Always Try To Do It The Hard Way
I was coasting on fumes when he asked me the question, so I don’t think I got the answer right.
To be fair, I was 90 or so minutes into being on stage for my talk in Sydney when I was asked: “If obstacles make us better, should we seek them out (or create them for our kids)?”
Like I said, I was a little fried, so I said something like: “Life is full of obstacles already, I’m not sure we need to go around creating additional ones.”
It’s strange that I said this because I was in the middle of doing the exact opposite… and it’s Chris Williamson’s fault.
He and I were talking in Austin back in May and he told me he had just gotten back from a speaking tour. “What kind of presentation did you do? Did you have slides?” I asked, curious because I was getting ready to head out of the country for my own set of theater dates (which, by the way, you can get tickets for my next stops in Europe and Canada here) and Chris had spoken at some of the same venues I was going to be at.
“It was just me and a microphone,” he said.
This struck me because most of the talks I do — usually at conferences or to companies or to sports teams or soldiers — are not that way. You’re expected to have a slide deck that walks the audience through what you’re talking about. This extra work can…
