It’s easy to smirk at the ridiculous images one can make in twenty seconds with AI.
People used to smirk at photographs in the 1800s.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” is no longer a useful thing to say. Truth is real, photos are not.
Not “amateur” as in the unprepared professional.
Amateur as in the passionate individual, untrained but with something to say.
If you’re called on to give a talk or presentation, the biggest trap to avoid is the most common: Decide that you need to be just like a professional presenter, but not quite as good. Being a 7 out of 10 at professional presenting is a mistake. Better to stay home and send a memo.
Don’t set yourself up for a ‘fail.’ Instead, here’s a chance to actually share your light and your vision.
No, the opportunity is to refuse to become a slightly prepared wannabe professional presenter. Just like it doesn’t pay to slightly practice the violin or sort of get ready to play in the NHL.
Sure, you might land a few well-timed punchlines or have a clever slide design. And sure, your violin might be in tune or your slap shot might work… But it probably won’t.
The alternative is to eagerly become an amateur presenter. Here are some thoughts to get you started:
Do you have something to say? If you don’t, stay home and send a memo. But if there’s a story you want to tell, a change you want to make, an impact you want to have, be really clear about what it might be. Simply getting through your presentation relatively unscathed probably isn’t a worthy goal.
Don’t apologize. Don’t apologize for being nervous, for caring, for not having 200 practice runs under your belt. The audience is offering you a tiny slice of time and attention. You cared enough to show up, here we go.
Find just one person. This is repeated often enough to be hackneyed, but it’s still ignored. I mean it. You have a microphone. There’s a room with some people in it. One of them, just one, is the sort of person you can tell your story to. So tell it to them. Ignore every other person. Don’t project your voice to fill the room, don’t pace around like Zig Ziglar or choreograph your slides, or tell jokes. You don’t do that in real life. Well, this is real life. Find one person and tell them your story. If other folks want to listen in, that’s fine.
Don’t memorize and don’t read. Very talented actors, recently returned from their strike, can read and make it sound like they’re not reading. A few podcasters I know can do this as well. Almost no one else can. Instead, amateurs understand that they’ve been telling stories their whole lives, and given the chance, they can tell a story again. Without reading it.
This isn’t a performance. Professionals perform. It’s their job. This is you sharing the change you’d like to make with one person sitting a few feet away from you.
Think about the most important interactions you’ve had. The ones with partners, doctors, strangers and friends. None of them were professional speeches. Not one. Instead, a human interacted with you and made a change happen. Not because they had a script and a director, but because they cared.
The challenge isn’t in becoming a sort of pretty good professional presenter. The challenge is becoming you.
Of course, it’s scary. But the response to the fear isn’t to soothe ourselves with memorization and insulation. It’s to simply show up.
Paradigm shifts are appealing but rarely well executed.
A paradigm is our mental model of the world. We’re surrounded by people who share a similar model, and as long as the model is working, we live our lives without thinking much about it. If you lived in a space station, the absence of gravity would be something you’d notice at all times… until one day, you didn’t.
Technology and culture conspire to change the rules. When that happens, there are huge opportunities for those bold enough to imagine a different system, a mental model that isn’t simply adjusted, but rebuilt.
Network TV was based on the paradigm of mass markets and the battle for the last few percentage points of share.
Cable TV shifted that (a bit) because niche networks could find plenty of viewers to make a profit, and suddenly, the smallest viable audience was a useful new way to build a media asset. MTV and ESPN couldn’t have worked in a three-channel world, but did fine in one with forty channels.
The real flip, though, comes from YouTube. Now, it’s not about trying hard to add a few channels. It’s about embracing the idea that there’s an infinite number of channels. That a scarcity of spectrum isn’t normal or useful. And no one from the world of network or cable TV understood this or did anything about it. They were focused on shifting, not flipping.
Many of my colleagues and friends in the traditional publishing business are still wrestling with the print version of this. They have assets, reputation and a bit of momentum, but instead of flipping to a new system, they’re inching around a shift.
In medicine, millions of lives have been saved by flipping paradigms. Germ theory, for example, and hand washing. Or more recently, beta-blockers for heart disease, or seeing the role of bacteria in ulcers. In this video, my friend Jonathan Sackner Bernstein talks about his breakthrough work in reconsidering how Parkinson’s actually works:
Not all paradigms flip. Often, humanity is stuck with a culturally-entrenched system that’s difficult to change. But when we see an opportunity to contribute, the hard work is being willing to walk away from our reliance on how things were instead of simply trying to make a small shift happen.
When electricity came along, there was a swath of industries that were trapped in an old way of thinking. The only ones that thrived were able to walk away from what they used to do and eagerly embrace something new.
When the internet was young, the major book publishers had everything they needed to create a dominant search engine. After all, they were in the business of organizing the world’s information. With just one exception, they didn’t even consider it. That’s because they believed that their job was to sell books to bookstores.
This is even more urgent for individuals. What you were trained to do, what you did yesterday… that’s a gift from your past, not an obligation. Beginning the analysis with, “what I used to do was…” is a great way to open the door to what you’re going to do tomorrow.
In Steven Pressfield’s classic The War of Art, he introduces the idea of Resistance. It’s the internal force that keeps us from doing our most important creative work.
If an instinct, a habit or a feeling gets in the way of the work, it’s Pressfield’s Resistance. Things we would never choose to add to the flow of our days, but there they are.
It’s easy to imagine that Resistance is for screenwriters or novelists. Writer’s block and procrastination. But anyone leading a project of any kind–a business, a non-profit, a campaign–confronts it as well.
We could do something, we might do something, but we don’t. And so the work doesn’t ship, or it doesn’t meet its potential.
I’m not alone in facing Resistance. It happens everywhere we look.
Some of the symptoms of Resistance seem contradictory, but if we go back to the definition, that makes sense. Here are a few:
It’s tempting to imagine that Resistance is a moral failing, but it’s more like stubbing your toe or burning the toast. We don’t have to blame ourselves for where we are, but if we can see it and name it, we can learn to dance with it.
These behaviors may seem as though they happen to us, but ultimately, they’re a choice. A skill we can learn, a habit we can unlearn. We can be kind to ourselves, focus on the goal and get back to the project.
There are two confusions and one fear:
The first confusion is that we might not realize that these are choices.
The second confusion is that we might not have learned better tactics, tools and choices, but we can.
And the fear? It’s of change. The change of it might not work, or the chance that it will.
When Resistance arises, and it always does, we can see it, name it, and gently move on.
Mixing up a batch of homemade vegan marshmallow Fluff® is an exercise in patience.
For the first nine minutes of the ten minutes it takes in the mixer, not much happens. And then, it transforms into something fluffy and delightful.
Without the recipe, it’s unlikely that most folks would make it to minute five, never mind ten.
Knowing it can be done makes it far more likely we’re going to stick it out and do it again.
It’s worth the most when it’s the most difficult to find.
When we raise our expectations for a student, a friend or a co-worker, we open the door to possibility. We offer them dignity and a chance to grow. We are offering them trust.
But if we become attached to those expectations, if the expectation unmet leads us to distress or unhappiness, then that attachment undermines the very reason we created the expectation in the first place.
There are people who get paid to play the flute or bassoon. There are far more people who volunteer to participate in a community orchestra. For many, rehearsals or performances are the high points of their day.
The metaphor is powerful, because it teaches us that we all benefit from having a community orchestra in our lives. The 1900 people who worked together on The Carbon Almanac were all volunteers, showing up when they could, working together to build something important.
Digital connection makes it much easier to find your orchestra. And easier still to start one.
Not all tech is new tech.
The ballpoint pen was a revelation, and a bit controversial. Now, it’s disposable and obvious.
Different industries go through tech spurts. My desk is covered with items I use every day (a mouse, headphones, a solid-state drive, transparent tape, and even a Star Trek communicator) that were risky breakthroughs, and now they are simply commonplace (though we now call the communicator a phone).
When tech is coming at us too quickly, it’s tempting to simply wait. It’s risky to be an early adopter.
But once the pace slows down a bit, once our peers and competitors are benefitting from a productivity breakthrough, our aversion should be more intentional than that. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the tech we once said we were too busy to bother learning.
We get to choose our tools, and the tools we choose alter the work we do.
