4 Promises to My Future Self (& You) After My First Year as a Public Speaker
Or, How to Not Be Full of Crap in 2 Years
I’m winding down my first 12-month period of consistent public speaking, and I couldn’t be more excited about the months to come.
I also couldn’t be more petrified of becoming a guy who is, well, full of crap.
In the past year, speaking gigs have helped fund my business, Unthinkable, which today is a highly produced podcast and tomorrow will be a full-fledged media and education company. The people I wish to serve are craft-driven creators in business — writers, designers, podcasters, videographers, content marketers, entrepreneurs, and whoever would make what they make for its own sake but ALSO wants to see results from it. These are my peoples. They reject shortcut culture. They’re bothered by suck. They are, on no uncertain terms, the best part about the internet. And my one goal is to help them — help YOU — break from conventional thinking to successfully follow their intuition.
And to do this, MOST of my projects require the same things that people who are often full of crap love to use to spread their full-of-crapness— speaking, blogging, podcasting, social media, and so on.
So, I wanted to make four promises to my future self in this letter. My future self is, of course, in greater danger of being full of crap compared to my current self, provided Unthinkable keeps growing.
By sharing this publicly, I’m keeping myself accountable, but I’m also hoping to receive additional thoughts from (or at least inspire some thoughts in) both aspiring and established speakers/creators whose work depends audience attention.
A Letter to My Future Self (and All Speaker-Creator-Types Building Audiences)
1. I promise that my Personal Attitude Dial will always be set to “Grateful.”
I’m sorry, but did people literally applaud your work today?
Then don’t even think about complaining for one second. Your default setting needs to be “grateful.”
Wait, no, scratch that. Your default setting needs to be “ridiculously, ludicrously, 12-year-old-boy-whose-crush-just-smooched-him-on-the-cheek grateful.” Bashful smile and all.
Most people don’t get the appreciation they deserve over a lifetime of hard work. You just did 45 minutes on stage, and people clapped and hollered and cheered.
Be grateful. Period.
2. I promise to wedge my brain’s loading dock permanently open.
Here’s the deal: You need to get comfortable with that uncomfortable feeling that you both KNOW and DON’T KNOW a ton. You know more than you think you know. You also know less than you think you know.
For starters, if you’re not confident in your skills, knowledge, stories, and message, you’re gonna suck up there. You should draw confidence (and a little showmanship) from all your hard work and preparation. Because you know your stuff!
But — and it’s a giant badonkadonk of a but(t) — just because you know a thing or two about a thing or two doesn’t change the fact that every single person in that room can teach you a thing or three about a thing or three. So, yeah, people are gonna come up to you, ask questions, and assume you have answers, and sometimes, that’s all justified. But don’t forget that others can teach you just as much as you can teach them (and likely MORE).
In the words of Jay Baer, everyone is a teacher and everyone is a student. Forgetting that fact not only makes you full of crap, it stunts your growth and your success.
Stay open. Always and forever.
3. I promise that being impressively nice is the only time I’ll actively try to be impressive.
Speakers too often try to be interesting instead of interested. That’s backwards.
For better or worse (wait, no, it’s definitely “for worse”), general good guyedness and good galedness is underrated and underused. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s entirely mandatory.
Think about all those big names you hope to meet someday. Whenever anyone meets them, they walk away with one of two thoughts:
“WOW! They’re so refreshingly nice in person!”
…or…
“WOW! They’re a giant bag of moist diapers!”
Don’t ever do anything to even remotely slip into the second category. I don’t care how many people follow you on some meaningless social network. I don’t care who you meet or who you work with or who you know. You are not special. You are a person in the world. And people in the world have only one role to play: Be nice to others.
In fact, be refreshingly nice to others. Don’t be a giant bag of moist diapers.
Because ew.
4. I promise to never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever (times infinity) promise others any “secrets.”
Let’s rip the bandaid right off, leaving the hairless red rash of truth behind: THERE ARE NO SECRETS! There’s only hard work done with the right intent.
I can’t teach you to be rich. I can’t give you the one thing every successful person knows. I can’t impart THE steps you must follow, no matter who you are or what you’re doing.
Said another way: I don’t want to lie for a living. People who trumpet secrets are professional liars.
It’s appalling how many talks, blog posts, podcasts, videos, books — audience-driven people — claim they have a secret to share with you.
But this ignores one fundamental truth: Every person is unique. I could assign 12,000 people the same blog headline and 90% of a completed draft, and I’d get 12,000 different finished articles in return.
So if every person (and situation) is unique and has a different context, then the “secrets” don’t hold up. What DOES hold up is a person’s intuition, if well-honed, because that enables them to execute their work in a unique, creative way, relying not on someone’s “secrets” but instead on everything that makes them THEM.
The big problem with shilling secrets is it removes the person involved in the task at hand. People are the grand total of all their experiences, mixing together, fermenting over time, and giving them a unique perspective on how to solve a problem. A talk is simply one additional data point.
It looks like this:
Speakers who are full of crap will claim they know the big arrow on the right for everyone in the room: “Here’s how to act. Follow this secret. It doesn’t matter that everyone’s context is different! I can teach everyone to be rich, to get more leads, to find love, to succeed!”
Nah, bro. Nah. You’re trying to remove the context of the person, which is impossible when applied to reality. So, far better than me promising others secrets and telling them exactly how to execute like there’s one silver bullet way is to help others think for themselves. How do I help them hone their intuition? How can I help others think the right way or, better said, be open to and aware of their own power?
Because remember: If my goal is really to help creators break from conventional thinking and find success following their intuition, I can’t expect or even WANT everyone to blindly follow some “best practice” I shared. Nope. This is all about helping others go craft their own. Their situation is unique. Because THEY are unique.
Dear Future Me:
You are a giant hambone who loves the stage, loves making others laugh, and loves taking the idealistic and optimistic view on things. You believe in being grateful, open, and nice. You don’t sell secrets because there aren’t any secrets. You know there’s a powerful creator in everyone that just needs the confidence, skills, resources, and leadership to emerge. Oh, and you also use slightly too much hair gel. But that’s for a different rant.
Dear future me, I hope you get everything you’re working towards. But so help me God, if you lose sight of any of this stuff, I will NEVER forgive you. Err, me.
Hey, Not Me (that’s you):
I figured since you read a post about someone who speaks, you might be curious to hear a talk by said someone. So I included an example speech below. This is from Content Jam, an awesome event in Chicago from August 2016, hosted by the great Andy Crestodina and Orbit Media.
Also, if you’re in need of a speaker, emcee, moderator, or workshop leader who desperately tries to avoid being full of crap, you can learn more about me and put a date on hold.
Thanks for reading/watching!
