy at Level One, tweaking sentences and worrying about structure. Some people get to Level Two—they get vulnerable, they get honest. But almost nobody lives at Level Three, which is why that level has so much power in the marketplace.
The path is clear. Tools matter, but only as a foundation. Truth is deeper, harder, and worth doing. And the real work—the work that actually compounds over years—is deciding to become someone worth talking about.
That’s where the three levels point.