For years, the weakest part of my performances was the patter.
The mechanical execution was solid — years of hotel room practice had taken care of that. The structure of the routines was decent. But the words I said while performing felt thin. Generic. I was describing what was happening rather than telling a story. I was filling time rather than building meaning.
When other performers talked about their patter, they seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of personal material. Specific memories. Precise details. Stories that felt genuinely lived-in. Mine felt assembled. Even when I was drawing on real experiences, they came out flattened — the kind of vague recollection you’d offer in a brief conversation, not the kind of vivid specific that makes someone lean forward.
I knew the problem. I just didn’t have a solution until I came across Matthew Dicks and what he calls Homework for Life.
The Practice
The concept is simple to the point of seeming slight. Every evening — or at any point in the day — you ask yourself one question: what is the most story-worthy moment that happened today?
Not the most dramatic. Not the most remarkable. Just the one moment from the day that could potentially become a story. The moment with some emotion in it, some small surprise, some brief collision between expectation and reality. You write it down. One or two sentences. Just enough to capture it before it disappears into the ordinary blur of memory.
That’s it. That’s Homework for Life.
What Dicks found, over years of doing this practice, was that two things happened. First, he never ran out of story material. He had documented thousands of potential stories from his actual lived life, so when he needed personal material, he had a searchable library. Second, and more surprisingly, he started living differently. Once you’re looking for story-worthy moments each day, you start noticing them. Your attention sharpens. Things that would have slipped past unremarked become vivid because you’re actively searching for them.
The practice changes not just what you write but what you see.
Why I Needed This
My professional life as a consultant involves a lot of travel, a lot of different contexts, a lot of conversations with people from wildly different industries and backgrounds. I have hundreds of hours of experience that, in principle, contain story material. The problem is that most of it lived in the same undifferentiated fog that past experience occupies for most people — something happened, it was interesting at the time, but the details dissolved.
I couldn’t tell you what was unusual about the hotel room in Klagenfurt in 2019. I couldn’t tell you the exact thing the client said in the meeting that made me understand something I hadn’t understood before. I couldn’t tell you the moment in a performance when something shifted and I felt the room change. Those things happened. I just didn’t have them.
Magic patter needs specificity. The difference between “one time I was practicing late at night” and “a Tuesday in October, Graz, eleven-thirty at night, the deck spread on the bedspread because there’s no desk in that room that’s big enough” is the difference between a listener who hears you and a listener who is there with you. The second sentence creates a movie in the listener’s mind. The first one doesn’t.
I couldn’t create that second kind of sentence because I hadn’t preserved the details.
Adopting the Practice
I started doing Homework for Life somewhat awkwardly, in the way that new practices always begin awkwardly.
The first few weeks, I ended most evenings staring at my notebook trying to remember if anything worth noting had happened that day. Most days felt empty. Meetings, emails, a flight, a hotel room, a performance or a consulting session or a dinner that I couldn’t reconstruct with any detail. I had the residue of a full day and none of its texture.
Then something shifted. I started looking differently during the day. Not constantly, not obsessively — but I had a quiet background awareness that I was going to ask myself the question later, and that awareness made me a more active observer of my own experience.
A moment in a Vienna coffee shop where I watched a table of tourists try to navigate a menu in German and saw one of them quietly and successfully guess at something based on a word that sounded familiar — a tiny, complete little story about pattern recognition and the confidence to act on incomplete information. I wrote it down that evening.
A conversation with a client during which he said something that I recognized was exactly backwards from what he believed himself to be saying — a moment of genuinely interesting self-deception that I witnessed but couldn’t point out without derailing the engagement. Two sentences. I wrote it down.
A night in a hotel room in Innsbruck where I was running through a routine for the forty-seventh time and suddenly it felt completely different — not because I’d changed anything, but because something had finally clicked in the neural circuitry and the routine was mine in a way it hadn’t been before. I wrote that down too.
Within a few months, I had dozens of these. Within a year, I had hundreds.
What Changed in Performance
The material I’d collected started appearing in my patter, sometimes directly and sometimes as seeds for something more developed.
The tourists with the menu became a moment in a piece I do about the confidence to act on incomplete information. The client’s self-deception became an anchor in a piece about how we lie to ourselves about what we notice. The Innsbruck night became part of how I talk about practice — not as a general truth about the learning process but as a specific memory with specific texture.
The difference in how audiences responded was immediate and unmistakable. Not to the fact that I was telling personal stories — I’d been doing that before — but to the fact that the stories were specific. They had the density of real memory. Listeners know the difference between something that was genuinely experienced and something that was assembled to sound like experience. I don’t fully understand how they know, but they do.
The other thing that changed was how I developed new patter. Before Homework for Life, developing patter meant sitting at a desk and trying to invent something from scratch. That’s a miserable process. Now, developing patter means going to the library and asking what’s already there. The raw material exists. The work is selection and refinement.
The Compounding Effect
Dicks makes a point that I’ve found to be true: the value of this practice compounds over time in a way that’s hard to predict at the start.
After a few months, you have raw material. After a year, you have a library. After several years, you have a library with themes — you start noticing recurring moments, recurring questions, recurring emotional textures in your experience. You discover what you’re actually made of, narratively speaking. You discover which types of moments recur in your life because you’re the particular person you are.
That discovery is invaluable for a performer. It’s how you find your authentic voice. Not by trying to perform authentically, which is a paradox, but by actually understanding what your genuine experience contains.
My authentic experience contains a lot of solitude. A lot of analytical thinking applied to surprising situations. A lot of moments in unfamiliar places where I had to orient myself quickly. A lot of the particular disorientation of learning something as an adult that others learned as children. These themes are in my life because of who I am and what I do. They were there before I started writing them down. But I couldn’t access them until I had the practice of noticing them.
The Simple Version
You don’t need a special notebook. You don’t need a structured journal. You don’t need to spend more than two minutes on it.
Ask yourself, once a day, what happened today that could be a story. Write one sentence about it. Put today’s date on it. Go to sleep.
Do this for six months and then look at what you have.
The material you’ve been wishing you had for your performances? It’s in your life right now. You just haven’t been noticing it.
Homework for Life is how you start noticing.