Confessions of a Public Speaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

the same time.
    When I arrive at the Fort Mason complex, the venue for this
    particular Tuesday, I discover, as my taxi roars off, that I’m far from
    where I need to be. Fort Mason is a sprawling Civil War–era military base,
    recently converted into a community center. The word complex is apt. My instructions say to find Building
    A, but there are no signs, and, more importantly, no normal-looking
    buildings, only endless rows of identical barracks, towers, and narrow
    parking lots (see Figure 3-1 ). The Fort Mason
    Center has one major flaw: it skipped the conversion. It still looks like
    a place designed to kill you, not welcome you to fun community activities.
    There are fences, gates, barricades, barbed wire, and tall stone walls
    with sharp corners.
    Figure 3-1. The speaking venue: the intimidating Fort Mason, San
     Francisco.
    For comparison, there’s a military museum in Kiev with two
    decommissioned World War II tanks at the main entrance, painted top to
    bottom with fun, peaceful swirls in bright rainbow colors (see Figure 3-2 ). Now that’s a
    conversion: one day a death machine, the next a happy, silly plaything.
    Fort Mason, on the other hand, looks like a place the Spartans would say
    is too spartan. They’d demand a row of shrubs and fresh paintbefore they’d even consider moving in.
    Figure 3-2. The National War Museum in Kiev, Ukraine. This is how to renovate
     a thing made for war.
    Trying to find my way, I stop at the front gate—which is what I do
    instinctively at gates near things looking like military bases—and only
    after long moments standing like an idiot do I realize I’m free to enter.
    No ID or white flag required. The gate is for cars, which explains the
    strange look from the guard: I’d been standing in the car lane the entire
    time. I wander aimlessly through the complex, surviving several dead ends,
    wrong turns, and unlabeled parking lots, trying not to imagine snipers in
    the towers above, until I find Building A and happily step inside.
    The event at Fort Mason was run by Adaptive Path, a well-known Bay
    Area design consulting company, and I know these folks well. They’ve hired
    me before, and I say hello to friendly faces. I soon meet Julie, one of
    the event organizers, and after a brief chat she hands me an envelope. I
    know that inside is a check for $5,000, the fee for my services. I want to
    open it and look. My brain still thinks like a kid in terms of money,
    where $100 is tons and $500 is amazing. Anything over that simply does not
    exist in the surprisingly large 15-year-old part of my mind. I want to
    look inside, not because I don’t trust Julie, but because I don’t trust
    myself. I’m baffled at how adults pay other adults so muchfor doing boring, safe, adult things. My childhood friend
    Doug drove his mom’s Cadillac over the big hill on the wrong side of the
    entrance to the Whitestone Shopping Center in Queens at 60 miles per
    hour—with all of us screaming in the back seat—for free. He risked all of
    our lives without payment, other than his own insane but infectious
    pleasure. Meanwhile, bankers and hedge fund managers make millions playing
    with Excel spreadsheets, an activity with zero chance of bodily harm, save
    carpal tunnel syndrome. They earn more in a year than the guys who put the
    roof on my house, paved the road that leads to it, or work as firemen and
    policemen to protect it will see in a lifetime. It’s curious facts like
    these we’ll have to explain twice when the aliens land.
    In the movies, gangsters are always opening briefcases and counting
    money, but in real life, no one does this. It’s awkward, strange, and
    slimy. Money for Americans, a culture cursed by our unshakable Puritanical
    roots, is loaded with lust and shame. Yet, our modern consumer culture
    values the accumulation of financial wealth above all else, despite that
    little line of scripture about camels and needles suggesting that, for the
    faithful, this