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To know something by heart

Or… How To Give A Great TED Talk.

According to Seth Godin:

The spread of TED talks means that more and more people are being put on stage and told to memorize their talk. This almost always leads to failure.

Watch a great performance and you’ll see no artifacts of memorization. Instead, you will see someone speaking from the heart.

This is what it means to know something by heart. Memorizing the words is half of it. And woefully insufficient.

My suggestion: Don’t memorize your talk. Memorize your stories. Ten stories make a talk. Write yourself a simple cue card to remember each story’s name. Then tell us ten stories. Be you.

We didn’t come to hear your words. If that’s all we wanted, we could have read the memo and saved a ton of time.

Bring your heart.

Don’t pee in the pool

The always insightful Seth Godin writes:

For generations, people dumped crap into the Hudson River. The river was so large and so swift that they assumed that the effluent wouldn’t come back to haunt them.

Of course, it did, killing the oyster beds and poisoning the public.

How big does a body of water have to be before we forget that we’re swimming in it? That it all comes around…

Why are we are okay at yelling at a stranger, but not our neighbor? We will abuse the department in the other building, but not down the hall…

It turns out that the pool/river/tub that we live in is far smaller than it seems. The culture of the place we work, the vibe of the community where we live. It’s all more connected than we realize.

Photo by Shazmyn Ali on Unsplash