HOW TO BE THE BEST PUBLIC SPEAKER ON THE PLANET
I was scared to death. I thought I was going to cry.
Polls say people would rather be dead than speak in public. Seinfeld joked that a guy giving a eulogy would rather be in the coffin.
I've given 100s of talks but last week I wanted to die before I went on stage. I was speaking to an audience of about 200 CEOs. I felt inadequate and that they would hate me.
Claudia said, "Just take a deep breath. Do what you usually do." And I did.
Here's the operating theory: you don't need 10,000 hours at anything to be the best. You just need to pretty good at something (a couple of 100 hours) and then you need to know how to give a good talk in public. Because so few people want to talk in public so you will stand out.
I wrote a post a year ago: "10 Unusual Tips to Be a Great Public Speaker". I still follow those tips but...
Since the first post I've given a lot more talks to a varied set of audiences. I've spoken about everything from spirituality to business to creativity to entrepreneurship to failure.
And before each talk I've always thought to myself: "holy s**t, how did I write that post about public speaking. I'm more nervous than ever!"
So I have a few more tips. And these tips are as important as the first ten.
A) WATCH COMEDIANS. I watch great standup comedy before every talk. It puts me in a looser mood and makes me laugh, which relaxes me.
When possible, I will directly steal a joke from whatever comedian I'm watching. If they've tested out the joke, then it's probably a good one and will work for me as well.
I even practice imitating their timing. The way they pause, the way they change voices and move around the stage, everything.
Comedians are the best public speakers and are up against the most brutal audiences so you MUST study comedians.
NO POWERPOINT. I used to think I always needed a PowerPoint. Because as useful as my words are: a "picture is worth a thousand words".
This is total BS. If a picture is worth 1000 words then you are worth 100,000 pictures.
I compare Daniel Tosh stand-up with his TV show "Tosh.0". In his stand-up it's just him, making jokes, NO PowerPoint.
In "Tosh.0", the format is that he watches YouTube videos and makes fun of them.
His stand-up is better than the show. Even though the show is great, it isn't as fun as just watching him do stand-up.
PowerPoint will only distract from the main attraction: YOU.
C) CLOTHES. I ONLY dress in clothes I feel most comfortable in, even if everyone else is wearing tuxedos.
When I speak I have a specific "uniform". I wear a t-shirt I had custom made that has all 67,000 words of my book, "Choose Yourself!" printed on it. And I wear a white shirt over it and black pants. Like a waiter. I'm at your service and I've chosen myself. BAM!
D) PAUSE. I had this unnatural fear that if I paused too much during a talk people would get bored.
But inserting pauses allows people to think about what you are saying. It allows you to breathe, it allows you to be funnier, it avoids the impression that you are rushing through the material. Take a drink of water. Walk from one side of the stage to the other. Whatever you need to do.
E) Q AND A. I enjoy Q and A as much as the talk itself. So I arrange beforehand to do the maximum amount of Q&A.
F) ABS. Always Be Storytelling. NEVER give advice in a talk. Nobody is smart enough to give advice.
Just talk about your own experiences and what you did to help yourself. Mix in interesting facts.
Straight out advice will never help anyone. Buddha himself realized this about public speaking. He said, "Don't believe me on anything. Try this out for yourself."
G) ABV. Always Be Vulnerable. Nobody wants to hear from Invulnerable Man. They want to hear where you are scared and vulnerable and feeling insecure. Because we all do.
Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.
Let me tell you - there is no such thing as credibility. In 100 years there will be no buildings named after any of us.
Somebody has to be on stage and some people have to be in the audience. That's the only difference.
Don't put any thought as to WHY you are on the stage or how you need to be "better" than the people in the audience. You aren't better. You're simply the speaker.
We all woke up lonely and confused this morning. What a miracle that we get to speak to each other.
And even better, we feed the soul by listening to each other. Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.
http://redefineschool.com/632-2/james-altucher/
Friday, October 4, 2013
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
la - city as school
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kerchner-los-angeles-summer-of-learning-20131003,0,7258047.story
cool jets.
now let's just get it as the day.. not after hours/summer only.
___________
cool jets.
now let's just get it as the day.. not after hours/summer only.
___________
ethan zuckerman - advocacy journalism
Ethan Zuckerman from Nieman Foundation on Vimeo.
there's a whole rhetoric around the idea that youth are disengaged that they're not involved.. they're not apathetic, actually they're utterly desperate to have an impact. but they don't think they're going to have an impact through the institutions through which we believe they should have an impact. - Ethan
pat farenga - on abuse
http://www.johnholtgws.com/pat-farengas-blog/2013/10/1/homeschooling-and-child-abuse
http://redefineschool.com/pat-farenga/
_____________
elephant in the room and how Pat addresses it via Al Jazeera:
This must happen regardless of what changes we make to homeschooling laws: the reality is when these children return home from school, they are going home to the same parents who were not allowed to homeschool them. The cycle of abuse is ultimately not broken by regulating who is allowed to homeschool; this is why we need deeper, more personal efforts to create genuine change in people’s homes, not just cosmetic bureaucratic compliance.
http://redefineschool.com/pat-farenga/
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tweets
In a world of dialogic systems. Why are educators sitting in rows listening. Why are the "EdTechElite" not making MOOCs? - Answer $$$$$$
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/Type217/
If we think MOOCs are the answer what was the question? Learning is driven by social interaction rather than info consumption #Learning2030
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/GrahamBM/
Tony Wagner (@DrTonyWagner)10/1/13 7:14 AM
Gallup poll finds 43% of HS kids want to start a business, but only 4% of superintendents say schools are teaching it bit.ly/17nBv45
Dalai Lama (@DalaiLama)9/30/13 3:30 AM
If we make a common attempt to improve our education systems, we can educate the coming generations to be more compassionate.
Innotribe (@Innotribe)10/1/13 7:30 AM
Looking for summaries of #Innotribe #Sibos here's on overview of all coverage in Sibos Issuesinnotribe.com/2013/10/01/inn… #startupchallenge
 John Hagel (@jhagel)10/1/13 7:34 AM Forget about 3D printing. @SkylarTibbits explores next edge: 4D printing - self-assembly and evolution of structures bit.ly/19eDp9R  rightingteacher (@rightingteacher)10/1/13 7:27 AM For example, a student just said to me, "Oh, so what we're doing in the paper is like what we did in the presentations...but written." rightingteacher (@rightingteacher)10/1/13 7:29 AM But for him, connecting those two separate activities was an additional step in the work.#OOOOOHISEE  syamant sandhir (@syamant)10/1/13 7:29 AM #WEF Human Capital Report new.livestream.com/wef/  Salon.com (@Salon)10/1/13 7:30 AM This explains exactly why we're in the mess we're in --> How the right sees the shutdownslnm.us/BWlexTW via @eliasisquith  Democracy Now! (@democracynow)10/1/13 7:30 AM Watch our summary of today's top news headlinesyoutu.be/RkobiZARnBs
As Warren Buffett once put it:
And those who have followed their capabilities, rather than their industries, have done well. It didn’t really matter if Steve Jobs was in hardware, software or even retail. He simply wanted to design products that were beautifully functional. It bothered him when products weren’t. He’d curse, call them “sucky” and set out to change the world.
As Jim Collins pointed out in his management classic, Built to Last
 , many highly successful companies, such as Sony and Hewlett Packard, started out with no idea what kind of business they were in, but rather found themselves among a group of people that they wanted to work with. “First who, then what,” Collins advises
It’s tough to figure out what business Elon Musk is in. He co-founded PayPal in order to revolutionize payments, then created the SpaceX and has recently turned his first profit at Tesla with electric cars. Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google set out to organize the world’s information, but created Google X to do things like build autonomous cars.
Harvard’s Clayton Christensen would approve. He advises us not to think about what business we are in, but what job needs to be done. In his famous milkshake example, he argues that while we think in terms of categories, consumers want us to think in terms of their needs
Anybody who even casually reads the business press will come across a variety of provocative questions: What business are you in? What is your core competency? What job needs to be done? While many of these can provide useful insight, they can also lead you astray.
So perhaps the types of questions we should be asking are: “What business do you want to be in?” “What motivates you to get up everyday?” “In what do you take pride?”
• identifies the policy issues to which the indicators relate, with three major categories distinguishing between the quality of educational outcomes and educational provision, issues of equity in educational outcomes and educational opportunities, and the adequacy and effectiveness of resource management.
what if we re doing the circle line navigation to a wrong/not-zoomed-out-enough north
which is spinning our wheels.. back to cycle or circle in x-d ness
and spending us big time.. energy/resources/people....
keeping us.. distracting us... from us
 TimKarr (@TimKarr)10/1/13 7:31 AM What Net Neutrality and the Debt Ceiling Suddenly Have in Common by @ChristianStorkpolicymic.com/articles/65789… via @PolicyMic  Global Voices (@globalvoices)10/1/13 7:34 AM #Brazil has the 7th highest rate of #violence against #women in the world. bit.ly/1fFEavT by@christian_aid |
Greg Satell (
Giorgio Bertini (
Ignite Your Childlike State of Wonder
these are the only spaces that have every led to visions that have transformed the world..
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
blurred boundaries at best
"What name could one possibly dream up for that kind of science, and whose science it was anyway?" - at best blurred boundaries
While advancing the hypothesis that the two crucial theorems Copernicus had used (Tusi couple and Urdi lemma, see pics below) were transmitted directly due to Arab speaking European scholars, George Saliba (Professor at Columbia University, NY), asks a "perplexing question, namely, that of attaching cultural, civilizational, or linguistic adjectives to the scientists themselves when it is made so obvious that their works and concerns either knew no defined cultural, civilizational or linguistic boundaries, or whatever boundaries they encountered they were at best blurred boundaries. Most blatantly, one still has to find a name for the production of the Tusi Couple, that was first encountered in an Arabic text, written by a man who spoke Persian at home, and used that theorem, like many other astronomers who followed him and were all working in the "Arabic/Islamic" world, in order to reform classical Greek astronomy, and then have his theorem in turn be translated into Byzantine Greek towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, only to be used later by Copernicus and others in Latin texts of Renaissance Europe. What name could one possibly dream up for that kind of science, and whose science it was anyway?"
From the fifth section in:http://www.columbia.edu/~gas1/project/visions/case1/sci.1.html#int1
(3 photos)From the fifth section in:http://www.columbia.edu/~gas1/project/visions/case1/sci.1.html#int1
Seth's Blog: Decoding "art"
Seth's Blog: Decoding "art"
When I write about making 'art', many people look at me quizzically. They don't understand how to make the conceptual leap from a job where we are told what to do to a life where we decide what to do--and seek to do something that connects, that makes an impact, and that yes, might not work.
When I write about making 'art', many people look at me quizzically. They don't understand how to make the conceptual leap from a job where we are told what to do to a life where we decide what to do--and seek to do something that connects, that makes an impact, and that yes, might not work.
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