3 Steps to delivering a moving speech.
Every once in a while I am called to give a talk or a lecture to a bunch of people, most of whom are more intelligent or accomplished than I am. While I am not sure why that happens, what is even more bizarre is the kind of stuff that I am expected to talk about.
I have been asked to give talks on economics, entrepreneurship, and oil pricing, neither of which, I am good at. So like any good teacher, when I don’t know what I am doing, I joke about it. This helps me get through the talk without really looking dumb and a lot of time, it even passes off as cool. But it’s not exactly what you would call a sustainable solution.
So I do this one little 3 step routine at the beginning of every class. A routine that I came to figure out as the best thing that I could do before I start a lecture, which is, in all cases, a one way dissemination of information.
I try not to let anyone introduce me
Normally when you’re invited to talk, they like doing this pompous introduction where they sing your laurels. Now while it generates a lot of applause and people do respect you after that, it’s done more because those who invited you want to feel good about the choice they made. They share in the applause and it is only fair but I somehow feel it to be an unnecessary waste of time.
I discredit myself
It is a ritual that at the beginning of my lecture, I neutralize all emotions in the rooms. It’s this sort of a sanitation drive where I make it explicitly clear that I do not have any professional accolades to get on to where I am. I don’t deserve to be here. That I have hardly done anything. And while it might sound like something you would do while fishing for validation, I don’t get any because it’s a one way. Whatever I say about myself, will be taken as a the truth.
Doing this makes sure no one in the rooms continues to think of me on a high horse. The believe that I am just as human as they are, that I am not above them and that being on different sides of the auditorium is just a chance. That I might as well be on the other side.
And I do all this to reach to the last and the most important point of the introduction.
I could be wrong.
This is probably the most important message that I give at the beginning of any talk. And no, I don’t do that because I am ill prepared. I normally wake up at 4 in the morning for a 1pm talk and usually don’t sleep at night when it’s a 9am. I do this because it needs to be a thing. And here is why.
Biological evolution does lay the philosophical grounds for this idea but I could much more easily explain it by using scientific evolution. We have come hundreds of years on in the process of scientific evolution. From thinking of the Earth to be flat to thinking we are at the centre of the universe, there has been a lot of things that we found out about ourselves over the time.
In the process of making these discoveries, we also came across things that we did wrong. Things which were, till a certain point in time, thought of as right, turned wrong and we had to establish completely new models to understand them. The atomic theory and the wave-ray debate of light are just a few examples.
But across all these years, of all the things that we did right, and the ones that we didn’t, there was one emotion that was persistent. One emotion that made sure scientific process does not halt. One emotion that incentivised continuous scientific development.
The feeling that we are WRONG.
I am a strong believer of the fact that more than the satisfaction of having found something right, what drove human exploration was the idea that we could be wrong. It is constant in no matter what you find, no matter how strong the evidence. The scientific community will always address a challenge to a theory. There will always be people who say, “yes, they could be wrong. Tell us how, and we shall hear”
So yes. I do this when I enter an educational setting where I am expected to enlighten people and in the least inspire them. I make them believe that however far I could’ve gotten in life, I am just as human and I could be wrong. That true temperament lies not in realising what is right but in looking for the possibility of what could be wrong.
And in closing, no, this isn’t a pessimistic approach. In fact, it is the most optimistic and motivating approach to life that I have ever seen. Yes it seems anarchist, and yes it generates chaos, but who said that isn’t how things are supposed to be? At least it makes us move. At least it helps us get our asses off the chair and look for what’s right.
In our small little life spans, the search for truth, like the setting sun, is always two things, beautiful, and never the last to be seen.
