Category: Speaking

Today I’m at Raquette Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, delivering a talk called Rethinking Careers. I wrote about the idea once before, and it’s turned into a presentation.

The biggest takeaway I hope to leave people with is that regardless of the employment type or status (corporate employee, startup founder, freelancer…), it’s our responsibility to find the intersection of:

1. our specialty (something that we actually know)
2. our interest (something that doesn’t make us want to die)
3. our value demonstration to the market (something people will pay us for)

Also: this work never ends. We have to remain in a posture of finding out where that intersection is, and to courageously seek it out.

On Sunday, I delivered a presentation called Inside Out: A Web Performance Philosophy to a group of affiliate pros as a part of a panel at Affiliate Summit East here in NYC.

I knew my material cold, it was just a question of how to present it in a way that resonated with a largely non-technical audience.

The punchline is that it was far too technical, although packed with relevant and valuable information. Mid-way through my presentation, I changed gears and made an effort to speak the version of English that non-engineers would appreciate.

https://twitter.com/77andSunny/status/234695849047887873

It went over well.

Feedback was generally positive, but the lesson—which is fundamental—was clear: know your audience, know your audience, know your audience…

Something odd

Fun fact: I uploaded my presentation to SlideShare and despite not being designed for consumption without my talk..

1. It was featured on the SlideShare homepage
2. It was quickly viewed over 100 times
3. It’s now approaching 1,000 views as of this post

I’m not being unnecessarily modest when I say that the presentation isn’t particularly interesting or valuable without the talk, so I’m wondering if this is normal. Would love your thoughts if you have experience with this.

And if you’re interested, you can check out the presentation below:

Email and RSS subscribers might need to use this link.

I’m excited about A Web Afternoon in May for a few reasons:

• It’s a neat event
• I was asked to speak
• It’s in Atlanta (where I spent a few years)
• I’ll be testing material for a book I want to write

Are you coming? It’s practically free (unless you wait too late).