Episode Highlights

• Learning how storytelling defines everything we experience and create
• Structuring your origin story
• What does storytelling look like in a reality show like American Ninja Warrior?
• Jeff Bartch’s guide to telling compelling stories
• Understanding the most basic elements of story and their ubiquity in art
• You can’t NOT tell a story, so learn how to do it engagingly
• The dangers of comparing your story to others instead of living your own
• If you’re struggling, remind yourself that you are at the beginning of your story
• Stop making excuses and turn your problems into obstacles to be surmounted
• Don’t worry about being original, learn to be authentic

Useful Links

• Edit Better: Hollywood-Tested Strategies for Powerful Video Editing
• Story Greenlight

About Guest

Jeff Bartsch is a multi-faceted author, teacher, and television editor based out of Los Angeles. He is the author of “Edit Better: Hollywood-Tested Strategies for Powerful Video Editing” and built his career editing television for ABC, NBC, Universal, Disney, Apple, and many others. Jeff’s commentary on the entertainment industry has been featured in TIME Magazine, USA Today, the Associated Press, and multiple textbooks.

Jeff is the founder of Story Greenlight, a virtual community that helps online video creators connect with their audience, turn up the impact of their message, and change people’s lives.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m a here today with Jeff Bartsch, who is an author, a teacher, and he is a television editor out here in Los Angeles, just like me. He’s the author of the book Edit Better: Hollywood-tested strategies for powerful video editing, and he has also worked in television for networks like ABC, NBC, Universal, Disney, Apple, and a whole bunch of others, like all the big ones, you’ve probably worked for all of them, and most importantly, Jeff is now the founder of something called Story Green Light, which we are going to talk all about tonight. So, Jeff, it is a pleasure to have you back on the show this evening with me.

Jeff Bartsch: Glad to hear you. Glad to be here, man. Thanks.

Zack Arnold: And for anybody that may have noticed, when I said back on the show, that is because Jeff was on the show before, for one of my favorite episodes of all time, where you and I geeked out on the idea of setting goals and following through with him, which everybody knows I am just totally obsessed about, is understanding how to achieve things, how to set goals, so for anybody that wants to go deeper into the stuff that you and I talked about in our first episode, I will put a link in the show notes. But for this episode, we’re going to talk all about the concept of story, because people that work in creative industries, whether they realize it or not, their job is to tell stories. Well, I’m a graphic designer, I just draw pictures. Your picture needs to tell a story. Vloggers need to tell stories, editors tell stories, directors tell stories, and most importantly, we all tell stories about ourselves as well. So, what I want to do first is I want to give people a little bit more background about you. So, let’s start with Jeff Bartsch’s origin story.

Jeff Bartsch: Aha, well, I was born at a very young age, blah blah blah, and that’s where everyone groans. But really, what happens is I was born in Australia. My dad was working over there as a youth pastor, and mom was pregnant with me when we moved over there, so that’s why I was born in Australia. But we moved back before I turned four, which is why I have no accent. Grew up mainly in the Midwest, US, and had a pretty quiet upbringing, mainly because most of my life I have preferred books to people, I preferred playing with Legos to playing with people, and I’ve always been kind of a solitary kind of a guy, ironically. When you fast forward to the current day, here I am, I’m in Hollywood, working as a television editor, sitting by myself in a room with a computer all day long, playing with the Lego building blocks of picture and sound and story and all that kind of stuff. So quick fast forward, it’s just one of those things where it’s like, how did I end up in this place? It’s just the single most perfect job I can imagine having for myself personally. So, beyond that, I’ve been a musician my whole life, and I’ve started playing piano when I was four years old, took lessons all the way up until when I was in high school, I had a big fancy recital when I was in 12th grade and put on a tux and played on a big fancy piano and played fancy pieces by Chopin and all that kind of stuff, and I was a composition major for a while in high school, and when I was in junior high, I got into things like multi-track recording and arranging and recording music, and so I was like, I had all these different things that I’ve always been into, and I never really knew how it all fit together, I knew it was all kind of in the same world, but it took me years and years to realize that it all is about communication, and really, when you distill it down even more, everything that I was doing, whether I was sitting down at a piano, picking out a song to play, picking a song to arrange on the fly, or whether I was recording a piece of music, or later on when I was sitting down in the edit bay to put a piece together. It’s all about storytelling, it’s all about communication, and all this stuff, it all fits together.

Zack Arnold: So, one of the things that you do for. A living is you package other people’s stories into very, very short forms. So, the reason that I wanted to start with your origin story is I wanted to get a sense of how you structure your origin story, and what did you do? You started with the beginning, and then you talk about the middle, and then you came to the end, but you weren’t just telling all this useless, boring information that was every little piece of your history. You used the most important parts, right? So, what I want to start talking about is how you take other people’s stories, and we’re mainly talking about the work that you do on shows such as Spartan and American Ninja Warrior, and you know things that I, of course, have very little interest in whatsoever, things that I’m not obsessed with at all,

Jeff Bartsch: Not in the slightest,

Zack Arnold: But I, what I want to talk about is how you actually tell these people stories, and the reason why this is important is now that I am ridiculously, incredibly assessed with American Ninja Warrior, and I think by the time that this airs, everybody’s going to know what’s going on anyway, so I don’t need to feel like I’m giving anything away, but I’ve gone back and started watching at the beginning of the show, and unfortunately the first three seasons I can’t find available anywhere, maybe you know where they are, but I can’t find them anywhere, but starting

Jeff Bartsch: It seems pretty tough to come by those,

Zack Arnold: And I would guess it’s probably just because they’re pretty low budget, not terribly well produced, could be wrong, maybe it’s a different production company. I’m not sure what the logistics are, but watching season four, I swear to God, it’s a completely different TV show, because it’s just about people running through an obstacle course, and you would think, well, isn’t that what American Ninja Warrior is? But it isn’t. There’s a gigantic seismic shift that happens with the show starting at season six, where all of a sudden you find yourself rooting for people way more, and it’s not about the obstacles, it’s about people’s stories, and you are one of the masterminds behind telling those stories. So I want to construct or deconstruct the process of telling a person’s story in very short form, because this is useful either for somebody to tell stories about others for a living, or they want to be able to tell the story about themselves. So, let’s just kind of go through and deconstruct your entire process when you need to tell somebody’s story.

Jeff Bartsch: Okay. Well, to do that, let’s take this way up to the 30,000 foot view. Let’s go like big picture conceptual. So, before we talk about how we put a story together, let’s just talk about what a story is, because there’s a lot of discussion one way or another. So, there have been so many people who have written so many books and said so many things about what story is, and so I’m not going to say that this is all original with me. In fact, I’m actually a big fan of the work of a guy by the name of Donald Miller, and his thoughts on story. So, I’m taking some of his ideas and adding some of my own. So, here’s the idea of what a story is in its most basic form. A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it, and experiences a transformation as a result. So, I’ll just say that again. A story, in its most pure basic form, is a character who wants something, who overcomes conflict to get it, and experiences a transformation as a result. That’s the starting point, so when you’re looking for some place, when you’re looking to tell the story of a person, say an athlete competing on a show like American Ninja Warrior, you have to know who the person is, you have to know what they want, you have to know what’s holding them up from getting there, and you have to know what that struggle is, and the best pieces they show that change that shows like I used to be this, and then I struggled, and I went through all the work, and now I’m that. So that’s the idea of a story in a nutshell.

Zack Arnold: Well, and it pretty much sounds like you just described, I believe almost every movie and television show ever created in the history of modern culture.

Jeff Bartsch: It covers pretty much all of them well, and I will say there are a lot of people in television and movies who are like, who want to say things like, well, this is feeling so formulaic, so I want to just like get rid of these rules, and I just want to do stuff that’s different, and every once in a blue moon they can get away with it, but most of the times if you ignore those fundamental tenets of what a story is, it doesn’t work. Now I will say, when you look at a lot of content online, like if you go to YouTube, and if you’re familiar, for those who aren’t familiar with the idea of what a vlog is, vlogging is basically the equivalent of a blog with video, hence the term vlog, and. And a lot of the time people just go around documenting what they do all day long and I will tell you it’s really easy to have a really, really boring vlog, because if you just go about your day and you say, okay, well, hey, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, and we’re doing this, and at the end of the day, oh, that was nice, that’s like just shoot me now. There is no, like, we barely know who this person is. We barely know what they want. We barely know what’s keeping them from getting it, and it’s just like there’s no tension whatsoever. But I will say there are a lot of stories that you can put out that if you keep them really short, it’s kind of like you’re a drug dealer and you’re giving people a hit of something, so like online on YouTube, there are a lot of people who like to do travel, travel films, travel vlogging, and really you can get away without really digging into a story, you can just deliver a hit of amazing visuals, which trigger a response of escapism, like the desire for escapism in the viewer, and you’re like, man, those crystal blue waters with the hammock in the under the palm tree, halfway around the world, that looks really cool. I really wish I could do that. Sigh, back to my real life, you know. So you can do stuff like that, short form, and deliver a hit of some little thing you can have a cat video that people watch, and you can, it’ll make you laugh, and that might also give you a little hit of escapism from whatever you’re wanting to escape, but really, the longer your story goes, the more important it is to adhere to those tenets of story that goes for like a 10 minute vlog that goes for a half hour television show that goes for a two hour movie, and that most definitely applies to our lives in general.

Zack Arnold: Well, and it applies to everything, it applies to this podcast. Like, I have a very specific story that I would like to tell, that story is about story, so this is a little meta, but I would argue that there’s almost no content available anywhere that doesn’t have some form of story. There are going to be some things, but I believe there are very, very few, and much fewer than most people would assume. And I’ll give you an example. This is going to sound like I’m being ridiculous, but I’m actually being mostly serious. So, you’d mentioned, like, cat videos, right. You’ve got a 62nd cat video. This is just escapism. I’m bored at work. I’m waiting for somebody to email me something. I’m just going to take a minute. I’m going to watch something, right? But there is a story. There’s a cat. The cat, the challenge for the cat is that he wants to get on the ceiling fan. He gets on the ceiling fan. The ceiling fan turns on, and now the challenge is he must get off the ceiling fan, that is the cat’s struggle, but the cat goes around and around and around and around, but then he gets off, and that’s his transformation as he overcame the ceiling fan, and yes, I’m being a little sarcastic, but I’m not being that sarcastic,

Jeff Bartsch: Not all that much,

Zack Arnold: And let’s go to the, let’s go to the travel travel vlog, because I think that if you were to just put up video, let’s say that I were to go on vacation, and I’m in the Caribbean, and I just have a camera, and I’m shooting underwater footage, and I’m shooting footage while I’m on top of a mountain, and I’m looking at all these beautiful waters, and all I do is point the camera places, and it’s silent, there’s very, very little story there, but the order that I put the images in might tell a specific story. But now, let’s say that I’m narrating those images, and I’m talking about, well, when we were here, we did this and we did that. There’s a story, it’s boring, but there’s still a story, so it’s not just images. But now imagine if you are really successful travel vlogger. The reason people are watching your story is because you’re letting people live their lives through yours, and you’re talking about how I used to sit in a cubicle, and I used to hate my life, and I used to think about traveling, and one day I just decided I’m going to do it. I’m going to take my life savings, and I’m going to travel to these five countries over the next three months, and I’m going to see if I can just travel the world, and you document it. Guess why people are so much more engaged with similar types of footage is because you are telling a story that people relate to and want to live through. So that’s something that I think you really, really specialized in with Story Green light is helping people that know they can shoot images with their iPhone or whatever, or maybe they are even professional storytellers, but they want to be able to tell better stories. So, let’s talk a little bit specifically about the concept of Story Greenlight, and what that really means.

Jeff Bartsch: Story Green Light is the name of the YouTube channel that I set up, and its name comes from the term Green Light, which is very well known all throughout Hollywood. I mean, it’s the idea of, like, for the last century people have come to Hollywood with a story to tell, and they’ve waited for permission, they’ve waited for someone with authority to say yes. To their story to give them the green light, everyone’s looking for the green light from someone in Hollywood, and so when they got that green light, that meant that you had the money and the equipment and the platform to put your story in front of a whole bunch of people at once, and that, of course, has all changed because at this point, if you have a cell phone, you have the gear, if you have access to the internet, you have the platform and access to the audience, and so the thing that remains is the green light, and you no longer need any kind of a green light from some faceless studio executive, you give yourself permission to say this is the message that I want to spread to the world, and I’m going to stand up and I’m going to do it. So that’s the idea. So, okay, so just back up from that a little bit. That right there is a story of a transformation of the term green light. It starts at point A, and now it’s point B. We have seen that change, we’ve seen that shift of context. So, even just that right there, it really, this story structure, it just seeps into everything you do, everything you say, every conversation you have, and every choice that you make in your life.

Zack Arnold: Well, I think the key word that so many people get wrong when they talk about either telling a story or trying to advance their own story in their own lives is the word permission, which I think is so important to the work that you’re doing, is they don’t give themselves the permission to tell a story, and where I see this so much is when I talk to people that are trying to advance in their careers, and they’re looking for career advice from me, and they’ll say, well, you know, I want to be an editor someday, but right now I’m, you know, kind of working at this laundry startup during the day, and well, I, but I edit music videos at night, and I edit montages, like all I ever do is edit, edit, edit, but I work at a startup, so I’m not an editor. I’m like, the only person that says you’re not an editor is you. You need to give yourself permission to say I’m an editor, to say I’m a writer, to say I’m a director. If you work at a coffee house 40 hours a week, but you write a full-length screenplay a month, you’re a writer, but you need the permission to call yourself that, and I feel that’s such a huge mistake that people make when they’re trying to tell their story, is they’re hesitant about what they’ve accomplished and what they do, so they figure, well, if I haven’t gotten paid a lot, I’m not a director, but you’ve directed 12 short films, but they haven’t gotten paid, so let’s talk about this concept of permission, because I think this is so key,

Jeff Bartsch: You know, the idea of permission often comes down to comparison. It is such an evil trap to go through life constantly comparing yourself to others. I mean, just one of the things that I always talk about, I’ve done quite a bit of coaching with students who want to get into the editing industry, and one of the things they quickly figure out is they think that if they do a great big fancy show, then that means they are going to be, in the sense, a great big fancy person because of that show, and they think, well, if I could just get there, then I’d be happy. Well, they end up getting there, and they realize that there are all these other levels of higher levels of greener grass, if you will, and you know it’s not about it’s not about comparing yourself. The idea is, if you’re like, certainly for those who are saying, I would love to see x happen in my life. Do not compare your beginning to someone else’s middle or someone else’s end. You’re at the beginning and you’re saying, okay, who am I? What do I want to accomplish? What is standing in my way, and how am I going to work? How am I going to overcome those obstacles to get where I want to go, that is how one starts figuring out one’s own story and taking an active role in writing that.

Zack Arnold: Okay, so let’s say that I am a vlogger, for instance, or let’s say that I’m somebody that’s making videos online, either just for fun or because I want to make a business out of it. Let’s just start from scratch. Give me one of the craziest kind of stories, or you know, just somebody’s profession or something that they’re trying to do online. Just give me an example of somebody in your community, and let’s start from ground zero, right there.

Jeff Bartsch: Okay, so for instance, there’s one of one of the subscribers to story green light is a young guy who he’s interested in beads, like he’s making, like making crafts out of beads, like bracelets and stuff, and and so he, what he has done a really, really cool thing, he puts together tutorial videos of how to put these things. Together, and he tells the story of the things themselves in the process, so for instance, he does, hey, today we’re going to be making a shamrock, and he doesn’t just show you how to string the beads together to make a shamrock, he said, you know, he starts telling you about the history of the shamrock, and he tells you about the people of Ireland and all that stuff, he starts weaving all these different elements together. One of the things that I love about what he’s doing, like I actually saw a video that this guy did, and he didn’t show you exactly what he was making, but he was talking about his own journey, about how he wants to be all that he can be, and he reveals at the end of the video it’s a bead design of the Iron Man mask and he ends up with some sort of an idea of like you know you have to realize that you can be the hero yourself and that kind of thing is spot on because this guy his name is Justin Bennett. He is not just talking about the thing, he’s talking about the thing under the thing, and that’s one of the best ways that I know to make any story more meaningful. You don’t just talk about the thing on the surface, you talk about what’s driving it underneath you talk about the thing under the thing, so for instance, the thing that makes a show like American Ninja Warrior so incredibly powerful is that that obstacle course in and of itself isn’t it’s this massive thing, like you just look at it, and you just marvel that anyone is able to get through it at all, but really it’s not just a whole big set of truss and light and pipe and all this stuff. This obstacle course is literally a metaphor for life itself, as we go through obstacles in life, and people fall down. What do you do when you fall down? Do people get up? What’s the look on people’s face when they fall, and when they get back up? And so you can just keep going layers and layers and layers down on this, and it gets more and more meaningful the more layers under the surface that you go, it’s super powerful.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean, there’s no question that that is by far the biggest reason that at least I watch, and my family watches, and I think millions of people watch. I don’t think this show would have become the phenomenon that it is if they just continued year after year to show a bunch of free runners going through a course and going up and down cargo nuts and grabbing wing nuts and flipping around. I just think the people get bored very, very easily, and that’s even the experience that I got watching season four was like, “Wow, this is really kind of monotonous. And every once in a while, they tell a little bit about somebody or show some footage of them doing free running upstairs or in, you know, subway stations, like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool. But once you start getting into people’s personal stories, and I’ll give you one, one very specific example, I could give you 100 but this is the one that stuck in my mind. Is there’s a guy that is on the show, his name is Lance Picus, and super rip, super buff guy that’s on this farm, he’s a rancher, okay? So he’s, you know, down, hold good old boy, he goes through the course, first year he did okay. Next year he did better. Then all of a sudden he becomes a phenom, but then last year you find out that his wife has MS, and now all of a sudden him running through that obstacle course completely changes for both him, for his family, and most importantly for the audience experiencing it. So walk me through the process a little bit of how you help to progress somebody’s story, and this is something I know that you’ve talked about before, where you kind of feel like, oh God, if I have to cut this person’s video package one more time, but really, even over the course of several seasons, you’re progressing people’s stories forwards, and that obstacle course really does take on a different meaning, so he was one example that I had, so you can talk more about that one, or about somebody else that maybe you thought about as well.

Jeff Bartsch: Lance Picus is quite the guy, because when you look at him, like you say, he looks like he lives on a farm and pitches hay bales for a living, which, which basically is what he does, among other things, and so when you look at him on the surface, you start thinking about what kind of person he is or person he isn’t, and so you can start by doing some things on the surface, you can start by telling a story about, hey, this is Lance, he lives on a farm. The longer you get to know someone, the more you get to know about them and who they are. That’s that first person, that’s that first element of the story, is like, who is this character, who are they? You get to know more about what they want and what’s. Keeping them from getting what they want, you know. Lance is married to his wife, and they have kids, and they want to raise their kids. They want to have a happy family. They have this monster of an obstacle in their way, in the form of multiple sclerosis. And so you see them taking on this obstacle, and you hear what they have to say about it, and you see the wife fighting back tears. You see Lance, this stoic guy, this stoic cowboy, he’s fighting back tears, because, and, and anyone who dares to make fun of him is just like clearly this, this man loves his wife, and it’s tearing him up to see this conflict in her life, and so it’s just such an honor to be able to be part of sharing the arc of this man of this family’s story as it goes from season to season. Now, an interesting thing about American Ninja Warrior, probably one of the most well-known faces that that you’ll see on American Ninja Warrior is a gal by the name of Casey Cat and Zaro. She is a former collegiate gymnast, you know, and anyone who sees the show and has been watching for multiple seasons, you’ll, you’ll know this, but just to recap, she is a former collegiate gymnast, and she is all of five feet, she’s the very short gal, and she ended up being the first woman to scale the warped wall, and this at being five feet tall, and I’ve helped edit stories since that have ended up on the air, where there are guys that are saying it’s like, well, I never thought that I could go off for American Ninja Warrior because I thought I was too short. Well, I’m five two, Casey Cat, Zara was five foot. Oh, what excuse am I making? You know, and so, and so, they, they end up going out for the show, they get on the show, and they get up the wall,

Zack Arnold: And I think that one of the, the key things to really take away from that is the idea of excuses. Excuses are such a powerful, powerful thing in our lives that stop us from doing things, and now I feel like I’m definitely getting on my, my soapbox here, and maybe deviating from the, the formula that we’re talking about a little bit, but I just, I think that excuses are the words that most people use instead of obstacles, and another word would be problems, and what I tell people is kind of a half joke, but not really joking, is I say that you can get rid of every single problem in your life instantly, instantly get rid of all your problems by doing one thing, and that stop using the word problem and start using the word obstacle, because nobody wants to talk about their problems, oh, I’ve got this problem and this problem and that problem, right, but when there are obstacles, there’s immediately this idea that this is something that can be overcome with effort, and when people make excuses and talk about their problems, all they’re doing is framing whatever is in their way as something that can’t be overcome or something they don’t want to overcome, but when you’re telling the story of, like, you said, a five two gymnast that’s saying, well, I didn’t think that I could do it, but then I see this five foot zero girl that I think she weighs like 90 pounds or something. For anybody that’s finished, yeah, for anybody that’s seen the show or hasn’t seen the show, the wall that she scaled is 14 and a half feet, that’s three times her size, literally three times her size. So she didn’t make excuses. She said there’s an obstacle in front of me that nobody’s ever done before, and I’m going to figure it out. But it’s my belief that it’s not about you have to do all these amazing super human things. The first thing you have to do is start using different language when you’re telling your own story, so the words that you use when you’re writing your own script completely dictate the direction that you are going to go or not going to go,

Jeff Bartsch: Absolutely. And it’s as you, and when you think about it, from the terms of that, that core definition of what a story is, you start, you know, you as a person want to get somewhere, the obstacle in your way is the thing that you’re calling a problem, and that’s standing in your way when you decide to change the words that you use and call it an obstacle or a challenge instead of a problem. You are making a shift in context, you’re making a turn, and that ends up showing a transformation, both in the way that you think about that, and it ends up showing a transformation ultimately in who you are as a person, because you’re not the same person when you get through those challenges, and you get those, get to the other side, you are not the same. Person, as you were when you started,

Zack Arnold: And that’s ultimately what people want out of watching stories. They want to experience the transformation. That’s basically what any good movie is about, is you don’t want to go from point A to point A, you want to go from point A to point Z, living through somebody else. And this is not just something we’ve been doing for the last 100 years with movies, this is something that we’ve been doing since the beginning of recorded human history. I mean, if you look at cave paintings, those are stories that cavemen are telling, and they’re trying to make sense of the world around them and make sense of all the things that they’re dealing with, the things that they don’t understand about the universe or religion or whatever, it is. There’s so many deep ways that you can look at how stories help us experience the world, but ultimately it’s all about knowing how to tell that story. If you number one want to be successful in any way, shape, or form, either just trying to move along in life or trying to do specifically what you are doing and helping others do, which is create a world online where you are telling your stories, and I think going back to the example that you shared a while ago, talking about the guy that is making shapes with beads, I would venture to guess that there’s probably nobody listening to the show right now that’s saying, wow, that sounds incredibly interesting, I want to watch a guy design beads, right, but here’s the thing. In today’s world, and you can talk more about this as well, with the vast connections that we have online, you don’t need to tell a story that interests everybody. You just need to find an audience that loves your specific story, and if you tell it well, people that enjoy that content already will find you. That’s the idea of finding your niche.

Jeff Bartsch: Absolutely, one of the things that has been true pretty much forever is that if you tell a story that you want to be accessible to everyone, you better have one incredible story that adheres 100% to that formula of the classic story, because it has to have something for everyone. Now, every once in a while, you get a movie that does that, that is equally attractive and engaging to adults, teenagers, children, males, females, like all across these different demographics, and those are exceedingly rare these days. We no longer live in a world where everyone watched the same three channels of television, literally, because they were there. We now have hundreds of channels of television. If you even watch television anymore, I mean, you can go on to some online service streaming whatever shows they do, you can go onto a place like YouTube and find literally whatever kind of content you want to make. So, if you’re looking to tell a story, you must know who you want to be talking to. One of the phrases people use is, if your message is too wide, it’s going to splatter, and if you splatter, you don’t matter, that kind of a thing. You have to find some sort of focus to say, okay, who specifically am I talking to? So, for instance, I will say right now, Story Green Light is still a very small channel, and I’m still going through my own journey of finding out who is the most interested in the messages that I have to, that I have to talk about, and what I had been doing for a number of years, you know, since my background is in the entertainment industry, working as a television editor, often I would be approached by people who are either they want to be an assistant editor or they are already an assistant editor, they want to sit in the editor’s chair full time, or whatever, or they might have made that jump already and they just want, they just want to get to the next level. So those are the people that I’ve been talking to for a number of years. When I switched over to story green light, I, it was driven by desire for me to say there are so many people out there who have a story in them and who are either giving themselves permission right now or they’re just on the edge of giving themselves permission, and they have zero desire to come to Hollywood and do what you and I do. They just want to be who they are and tell their stories to their crowd, where they are. And so that was where I wanted to say, I was like, Okay, who are the people who most want to hear what I have to say, in terms of that context, and so, as of right now, the working niche audience that I’ve been moving towards is more of people who are already on YouTube, they have a – they either have a small or a medium-sized channel, and they specifically have a message that they want to. Read, as opposed to someone who’s on YouTube because they just want to post selfie videos and say, ‘Look at me, I’m amazing. There’s a place for that, and there’s an audience for that. But the people that I most want to help are the people who say, ‘I have a message that the world needs to hear, I don’t know how to do that, and those are the folks that I want to help,

Zack Arnold: All right. So, then, if one of them is listening right now, and they’re saying, I have a story that I want to share, I have a message that desperately needs to get out there, and I’m completely clueless about how to do it. Where do I start?

Jeff Bartsch: Well, frankly, the place where I, the place where I would start is going on to a place like YouTube, and finding out what resonates with you. Find out, like, just look at what people are already doing, because there is, as a man much wiser than I once said, there is nothing new under the sun. They like it is very unlikely that we’re going to come up with a completely brand new story that has never been told before, but that’s that is not in any reason to stop doing what we’re doing. Go see who’s out there already, see what they’re doing, find out. It’s like, what, what attracts me about this? Is it the person’s personality? Is it the way that they is it is the way that they appear on camera? Is it the way that they shoot? Is it with the camera? Is it the way that they put things together, the way they edit things, is the way they use music, or it can be any number of different things. And then say, what do I like what do I think I could do? How can I put that together with what I feel is already inside me? That’s the first step.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that that’s a great place to start is to just look at what others are doing already, and I think the trap that people fall into, which you’ve already kind of alluded to, that’s the trap that I’ve fallen into in the past as well, is thinking I want to get out there and I want to tell a story, and I had this compulsion for years to start a blog. I didn’t really wasn’t interested in podcasting, that just came out of nowhere, but I just, I really wanted to start a blog, and I was looking in my industry, and I was saying, well, there are these guys that talk about video cards, and these guys rate software, and like, I don’t want to do any of that, like there’s so many people that are already doing that, so what I want to do is I want to talk about better health working in a crazy industry like film editing. Nobody’s ever, ever done that before. And then I started my podcast, and I realized that maybe there wasn’t somebody specifically in film editing talking about the stuff that I was, but there are like 1000 podcasts that are doing exactly the same thing that I am, and my first thought was, well, why am I wasting my time? There are other people that are already doing this, and I want to be original. I want to be the first one ever that’s done this, and I want to do it the bester of the bestest ever, ever, right. And then I realized, who cares, right? What I found is that as I started to become a lot more authentic with the way that I told my own story, and I realized that people weren’t looking for the perfect version of me, it was following along my own imperfect journey, that was the part where people really started to resonate with the work that I was doing, and they wanted to come along for the ride, and I realized, oh, well, that kind of takes all the pressure off because I can totally suck at stuff and I can totally fail, and that’s actually a good thing, because it shows that I’m learning and I’m trying to progress from a to z, but people feel like they’re learning alongside with me, and that inspires them, and that’s a huge part of somebody that is online trying to tell their story, is once again going back to this idea of permission. I need to be perfect first. I need to give myself permission to tell my story online, but not until I really figured out this video thing, and my audio needs to sound great, and my I don’t have a good enough lighting kit yet, and you know, I’m not so good with doing the graphic, so I probably shouldn’t do this yet, and again it goes back to not just permission from Hollywood, it’s that permission from yourself to say when is it good enough that I can start sharing this with other people.

Jeff Bartsch: One of the things that has been humbling to realize in my own journey, you know, here I am, I built my career editing television, whose results are measured by how many million people watched the last episode, and then you say, okay, I have this desire to empower storytellers to tell the stories that are most important to them, and I’m going to do that by going onto YouTube, and there was this moment where it’s like, I did, I knew how to set up a YouTube channel, I knew how to do some very basic shooting, but you know what was really humbling, looking at that channel and saying subscriber number zero, number of views zero, I’m like, oh boy, well, here we are, point A. Like you know, we, there’s no way to go but forward from here, and here’s another thing that I’ve been learning, is that just because you know how to edit things that look like a million bucks, it doesn’t mean that you know how to shoot at that same level. I do not, I am not a career camera operator, I’m not a cinematographer, I am, I’m very much a student of the art of capturing moving pictures, and that’s something that I’m actively learning even right now, and so there is no way to be perfect at everything before you get started, that it’s a straw man, it’s it’s a big fancy excuse, and the fact of the matter is I have found myself saying, well, I can’t do this because of x or because of y, and it makes perfect sense, but at the end of the day, it’s because I don’t want to admit to myself that I’m scared. We are really, really good at making up plausible excuses to cover up the fact that we are scared.

Zack Arnold: Yep, I mean, you basically stole the words right out of my mouth, which is saying, and I don’t know who I would attribute this quote to. I’m sure that I’m stealing from somebody, but I can’t think of anyone specific offhand. But I had heard this at one point, and it really resonated with me. It’s that being a perfectionist is just an excuse for being afraid to put something out into the world, and that was a huge revelation for me, because I always considered myself a perfectionist. I am OCD about every single little detail, and anybody that’s ever worked with me this listening is nodding their head vigorously right now, so much they might need a chiropractor tomorrow. Like, oh my god, he’s such a perfectionist, oh my god, he’s so OCD, and I am, and I believe that that’s led to a lot of my success, because I never stop until I feel like I’ve really gotten something right. But when it came to telling my own story and sharing it with the world, first of all, I went through that same experience where I went from having a TV show that I had edited, breaking all of the ratings records, doing season one of Empire, and the finale reached like 25 million people in the first week. I couldn’t even fathom that, that I was sitting in a tiny dark room all by myself one in the morning, cutting scenes, and seven days later 25 million flippin people across the country watched those edits that I was making, and then I went to my podcast and like, huh, gotten like 100 downloads this week. Okay, so that’s a little humbling, but you have to put something out there. And I just realized that with everything that I was doing, I was stopping and not doing it because I was afraid that it wasn’t just right. And once I got over that fear, and I said, you know what, I’m going to put a blog post out that isn’t very good. I’m going to put out a podcast that I probably could have asked better questions, or could have been more concise, or could have had a clear point. I don’t care. Basically, I went from having what was the perfectionist mindset to having what I think is the most important component of being successful, but also being willing to tell your story, which is having the beginner’s mindset, and this is an idea you also get from Buddhism, and you and I have talked about this, where you grew up with very, very Christian faith. I’ve grown up with Buddhist faith, and I’m not Buddhist per se, but if I were to align my values with anything, the most closely would be with Buddhism, and it’s all about the beginner’s mind and the process, and the journey, and not so much about the destination, and I think for anybody that’s out there trying to give themselves permission to tell that story, and it could be a vlogger, it could be a podcaster, or it could just be somebody that wants to do something with their life, and saying, well, I don’t give myself permission to say I’m this, this, or that yet, because I’m not good enough at it. You got to look at it from the beginner’s mind and say, well, if I try to do it and I fail, well, at least I’ve learned something. So, like, for the.. and I’m sure you can talk about this with your videos and with other people’s videos. Now that you do have more than zero subscribers, by the way, I was very impressed by how quickly your subscriber count has gone up, but for me every single time I release something now, I think this could be much better. But what did I learn from the process, and how can others learn from watching me learn?

Jeff Bartsch: Absolutely, and I would say one of the things that’s been most encouraging to me, you know, in this journey of starting up a YouTube channel where there are hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of YouTube channels out there, and you’re like, you’re sitting there, it’s like, why should anyone care about my little YouTube channel? Well, I know I already know that there are people out there who absolutely do care about the message that I have to share. That’s one level, but the next level is, is there a zero point in me saying, why can’t I look like I’ve been doing this for five years, and I’ve done 500 videos, and why can’t I get, why can’t I be there right now, and the answer is, it, that’s just not the way life. Works, I mean, you have to start at the beginning, and you have to progress through all the twists and turns of that story plot that is your life, or this project, this venture that you’re undertaking, and so one of the most important things is it’s not necessarily knowing how everything is going to go, you just need to be willing just to take the next step.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s always about the next step. I mean, that’s probably the biggest thing that I say in my articles, in the courses that I teach online, when I work privately with my coaching students, is that it’s always about taking one more step. The perfect example is just yesterday, and I’m sure it’ll be, you know, months later by the time this comes out, but just yesterday I went out rock climbing with a group of people that are going to be running a Spartan race with me, and somebody was going that had, I don’t believe, had ever been rock climbing, or maybe had been rock climbing once, like years ago, when they were a teenager, were not in shape to do it at all, and they were afraid of heights, and we went over, and we looked at the wall, and looked up, and he’s like, ‘I, there’s just no way, like that is so high, and like, I don’t think I have the grip strength. I’m like, ‘No, no, you don’t have to go to the top, all you have to do is reach this one. He’s like, ‘Well, I can do that. It’s like, ‘Great, so grab that one. So he grabs it. It’s like, see, now all you have to do is grab the one that’s a little bit higher up, just grab that. And he started to do that, and all of a sudden, wouldn’t you know it, he ended up at the top, about three minutes later, but it’s that shift in mindset, it’s not, oh my god, I can’t climb to the top, it’s just I need to grab the next one, and that’s the part that so many people miss, is when they’re thinking about telling their story, or thinking about setting up a vlog, or whatever it is that it might be, they’re always thinking it’s so much work, there’s so many things that I have to do, and they’re just looking at this giant macro goal, and they’re not thinking about how do I break this into very, very surmountable simple micro goals, and that once again, that’s what I’m completely and totally obsessed about, is how to break anything infinitely challenging and very complex, and make it really, really simple. So all you have to do is take that one step forwards, and then another one, and another one, but doing it confidently, knowing that that’s going to lead you to where you want to go.

Jeff Bartsch: Absolutely, and even as you do that, you need to give yourself permission to say it’s okay to not have all the answers. All the best stories in the world have open-ended questions just hanging there in the middle. You don’t know if the hero is going to come to the end of the journey successfully, and there is a risk that the hero might fail, and that’s just that. That’s what makes the story interesting, and that’s also what often gives us the most motivation to say, let’s make this happen, let’s take that next step. I don’t know exactly where the next step is going to be, but I’m going to get there, and I’ll, and I’ll find out when I get there.

Zack Arnold: So, let me ask you this question, then, because I want to be very, very, very respectful of your time. It’s now getting into the wee hours of the evening, and you and I both have little children, and I’m sure you wake up just as early as I do. What I really want to do before we go is I want to make sure that people are aware of your checklist. You have this checklist that’s 27 questions to make sure that you can craft the perfect video, and there’s no way that we are going to be going through all 27 questions. However,

Jeff Bartsch: Not a good idea.

Zack Arnold: No, that’s why there’s a guide for it. So, number one, I want to make sure that people are aware of where they can get this guide, but then more importantly, what I want to do is just kind of give them a taste, like give me like the one or two questions that pop in your mind the most that you feel that people need to ask if they want to craft the perfect video.

Jeff Bartsch: Okay, well, the place to go for that is just go to www.storygreenlight.com that will take you either to a website or either to the YouTube channel itself, and you will see links there, either on the cover of the of the website or the cover art of the YouTube channel, 27 point checklist for crafting the perfect video. You can get that at the about tab on the YouTube channel, and when you download that, it’s going to be broken into multiple sections, and it’s going to talk about what’s the big picture. Who am I talking to? Who am who am I as a person, and what, and what is the story that I’m telling? And really, everything begins from the third. Again, going back to the 30,000 foot view. Question number one is all about what is my desired outcome, you know, when I get to the end of this story, what do I want to look back and see? You know, what do I want to have gone through? What do I want to overcome? Or, if I’m telling a story about someone else, what do I want them to have gone through. When you’re crafting a story like that, you. You need to know what you want to accomplish. Then the second element of that is you can have the most meaningful story, but if it’s given to the wrong crowd, it’s not going to resonate, it’s not going to land, and it’s not going to do what you want it to do, and so then you have to say, Who am I talking to, or you know, if you’re looking at this from a, from a viewpoint of your life, crafting your life, Who is my audience in my life? Who are the people with whom I interact or want to interact with? Who are they specifically, and when you have that desired outcome, you know who your audience is, that desired group of people that you want to interact with, things just start coming together as you go from there.

Zack Arnold: So I think that the final thing that I want people to get from this checklist before we go, this is a such a super important thing, and it’s actually two questions, it’s not just one, but if you can figure this out, this is really the secret sauce to telling not just a story or a good story, but a great story, which is the difference between what does my audience think they want and what does my audience need.

Jeff Bartsch: That’s a really big deal, just thinking conceptually about story and obstacles getting in the way. There are there are multiple kinds of conflict. There is there is external conflict. There’s something, there’s a force acting on you from the outside. So, like, if you’re driving through an ice storm and you’re wanting to get to Grandma’s house for Christmas dinner, or whatever, it’s like the external obstacle is you’re driving on a sheet of ice, so then when you, the level below that is you have internal obstacles, that internal obstacle might be you’re petrified of driving on ice on this journey because you went off the road 15 years ago and you’ve never recovered from it and it’s just left you freaked out ever since, and then there’s the idea of the philosophical kind of conflict, which doesn’t really fit this example very well, but the, but going back to going back to what does the audience want versus what they actually need. Audiences almost always begin with the surface. They think that the solution to their problem is going to be fixing the external stuff around them, and what they end up finding out is that the stuff that really ends up making the biggest difference, the solutions that make the biggest difference in their lives are the solutions to their internal conflict. It’s the stuff that is going on inside their head, and so when you find the difference between what does the audience want, that’s the surface stuff, and what do they actually need? That’s when that deep transformation comes, and you end up going through really difficult conflict that’s made even more difficult by the fact that it’s you struggling against yourself, and when you come out on the other side of that conflict, you emerge a different person, and that’s the transformation of the very best kind,

Zack Arnold: And I think the key to this, if you are somebody that’s trying to tell a story for others, and it took me several years to figure this out as well, but it’s one thing to just figure out, you know, I’m going to tell the story with the external conflict, conflict versus the internal conflict, but if you can help other people, like you’re saying, help them discover what the inner conflict is, they are going to love you for life, and to give one very specific and quick example when it comes to the world of productivity, and this is again something I could probably go on for hours and hours, and I promise that I won’t. But the first thing that people always say is, what productivity app do you recommend? I want to get the best to-do list app that’s out there. What do you recommend? I never give them an answer. I’m so difficult with people because I just keep asking them questions and it drives them crazy, but they’ll say, what’s the best to do list app, and I’ll say, why do you need a to do list app? Well, because you know, I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff that I want to get done, and I just, I really want to get it organized. Well, why do you feel that you’re not getting it done now? What do you think this app, how will this app make a difference? Well, you know, I just, I feel like I procrastinate all the time, and I just think I need to get myself better organized. So, what app do you recommend? Okay, well, why do you think you’re procrastinating on things all the time? And then they start thinking about, they’re like, well, I don’t know, like, I guess I’m kind of disorganized, but now that I think about it, like, some of the stuff that I’m trying to get done, I’m, I guess I’m kind of afraid to do it, bam, it. Internal conflict, like it went from I need the best to-do list app to, wow, I procrastinate because I’m afraid of doing the things that I think that I need to get done, so I’m not doing them. So I’m on Facebook, and I’m on YouTube watching cat videos. So here we are back at cat videos of cat stuck ceiling fans because of an internal conflict, and that is the whole point of all this, is that just about everything tells a story, and if you really want to tell a great story, you don’t want to just entertain, you don’t want to just go to from point a to point z. You want to help people find that internal conflict deep inside them. That’s when people will love your stuff, and they’ll come back for more, and for more, and for more. And the only other recommendation that I have for people at this point is to go check out Story Greenlight, download the 27 point checklist, because I think we just went through like three or four questions, and we’ve already gotten to the core of humanity in like three questions, but I really think that for anybody that’s out there that wants to learn how to tell a better story, and it’s not just how to edit a better story, that’s one thing that I want to make very clear is that you used to teach people how to edit better, which you were great at, and you still do that, but it’s so much more about how to tell a better story, which anybody can use, because every single person on the planet needs to be able to tell their story if they want to be successful. So, on that note, I want to thank you so much for being on the show with me this evening, and sacrificing a little bit of family time, and a little bit of sleep time, because I know how absolutely coveted that is when you get to be our age. So, I really, really appreciate it, Jeff. One more time, let people know where they can go if they want to find your stuff.

Jeff Bartsch: Check out www dot story green light.com that’ll set you on the right path,

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).