How to Become a Communication Wizard

Take my course to become a world-class communicator in meetings, presentations, pitches, articles, speeches, and social media

Wizards live amongst us. 

No, we don’t live in Harry Potter’s world. Nor in Dune.

But some people can cast spells: They utter strings of words that shape the world to their whims. 

Their words bend people’s minds, mould their viewpoints, and compel them to do things they would not have done otherwise.

They change people, change nations, change the world.

Some you might love. Others, you might hate. But they have one thing in common: They all drag the world in the direction they desire.

I want you to learn their spells.

Unfortunately, you are probably not a wizard yet.

Your last pitch wasn't convincing.

Nobody replied to your email.

People yawned during your presentation. People hid their phones. You think someone was playing Candy Crush.

This is what your last video presentation looked like:

Was the light applause at the end of my speech sincere or out of pity?

Your Instagram post got one like.

Most people don’t know how to make compelling content because it’s very hard. There are hundreds of ways to get it wrong.

I used to fail like that, too. As a child, I stuttered. I still sometimes do. When I talk, sometimes I don’t look people in the eye. In my MBA application, a colleague wrote in his recommendation letter that Stanford had to accept me because I lacked gravitas. That’s when I thought: “Basta!”

How I Became a Spellcaster

I spent the next 15 years working hard on my communication.

I started at Stanford, where I took all the communication classes I could: public speaking, political communication, leadership, persuasion, behavioral psychology, and several scriptwriting courses at the Film School. 

I delivered two dozen speeches in Toastmasters clubs, and reached the California finals in humorous speeches—a bit like standup comedy.

A decade ago! Early on in the learning process…

I read dozens of books about narrative and storytelling. I even wrote a book about storytelling—not because I had a good book to write, but because I wanted to learn how to write books.

It was also a long, long time ago! I took the most niche topic I could find so that I could learn to write books without any pressure of success. I’m a big fan of learning by doing.

I then generalized these learnings and shared them in a TEDx talk:

I launched several videogames and social apps. Some of them grew virally to tens of millions of people in a matter of months.

New users per day for three Facebook apps in 2012. Source: AppData, Tomas Pueyo

I was part of three tech teams who raised $500M in funding—in finance, education, and retail companies, and hired hundreds of people. My biggest contribution to the raises was storytelling. One of my CEOs told me: 

I hope you know you’re a world-class storyteller.

I’ve had hundreds of employees. When coaching them, the consistent feedback they’ve given me is that they improved their communication a lot thanks to my advice. Here is one of them:

Tomas’ storytelling method was a massive career boost. Maybe the biggest. I will always remember the first time I used it: overnight it turned skeptical execs constantly challenging my Product roadmaps into supporters of what my team was doing. Ever since, I have used it for all my presentations and documents… And it truly feels like a superpower to make people follow your lead.—Ivan L.

Soon, it would turn out my skills were applicable outside of the corporate world.

During COVID, my articles were read by hundreds of millions of people. I appeared on TV and in the media around the world.

You can tell whether the interview was early on in the process or later on, as I aged about 90 years in one.

My ideas guided the domestic policy of dozens of countries like Germany, the US, India, Spain, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kuwait, Argentina, Costa Rica…¹

But that was just the beginning. Since then, I’ve gathered 85,000 people in this newsletter, and now I live off of it. 

I also have 330k followers on Twitter, with hundreds of millions of impressions every year. The early growth was from COVID, but you can easily tell when I started taking it seriously:

And recently, I’ve been able to replicate this success on YouTube:

Luckily, I’m able to use this for good. For example, after the SO₂ article I wrote, the CEO of Make Sunsets told me they have had more volume of sales, and a higher conversion rate through Uncharted Territories than anything else they’ve tried so far.

I want to share with you all the tips and tricks I learned over the last 15 years so you can also share your ideas to impact the world.

How You Can Become a Spellcaster

These are all the disciplines we will explore in our Business Storytelling course:

Storytelling

Humans are mesmerized by stories. If you understand the structure of stories, you can apply it to any type of content. In this course, you will learn:

• The structure of all stories

• How to recognize it in any work of fiction or nonfiction

• How to apply storytelling structure to your content

For this module, I will be heavily pulling from my scriptwriting courses, my book, and my TEDx. We’ll explore things like why the Hero’s Journey has the structure it has, and how you can apply it to your communicatio.

Problem-Solving

When communication fails, it’s usually because the underlying ideas are flawed. I’ve seen this from entry-level employees to CEOs and politicians: They don’t know how to solve problems. Luckily, every problem follows the same pattern, so you can quickly realize when your solutions are flawed. In this course, you will learn:

• The structure of every problem

• The most common mistakes people make when solving problems

• How to build a proper argument so that your solutions are optimal

I’ll share the top 10 mistakes that people make when solving problems, and an extended list of smaller problems, like not specifying assumed goals, or not accounting for prevalence, intensity, or probability of problems.

Influence

Brains are irrational. You can learn how to hack that irrationality. You will learn:

• The most common principles of influence and persuasion

• Dozens of persuasion tactics

For example, there are a handful ways to attract attention like violence or novelty; ways to bypass rational thinking like musicality or a common enemy; and ways to convince like authority and scarcity.

Negotiation

Most communications are negotiations: Different parties have different goals. You must learn to negotiate to navigate these differences. In this course, you will learn:

• The few, key principles of negotiation

• In what circumstances you should use each of them

Writing

Writing is unique in that it helps to achieve two things: communication, but also thinking. You will learn:

• Why writing helps thinking

• How to write great emails, memos, articles, and marketing copy

This is best illustrated by any of my articles.

Visuals

Writing helps to convey ideas, and visuals make them easy to understand. But most visuals are really bad—just think about the last internal presentation you went to! In this course, you will learn:

• How to create great visuals

• How to create great slide decks

If you like the visuals I have in my videos or articles, this is for you.

Public Speaking

In this course, you’ll also learn how to give:

• Inspiring speeches

• Convincing presentations

• Whether they are live, on video calls, or asynchronous

Social Media

It’s useless to scream into the void. The way to get attention is to craft content that people discover, and people are on social media. In this course, you’ll learn how to adapt all your learnings to:

• Newsletters

• Twitter and Twitter Threads

• Other media, including YouTube

I am open to adapting all this content. Let me know what you’re interested in!

What Will This Course Include?

This is what I’m aiming for:

• 7 to 9 live lectures on the topics outlined above, filled with entertainment, insights, and interaction

• Fun exercises during and after the lectures, to cement the insights

• Lifetime access to the course material

• Use every lesson to bring a real-life project from your current level to world-class

• Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions to discuss the lectures, the exercises, and the projects

• Study groups and private community

Exciting! Give Me All the Details!

What Will the Quality of the Content Be Like?

I have taken a handful of cohort-based courses in my life and, unfortunately, I have mostly been underwhelmed. Usually, the insights are either not that valuable or there’s not a high density of them, the courses are too short, there’s not enough interaction… 

That’s not what I want. If you already follow me, you know my bar for content. I want to believe it’s very high, and I intend to raise it for this course. I envision a fun and entertaining course packed with insights and applied knowledge so by the end, you are a communication wizard and you can convince people with your ideas.

When Will It Run?

We will kick it off on Monday, April 22nd, and it will run until Friday, May 19th. This is my tentative calendar:

Specific lectures subject to change. There will be at least 7 and no more than 9.but the details are changing based on student feedback, so let me know what you want!

The course will be structured so that you invest as much time as you want. The more you invest, the more you get, but if you can’t make it to some events, you should be able to catch up later or simply benefit from what you see. All sessions will be recorded and accessible later, and I will strive to write private articles for each.

At What Time of Day?

The course will probably begin at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 6pm CET. This will be the first time I run it, so I will listen to your needs and adjust accordingly. For example, I might do the AMAs just after the lectures, or add/change some sessions.

What About the Study Groups?

These are groups where you gather with two or three other students to review each other’s projects and give feedback. I aim at crafting the study groups by geography and seniority as much as possible, so that you can meet at a convenient time with people who work at your level.

What About the Project?

I think you must apply lessons to real-life examples to really learn them, so I’ll ask you to come prepared with a project that we’ll be working on throughout the course. It can be any communication project—ideally nonfiction—with which you’ve struggled: presentations, speeches, videos, decks, articles, memos, plans… I will look at some of them and give live feedback.

How Much Will It Cost?

Normally I charge $6,000-$10,000 to give just one of these lectures, which you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Here, you’ll get all the lectures plus exercises plus interaction for $1,500. I will likely increase this price to $5,000 in the future, because this is an executive-level course.

When Should I Sign Up?

I will limit the number of students to make sure every student’s experience is fantastic. I will accept students on a first-come-first serve basis, so enroll now if you want to make sure to get a spot.

Do you have more questions? Please leave a comment, reply with your questions to this email, drop your email in this form for more information, or book 15m to chat with me! Do you want your company to fund it? Make a reimbursement request to them by copying and editing this template.

I’m extremely excited to be doing this with you. I’m pouring my heart into it. It’s going to be a lot of fun! And the best part of it is that, by the end, we will be a community of wizards of communication. And if you love Uncharted Territories, I want to believe it will be to convey messages that make the world a better place.

See you soon!

Tomas

1. Early on, I gathered links that would prove the influence. At some point I was overwhelmed by the exercise so I stopped. One day, maybe I´ll do a proper study and clean up the links (many of them are now dead). In the meantime, I’ll just share with you what I had gathered at the time: European parliament, Costa Rica, Germany (another, another, another, another, another from their chief epi, see below, another from the same one, another), Netherlands (other example), Denmark (and here), Philippines (and here), Canada (another, another), US elected officials, Japan (another), India (another), UK (1, 2), Australia (and here), Peru, Bulgaria (another), Sri Lanka another, Madrid–Spain, Pakistan, Thailand, Kuwait, Norway, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Poland, Scotland, Finland