A powerful tool to use in your storytelling.

There’s contrast within my family, contrast  within my beliefs, contrast within ideas. And that’s what makes things interesting. Is the contrast. From food, from relationships, from all these kind of things. What I want to talk about today, a lot of people probably don’t know this, but it’s also the key to good story telling.

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Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing In Your Hot Tub. It is actually Christmas night and I’m in the hot tub right now. We just had all the kids in here, but all of them have left except for Dallin is the last remaining hot tuber, how you doing bud?

Dallin: Good.

Russell: So Dallin, if you guys saw Funnel Friday’s this week, was on Funnel Fridays and he actually built a funnel. What was the funnel about that you built?

Dallin: Snow balls. Rocks snow balls.

Russell: Yeah, Jim Edwards built a script to throw snowballs with putting rocks in the snowballs, evil snowballs huh?

Dallin: Yeah, evil. You don’t want to mess with it.

Russell: But it was pretty good right? You built the funnel in about 15 minutes.

Dallin: Yeah, it was supposed to be 30 but I got under pressure.

Russell: Normally people get 30 minutes but I gave Dallin 15 because I knew he could do it. And he did, the funnel was amazing. It was pretty good.

Dallin: I’m really good at it.

Russell: So if any of you guys are wondering or want to see that, go to Funnelfridays.com and look at the Christmas special and you’ll meet most of my kids, were on that episodes except I don’t think Norah came in.

Dallin: Yeah, but Bowen didn’t come in.

Russell: Oh yeah, Bowen didn’t come but most of my kids are on there, so if you want to meet them go to funnelfridays.com. But tonight I have a really special message. So that’s what I wanted to talk to you guys about today. The topic I’m talking about is a thing called contrast. So I’m telling you this while we are sitting in the hot tub, it’s 7:54 pm Christmas night. We had a great Christmas day today and now we’re outside and it’s dark and cold, there’s snow, there’s about ten inches of snow. In fact, yesterday we were out in….we bought this four wheeler rhino thing.

Dallin: That’s awesome. It’s like a snow thing that picks up snow.

Russell: Yeah, it has a snow plow on the front of it, and we hook tubes to the back and pulled the kids around the yard for….it was really fun.

Dallin: Now I know how to drive a car.

Russell: What? Don’t talk about that. So it’s really, really cold and then we jumped in the hot tub and it’s like 102 degrees and it’s really hot. So the kids, would be getting in the hot tub and then they’d jump out into the snow and do snow angels and they’re screaming because it’s so cold and they dive back in and they’re screaming because it’s so hot. And back and forth and back and forth. And what’s cool if you think about that, what’s making this experience really fun is the contrast.

And I started thinking about other things where contrast is the key. And I really think that happiness in life is tied to contrast. We had a church Christmas party and they decided to have Collette and I be in charge of it. So we had the chance to throw a party for 500 people and one of the ideas that came out of it, one of the guys on our committee, he had an idea. He’s like, “We should do a hot chocolate bar.” And I was like, “Oh that would be awesome.” So we had this huge hot chocolate bar, we boiled I don’t know, thirty gallons of hot chocolate.

Dallin: With a lot of good candy.

Russell: We had tons of toppings like York Peppermint patties, cinnamon bears, marshmallows…

Dallin: And then my favorite flavor ran out right when they came in.

Russell: So we had a whole bunch of stuff, and the point of this story, we had a huge hot chocolate bar, which was good, but what made it great was the contrast. We had an ice cream scooper scooping a bunch of ice cream into the hot chocolate. So we have this hot, hot chocolate with cold ice cream and the contrast is what made it magic.

You go like that with most foods. If you go to a restaurant and you get sweet and sour sauce, you get sweet and sour is the contrast, that’s why it’s interesting. A lot of foods are that way. They have two…..for Christmas somebody may have sent me a bag of this and may have eaten the whole thing by myself. It was a bag of chocolate covered pretzels. The chocolate is sweet and the pretzels are salty. So it’s salty, sweet and the contrast is what made it interesting.

Dallin: Dad, not cool to tell that in front of your kid.

Russell: You want to eat it now? But you think about most parts of life, the relationships I have with people that are the most fun are not where they’re like me. I do have a lot of fun with a lot of entrepreneurs that are just like me, but even within that there’s a lot of contrast.

There’s contrast within my family, contrast within my beliefs, contrast within ideas. And that’s what makes things interesting. Is the contrast. From food, from relationships, from all these kind of things. What I want to talk about today, a lot of people probably don’t know this, but it’s also the key to good story telling.

Dallin: And cars, and hot tubs.

Russell: To hot tubs and cars? It’s the key to good story telling, it’s the key to good selling.

Dallin: That’s compare and contrast. Boom.

Russell: Okay, boom. Dallin’s comparing contrasted. He compared a car and a hot tub. Did you contrast them?

Dallin: No, not really.

Russell: Okay, so let me explain this. So when telling a story it’s the contrast that makes the story interesting. So from a higher level view it’s like, you tell a story, “first I was broke, then I was rich.” That was the contrast. “first I was fat, then I got skinny. First I was sad, then I became happy.” That contrast is what makes the story interesting. That’s from an overarching story level. That’s kind of the arch that people normally go on.

Dallin: It’s like with the cereal I had this morning too.

Russell: Dallin wants to throw things completely off topic. Okay Dallin, let me finish this story and then you can tell about cereal okay?

So then it’s also from a macro level, the micro level is the same thing when you’re telling stories. You get down to the actual pieces of the story, it’s also the contrast. You dig down and as you’re telling the details, the contrast in the details is what’s interesting as well. So it’s like, right now if I were telling the story, we’re sitting in the hot tub and part of our body was so hot because it’s 102, 103 degrees. It’s really warm, but my head and neck is above water and when the wind hits you it’s bitter cold. And it cuts you, it cuts you down even into the water because it’s so cold, but then the water is so warm that it pushes that heat back up. So I’m telling the contrast of the cold and the hot, which makes it intriguing, makes it interesting.

So when you’re describing each of the individual pieces of the story there’s contrast in all of them. You’re writing emails, there should be contrast in your emails. As you’re talking about things, “I was this and I became this. I felt this, but then this happened.” There’s a scripture that all my Mormon friends would now about where Lehi in the beginning of the Book of Mormon, he talks about how there’s got to be opposite in all things. If it wasn’t for the dark you wouldn’t know ….if it wasn’t for evil you wouldn’t know good. There’s a reason why there’s contrast. Without sadness you can’t have happiness. Without that contrast you can’t know happiness until you’ve had sadness. You can’t know joy until you’ve had pain. You can’t do what’s right unless you know what’s wrong.

Dallin: Wrong.

Russsell: Yeah, Dallin’s getting it. Hopefully everyone’s catching on at the same time. But it’s that contrast in all things in life. That’s what makes life interesting, is that contrast.

Dallin: Sad, happy. Bad, good. Loving it, hating it.

Russell: What other contrasts you got?

Dallin: Ellie and school.

Russell: Ellie and school? Ellie’s is his sister, and school? Okay.

Dallin: They’re really far contrasts.

Russell: Ellie and school are contrasts. But you think about it you guys. It’s interesting because that’s the key. Depends on how you look at it. If you look at it like, I’m going to eat something, let me make some contrasts. I’m going to tell a story, I’m going to sell something. I’m going to write an email to…

Dallin: Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: What?

Dallin: Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: Who’s Billy Bob Joe?

Dallin: You’re sending an email to Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: Okay…..Alright, that makes no sense, but whatever. So I hope that, amongst the random thoughts, I hope you guys got some value from tonight. From the contrast of sitting in the hot tub while the cold is on my, blowing against my skin and kind of freezing up top.

Dallin: That’s why it’s cold, hot tub. Car, contrast.

Russell: Yes, alright Dal, you want to tell the story from breakfast this morning?

Dallin: Yeah, sure.

Russell: Alright, tell it loud so you can all hear.

Dallin: So our dad took a huge bowl, one that we use to make cookies and stuff.

Russell: A big salad bowl.

Dallin: Yeah. For Christmas he got a big Lucky Charm thing…

Russell: it was Marshmallow Matey’s. It’s the generic Malt-O-Meal knock off version of Lucky Charms. Speaking of, real quick of Lucky Charms, the reason why it’s so good is the contrast. There’s the oats that are not sweet and the marshmallows that are sweet, that’s why it’s so good.

Dallin: Yeah, but our dad dumped it all in and filled the whole bowl up, which he didn’t use a normal cereal bowl.

Russell: The whole salad bowl of Marshmallow Matey’s.

Dallin: And he ate all the oats first and then he sugared up with all the marshmallows.

Russell: So this is my brothers and sisters have done our whole lives. So Santa brings us sugar cereal, we always used to get Marshmallow Matey’s because it’s twice the size of Lucky Charms, because you get a big old Marshmallow Matey’s bag. So I would fill a salad bowl full.

Dallin: I wish I did it this morning too.

Russell: You can do it, I got leftovers.

Dallin: Tomorrow morning I’m going to use a big salad bowl.

Russell: And we do it so the rule is you can’t eat a single marshmallow until all the oats are gone.

Dallin: Unless we accidently eat one.

Russell: No, if you accidently, you have to spit it back out.

Dallin: What the…?

Russell: Yep.

Dallin: But what if you don’t know it’s in there.

Russell: Yeah, I guess you don’t know. But you should know. You have to be really careful, it take’s probably 20 or 30 minutes. I Snapchatted me doing it. But then I ate the whole thing, so when you’re done with it though, you’ve got this whole bowl of marshmallows and the marshmallows are oozing into the milk. So the milk’s like syrup as well. So at the end you drink the marshmallow syrup milk and it’s the reward for sacrificing 30 minutes of your life to something that’s completely ridiculous.

Dallin: Oh yeah, so tell them about the mission companion thing.

Russell: So I went on a mission for the Mormon church, I was in New Jersey and Santa Claus knew how to get Marshmallow Matey’s up to New Jersey. So Christmas morning I pull the huge salad bowl out, it’s tradition you have to do it. So I was eating it and it took like an hour…. Dallin’s dying over here. My companion, after a half an hour is like, “Elder Brunson, you gotta stop. I can’t handle the noise of you eating every little piece of cereal. Get out of this room.” Poor guy. He probably hates me for that.

Ooh, Dallin. Feel my hair it’s frozen hard as a rock.

Dallin: yeah, that’s why I was grabbing it.

Russell: So I have one more story for you guys about contrast. Actually it has nothing to do with contrast, but it’s a cool story. When I was a kid we went on a family reunion up somewhere for winter time and it was like this. We went to a hot tub, and we walked from the hot tub back to our condo and it was freezing. And my cousin, Juliana, her hair froze. And she grabbed it, bent it and it snapped her hair off, broke her hair.

Dallin: And she didn’t even feel a thing.

Russell: Which is crazy. So I wonder if I could give myself a haircut right now?

Dallin: Oh, hi Norah. Or Aiden.

Russell: Oh, there’s the kids. Oh man. I think we’re going to have to end the hot tub party while everyone els