Confessions of a Public Speaker

This book is highly opinionated, personal, and full of
behind-the-scenes stories. You may not like this. Some people like seeing
how sausage is made, but many do not.

Although everything in this book is true and written to be useful,
if you don’t always want to hear the truth, this book might not be for
you.

This book is written with faith in the idea that if we all spoke
thoughtfully and listened carefully, the world would be a better
place.

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:

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:

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:

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.
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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.

Figure 1-1. Live at Web 2.0 Expo. You can see the kamikaze remote control in
my left hand.