I’m on a long flight from Seattle to Belgium, and the woman sitting next to me starts a conversation. Despite hiding behind the book in my hands, I’m now forced into a common and sometimes unfortunate air-travel situation: the gamble of talking to a stranger I can’t escape from. While it’s fun to be near someone interesting for occasional chats, being stuck next to a person who will not stop talking for nine hours is my idea of hell. (And you never know which it will be until after you start talking, when it’s too late.) Not wanting to be rude, I say hello. She asks what I do for a living, at which I pause. I’ve been down this bumpy conversational road many times. You see, I have two answers, and both suck.
The best answer I have is I’m a writer. I write books and essays. But saying I’m a writer is bad because people get excited I might be Dan Brown, John Grisham, or Dave Eggers, someone famous they can tell their friends they met. When they learn I’m one of the millions of writers they’ve never heard of—and not someone whose novel was turned into a blockbuster movie—they fall into a kind of disappointment never experienced by people who are employed as lawyers, plumbers, or even assistant fry cooks at McDonald’s.
My other choice is worse, which is to say I’m a public speaker. If you tell people you’re a public speaker, they’ll assume one of three bad things:
You’re a motivational speaker who wears bad suits, sweats too much, and dreams about Tony Robbins.
You’re a high priest in a cult and will soon try to convert them to your religion.
You’re single, unemployed, and live in a van down by the river.
I don’t want to call myself a public speaker. Professors, executives, pundits, and politicians all spend much of their professional lives speaking in public, but they don’t call themselves public speakers either. And for good reason. Public speaking is a form of expression. You have to do it about a topic, and whatever that topic is defines you better than the actual speaking does. But I speak about the things I write about, which can be just about anything. Calling myself a freelance thinker—as vacuous as it sounds—is accurate, but if I say it, someone would surely think I’m unemployed, just as I would if a stranger on an airplane said it to me. Yet freelance thinking is why I’m on the plane. I quit my regular job years ago, wrote two bestselling books, and have been hired to fly to Brussels to speak about ideas from those books.
I explain all this to my newfound flight friend. Her first question, one I often hear at this point in conversations, is: “When you’re giving a lecture, do you imagine everyone in the room naked?” She’s half-joking but also eyeing me strangely. She wants an answer. I want to say of course I don’t. No one does. You’re never told to imagine people naked at your job interview or at the dentist, and for good reason. Being naked or imagining naked people in the daytime makes most things more complicated, not less, which is one of the reasons we invented clothes. Despite it being very bad advice, it’s somehow the one universally known tip for public speaking.
I asked many experts, and not one knew who first offered this advice, though the best guess is Winston Churchill,[1] who may have claimed imagining the audience naked worked for him. But he was also known for drinking a bottle of champagne and a fifth of brandy or more a day. With that much alcohol, you might need to imagine people naked just to stay awake. For us mere mortals (Churchill had an amazing tolerance for alcohol), you won’t find a single public-speaking expert recommending thoughts of naked people, nor a fifth of brandy. Yet, if you tell a friend you’re nervous about a presentation you have to give at work tomorrow, naked people will be mentioned within 30 seconds. I can’t explain why. It seems bad advice that’s fun will always be better known than good advice that’s dull—no matter how useless that fun advice is.
In hundreds of lectures around the world, I’ve done most of the scary, tragic, embarrassing things that terrify people. I’ve been heckled by drunken crowds in a Boston bar. I’ve lectured to empty seats, and a bored janitor, in New York City. I’ve had a laptop crash in a Moscow auditorium; a microphone die at a keynote speech in San Jose; and I’ve watched helplessly as the Parisian executives who hired me fell asleep in the conference room while I was speaking. The secret to coping with these events is to realize everyone forgets about them after they happen—except for one person: me. No one else really cares that much.
When I’m up there speaking, I remind myself of the last time I was in row 25 of the auditorium, or in the corner of a boardroom, or back in some stupid class in high school, desperately trying not to daydream or fall asleep. Most people listening to presentations around the world right now are hoping their speakers will end soon. That’s all they want. They’re not judging as much as you think, because they don’t care as much as you think. Knowing this helps enormously. If some disaster happens, something explodes or I trip and fall, I’ll have more attention from the audience than I probably had 30 seconds before. And if I don’t care that much about my disaster, I can use the attention I’ve earned and do something good with it—whatever I say next, they are sure to remember. And if nothing else, my tragedy will give everyone in the audience a funny story to share. The laughter from that story will do more good for the world than anything my presentation, or any other that day, probably would have done anyway.
And so, if during my next lecture in Philadelphia, my shoes burst into flames or I fall down some steps and land face-first in the aisle, I can turn what’s happening into an opportunity. I’m now cast in a story that will be told more often than anything mentioned in any other speech that month. The story will get better and more scandalous as it’s told, eventually including something about drunk, naked people. Best of all, I earn the right to tell that story in the future when a lesser disaster occurs. I can choose to use one supposed catastrophe as an escape from the next: “You think this is embarrassing? Well, back in Philly….” And on it goes.
If you’d like to be good at something, the first thing to go out the window is the notion of perfection. Every time I get up to the front of the room, I know I will make mistakes. And this is OK. If you examine how we talk to one another every day, including people giving presentations, you’ll find that even the best speakers make tons of mistakes. Michael Erard, author of Um (Anchor), a study of how we talk, offers this:
They [mistakes] occur on average once every ten words…. If people say an average of 15,000 words each day, that’s about 1,500 verbal blunders a day. Next time you say something, listen to yourself carefully. You st-st-stutter; you forget the words, you swotch the sounds (and when you type, you reverse the lttres—and prhps omt thm too). The bulk of these go unnoticed or brushed aside, but they’re all fascinating, as much as for why they’re ignored as why they’re noticed.
If you listen to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Winston Churchill, and then read the unedited transcripts of those same speeches, you’ll find mistakes. However, they’re mistakes we commonly ignore because we’re incredibly forgiving of spoken language.[2] Sentences get abandoned mid-thought and phrases are repeated, but we correct these errors in our minds all the time, even for people who are supposed to be fantastic speakers. As long as the message comes through, people naturally overlook many things. Lincoln had a high-pitched voice. Dale Carnegie had a Southern twang. Cicero used to hyperventilate. Barbara Walters, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, and even Moses had stutters, lisps, or other speech issues, but that didn’t end their careers, because they had interesting messages to share with people. As superficial as public speaking can seem, history bears out that people with clear ideas and strong points are the ones we remember.
I know I make small mistakes all the time. There’s no way not to. Besides, when performing, perfection is boring. Tyler Durden, the quasi-hero from the film Fight Club, said to stop being perfect because obsessing about perfection stops you from growing. You stop taking chances, which means you stop learning. I don’t want to be perfect. I want be useful, I want to be good, and I want to sound like myself. Trying to be perfect gets in the way of all three. If anything, making some mistakes or stumbling in a couple of places reminds everyone of how hard it is to stand up at the front of the room in the first place. Mistakes will happen—what matters more is how you frame your mistakes, and there are two ways to do this:
Avoid the mistake of trying to make no mistakes. You should work hard to know your material, but also know you won’t be perfect. This way, you won’t be devastated when small things go wrong.
Know that your response to a mistake defines the audience’s response. If I respond to spilling water on my pants as if it were the sinking of the Titanic, the audience will see it, and me, as a tragedy. But if I’m cool, or better yet, find it funny, the audience will do the same.
As an illustrative mistake of my own, in March 2008 I gave a keynote talk about creativity to a crowd of 2,000 people at the Web 2.0 Expo conference. I was given 10 minutes to speak, and since the average person speaks 2–3 words per second, all you need is 1,500 words of material (600 seconds x 2.5 words per second). Ten minutes seems tough, but many great speeches in history were much shorter, including Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It’s plenty of time if I know what I want to say. I prepared my talk, practiced it well, and showed up early to get a walkthrough before the crowd arrived. The tech crew showed me the stage, the lectern, and the remote for controlling my slides. Below the stage was a countdown timer that would show my remaining time. Nice.
The tech crew was adamant about one fact: the remote control only had a forward button. If I wanted to go back to a previous slide, I had to ask them, over the microphone, to go backward. I’d never seen this before. All remotes let you navigate forward and backward—why would someone go out of his way to eliminate the back button? I never got an answer.[3] But since my talk was so short, and I rarely needed to go backward anyway, I didn’t worry. I made a mental note to avoid accidentally hitting the button on the kamikaze remote. Piece of cake, I thought.
Standing backstage, listening to the last speaker before my turn, Edwin Aoki from AOL, I saw the huge crowd in the darkness. Press photographers and film crews knelt down in the aisles, the glare of the lights reflecting in their lenses making them easy to find. Aoki finished to applause, and Brady Forrest, the co-host of the event, stepped out on the stage to introduce me. I was psyched and ready. I’d practiced. I knew my material. I had big ideas and fun stories. I was confident it would be great. I heard my name and charged the stage, heading straight for the lectern. My eyes were fixed on the remote control, the one thing I needed before I could start. I carefully placed my fingers on the side of the remote to ensure I didn’t hit the button by accident (as you can see in Figure 1-1). Finally, I was ready to go.
My brain snapped into gear and I looked out into the crowd to get my bearings. My eyes, on their way back to the center of the room, stopped at the countdown timer. There I found a surprise. Instead of the 10 minutes I expected—the 10 minutes I’d planned, prepared, and practiced for—I had only 9 minutes and 34 seconds. Twenty-six of my precious seconds were gone.
I confess here in the comforts of this book, with no audience and no pressure, 26 seconds doesn’t seem worth complaining about. It’s barely enough time to tie your shoelaces. But there in the moment, raring to go, I was caught off guard. I couldn’t imagine how I wasted 26 seconds without starting. (I’d learn later that Brady’s introduction and my walk across the big stage explained the lapse.) And as I tried to make sense of this surprising number, more time went by. My brain—not as smart as it thinks it is—insisted on playing detective right there, live on stage, consuming even more precious time. I don’t know why my brain did this, but my brain does many curious things I have to figure out later.
Meanwhile, I’m rambling. Blah blah innovation blah creativity blah. I’m not a blabbermouth in real life, but for 15 seconds I can ramble on about a subject I know well enough to seem like I’m not rambling. Doing this bought me just enough time for my brain to give up its pointless investigation of what happened. Finally focused, I had to waste even more time managing the surgery-like segue between my rambles and the first point of my prepared material. Confidently back on track, despite being a full minute behind, I hit the remote to advance the slide. But when I did, I held it too long and two slides flew by.
We all have reserve tanks of strength that help us cope when things go wrong, but here mine hit empty. I didn’t have the courage to stop my talk, ask the tech folks over the microphone—as if speaking to the gods above—to go back, while just standing there on stage, waiting helplessly as the clock ate even more of my precious seconds. So, I pressed on, did my best, and fled the stage after my 10 minutes ended.
It was a disaster to me. I never found my rhythm and couldn’t remember much of what I’d said. But as I talked with people I knew in the audience, I discovered something much more interesting. Not only did no one care, no one noticed. The drama was mostly in my own mind. As Dale Carnegie wrote in Public Speaking for Success:[4]
Good speakers usually find when they finish that there have been four versions of the speech: the one they delivered, the one they prepared, the one the newspapers say was delivered, and the one on the way home they wish they had delivered.
You can watch the 10-minute video of the talk and see for yourself.[5] It’s not an amazing presentation, but it’s not a bad one either. Whatever mistakes and imperfections exist, they’re larger in my head than in yours. My struggles on stage that night taught me a lesson: never plan to use the full time given. Had I planned to go 9 minutes instead of 10, I wouldn’t have cared what the clock said, how weird the remote was, or how long it took me to cross the stage.
And it’s often the case that the things speakers obsess about are the opposite of what the audience cares about. They want to be entertained. They want to learn. And most of all, they want you to do well. Many mistakes you can make while performing do not prevent those things from happening. It’s the mistakes you make before you even say a word that matter more. These include the mistakes of not having an interesting opinion, of not thinking clearly about your points, and of not planning ways to make those points relevant to your audience. Those are the ones that make the difference. If you can figure out how to get those right, not much else will matter.
[1] I asked more than a dozen experts, and while none knew of the origins of the advice, Richard I. Garber tracked down a mention in expert James C. Humes’s book The Sir Winston Method (Quill) connecting Churchill to it.
[2] Some speeches are more formal than others, so you can find examples of perfect readings (but these are uncommon). I listened to Greatest Speeches of All Time, Vol. I and Vol. II, and many speeches support this point.
[3] For keynotes at some large events, there are several computers set up to run the same slides just in case one crashes. For it to work, the remote control is attached to the custom system, not to any one computer; thus, the funky remote.
[4] (Tarcher), p. 61.
[5] Forty-eight seconds into the video, you can see the expression on my face as I see two of my slides fly by: http://www.blip.tv/file/856263/.
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