3 tips for public speaking

Monday, February 27, 2023

I was texting with a friend yesterday and he asked me if I had any public speaking tips, and this is (a lightly edited) version of what I dashed off:

1. Talk slower than you think you need to. Take your time. Don’t be afraid of a little silence. If you’re lucky enough to land a joke, let the laughs die down before you start back up.

2. If you can open with a funny story or a joke — especially something local or specific to the group — you can get the audience engaged and on your side.

3. Don’t be afraid to be brief. Nobody ever said, “Gosh, I wish he went on longer,” and if they ever did, that’s a big win, to leave them wanting more. As James Brown said, “Kill ’em and leave.”

That’s just 3 off the top of my head. There’s a ton more, and a ton of writing on the subject.

The best way to learn is to steal like an artist.

“Pay attention to other speakers,” says Ted Gioia in his list of 10. “Steal all their best techniques.”

(I like to watch stand-up comedy and pay attention to pacing, audience work, delivery, structure, etc. The “callback,” for example, is helpful outside a comedic context.)

If you need a speaker, hire me.

A portrait of my brain working on 3 talks

Monday, June 21, 2021

Usually when a client hires me to speak, they’re interested in one talk, so I either have to narrow down the scope of what I’m going to talk about, or I have to try to weave in elements from all of my work into some kind of unified theory. A client recently hired me to do something I’ve never done before: three talks over three days!

Conveniently, I have a trilogy of books that map nicely to 3 talks, but because each subsequent book after Steal grew out of the one before it, there’s a bit of crosstalk between them. (For example, the chapters “Something small, every day” from Show, “Every day is Groundhog Day” from Keep Going, and “Be Boring” from Steal all speak to the idea of daily practice and routine.) So, funny enough, I’m combining what I usually do for talks: narrowing each book down to an essential idea, and then building up each talk by weaving in material from all over…

Smells of the lamp

Friday, February 12, 2021

A blacked-out baseball card from Baseball Card Vandals

When I wrote about Claude Debussy’s burn on overworked musical pieces, “They smell of the lamp, not of the sun,” I didn’t realize that he was quoting a very old idiom. From a 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Smells of the lamp
Said of a literary production manifestly laboured. Plutarch attributes the phrase to Pytheas the orator, who said, “The orations of Demosthenes smell of the lamp,” alluding to the current tale that the great orator lived in an underground cave lighted by a lamp, that he might have no distraction to his severe study.

In Lives, Plutarch writes about how Demosthenes wasn’t necessarily quick on his feet with speeches — if he was asked a question in public, he wouldn’t stand up and talk about something he hadn’t thought about, but took time to go away to his study and work out arguments.

For this, many of the popular leaders used to rail at him, and Pytheas, in particular, once told him scoffingly that his arguments smelt of lamp-wicks. To him, then, Demosthenes made a sharp answer. “Indeed,” said he, “thy lamp and mine, O Pytheas, are not privy to the same pursuits.”

In another translation:

…many of the popular pleaders used to make it a jest against him; and Pytheas once, scoffing at him, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp. To which Demosthenes gave the sharp answer, “It is true, indeed, Pytheas, that your lamp and mine are not conscious of the same things.”

And another story about his lamp:

And to the thief nicknamed Brazen, who attempted to make fun of him for his late hours and his writing at night, “I know,” he said, “that I annoy you with my lighted lamp. But you, men of Athens, must not wonder at the thefts that are committed, when we have thieves of brass, but house-walls of clay.”

Now I am conflicted, as a burn that is about overworked creative efforts was originally pointed at a dude who was probably just introverted and studious and thoughtful and against bullshittery!

(Always learning.)

Creative is not a noun

Monday, August 20, 2018

Here’s video of a 40-minute keynote I gave during the Scratch Conference at MIT’s Media Lab last month. It was one of the most enjoyable talks I’ve given — it’s a kind of mashup of my books, and it was received by a great room full of enthusiastic people. (Followed by a Q&A with the wonderful Karen Brennan.) If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, check out my speaking page.