Confessions of a Public Speaker Read Online Free PDF

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    around a late-winter sunrise, no one except the doorman, the cab driver,
    and me is awake and outside. You know why? People are lazy. Even if there
    was a sunrise at 7:47 a.m. as brilliant and soul-stirring as a wall-sized
    J. M. W. Turner masterpiece, a sunrise giving out $100 bills and
    tomorrow’s lottery numbers, few of us would be out to see it. Most of the
    things we say are so wonderful and amazing will lose without a fight to an
    extra hour of sleep. We’d wake up, think it over for a few moments, and
    fall back into the comfort of our dreams. Sleep deprivation is a curse of
    the modern age, a problem born from our technological things. Before
    Edison’s light bulb, we averaged 10 hours a night; in 2009, we average
    nearly half that. [ 13 ] And this means, when it comes to sunrises, judge people by
    what they do, not what they say.
    On this morning, the sun is putting on quite a show, but where are
    all the sunrise-lovers? They’re not with me out on the street. They’re
    sleeping, just as I would be if I could. The truth is, public speakers
    everywhere would have an easier time keeping their audiences awake if more
    people actually slept well the night before. If the ascension of our
    nearest star—the source of all energy and life on earth, the universal
    symbol for all that is good, happy, and hopeful—can’t get people out of
    bed, what chance does a speaker have?
    In all honesty, I love the sunrise…it’s the getting up to see it I
    hate. Sunrises are transcendent when viewed through a hotel window, from a
    comfy bed, when I’m not expected to do anything for anyone for hours. My
    professional problem is that public speaking is often scheduled hundreds
    of minutes on the wrong side of noon. And on the days I’m lucky enough to
    get top billing for an event, I earn an additional chronological treat:
    the keynote means I’m to set the tone for the day, a challenge that—given
    our limited understanding of space and time—requires me to speak before
    anyone else. All this explains why, at 7:48 a.m. on a Tuesday, I am
    showered, cleaned, shaved, pruned, fed, and deodorized, wearing a pressed
    shirt and shiny shoes, in a cab on my way to the San Francisco waterfront.
    Like the gorgeous light from the sun still conquering the clouds over the
    San Francisco Bay outside my cab window, this morning is both great and
    horrible, a thrill and a bore. It’s an amazing way to live, getting paid
    to think and learn and exchange ideas—all things I love. But I’m far from
    home, going to an unfamiliar place, and performing for strangers, three
    stressful facts that mean anything can happen, especially since it’s the
    worst of all times for my particular brain—early morning.
    Making it to the venue is the first challenge a speaker-for-hire
    faces, and let me tell you, it’s often a bigger challenge than the lecture
    itself. The lecture I know well, since I created it. I have no one to
    blame if it stinks. And when I do finally arrive at the room I’m to speak
    in—even if it’s the worst room in the world—I can try to adapt to whatever
    problems it has. But until I get to the room, until I make my way through
    the airports, highways, cities, conference centers, office complexes, and
    parking lots, I can’t begin to get ready. Being in transit means,
    psychologically speaking, you are in the purgatory of being almost there. Unlike lecturing, where I feel in
    control, it’s the things I can’t control that create stress—like the taxi
    driver getting lost, the traffic jam a handful of miles from where I’m
    supposed to be, and the confusing corporate and college campuses
    impossible for visitors like me to navigate. (How could anyone know
    Building 11 is next to Building 24 on Microsoft’s main campus, or that the
    Kresge Auditorium is hiding behind Bexley Hall at MIT?) From experience, I
    know there is nothing worse than being in the strange territory of very
    close and surprisingly far at