One thing we all hate together is regurgitated messaging. No one ever wants to be subjected to the same presentation twice—especially the same joke setups and the same case studies, etc. It’s basically a rule that the more impactful a story or illustration are in a presentation, the more memorable it is. That’s good—unless you’re one of those people who likes to generate one great story and then use it every time, with every body. It’s like having a friend who keeps telling you the same story for college. You start wondering if they’re even aware of the time they spend with you.
The solution is not to keep a running tab of whom you’ve told what stories. A better approach is to live a broad, prolific life. Do new things. Read new books. Watch new movies and, yes, turn everything off sometimes and watch nature roll by. Try new things at work. Try new things at home. Take notes of everything.
If you’re in a position where you’re constantly presenting, it’s critical that, basically, you be an inspirational and phenomenal person. People should have a sense of wonder for your energy and drive, your enthusiasm and the breadth of your experience. This enhances your credibility, sure, but it also ensures that your presentation materials are always fresh and cutting edge.
Of course, it’s not very easy to decide to be an “inspirational and phenomenal person”. That doesn’t really just happen. It is purposefully obtained through personal use of time. If you are determined, like the protagonist of those Dos Equis commercials, to be “the most interesting man in the world”, you have to schedule it. What gets scheduled gets accomplished. The implied reversal of this is that if you do not schedule it, there is no guarantee that it will ever be done.
When we fill our calendars with meetings, conference calls, trips and appointments, we pay little regard to filling free time. But when there is a block of time already scheduled, regardless of what is scheduled there, our first effort is to schedule around it—even if the block of time is not what we might consider to be critically important. In other words, the majority of us schedule our own time visually, basing it off of hour-by-hour calendars.
Thus, the first and most important thing any of us could do is go ahead and reserve space, every day, for the personal development and long term thinking we need to do to stay on our own cutting edge. If you want to be a great presenter, block of the time for it every day just like you would if you wanted to be a great tennis player. If the latter was your goal, you would know that you would be on the courts at a specific time every day, practicing. Why, then, would it be any different for presenting, or any other skill?
Jerry Seinfeld, they say, has a meticulous joke-writing schedule. It’s scheduled into his calendar, and every day he marks it off. How difficult it must be, as one of the world’s greatest comedians, to generate fresh and always funny content! To help himself live up to this expectation, he schedules greatness into his day.
Question: How can you schedule greatness into your day, every day?
