Seven talks in eleven days, one slide I kept trying to save, and the part of it my wife carried.

Most people who want to get good at something in public get about two shots a year at it. Two shots a year is not practice. It's occasional performance with long gaps to forget in.

I got seven shots in eleven days.

Seven talks in eleven days

August 24th, two sessions for the University at Buffalo, both on Zoom. August 25th, on stage at Adobe in San Francisco, the first time I'd given it to a room. Then back to Buffalo the following week for four more in person, opening the semester for the School of Management.

The logistics were bad. Airports, hotels, a talk scheduled to start while my plane was still on the runway at SFO.

Those are real problems. They're also the problems of a person who got asked. Ten years ago, when I started my business, my problem was that nobody was asking, and I'd have traded straight across without thinking about it.

One thing I didn't expect. I started at Buffalo as a freshman on August 23rd, 1996. That first Zoom session was August 24th, 2026. Thirty years and one day.

What the talk actually is

It opens on the thing nobody separates: some things are hard because they're worth it, some because they're wrong, and from the inside they're identical. Then three questions. What am I actually trying to achieve. Is this hard, or is this wrong. Who is one person who could help.

Then the two ways people get it wrong. Flinching, calling something wrong the second it got hard. Grinding, calling something hard long after the evidence said stop. Most of us have a favorite and have never noticed which one. It closes on an instruction rather than a feeling: before bed tonight, say it out loud.

You can't fix sucks

Mid-run I was in a hotel room at night working on one slide.

Not the talk. One slide. Moving a line, changing a word, trying to make it land the way I heard it in my head.

Then it registered that I'd already delivered that slide three times in two days and it hadn't worked once. I wasn't fixing it. I was decorating it.

So I said it out loud: this sucks. And you can't fix sucks. You can only cut it.

I cut it. By the last delivery I wasn't using slides at all.

The feedback arrives while you still remember the choice you made. I could hear which lines read well written down and sounded like filler out loud. I found out which points made students raise their hands, which is a better measure than the ones I thought were important. The volume wasn't a cost. The volume was the product.

Gay Hendricks calls this your Zone of Genius in The Big Leap, where your passions, strengths, skills and natural talents meet. He ties it to doing something better than anyone else, the part people drop when they quote him.

Here's where I'd extend him. That intersection is hard to see from inside, because what comes naturally to you doesn't feel special. So use a cheaper tell: not whether you're good at it, but whether you finish and want to go again.

I came home looking for the next one.

I'm not waiting for a stage

Which produced the next problem on schedule: how do I get on more stages.

I'm not waiting for that. I'm booking my own. Coffee shops and small rooms in Brooklyn, whatever will have me, for reps and honest feedback from people who owe me nothing. I have no idea how it goes holding a room full of hipsters in Bushwick on a Tuesday night. That's roughly the point.

Two things would help, if you're willing.

If you know a room, tell me. A meetup, a class, a team offsite, twenty chairs in a back room. I'm not picky.

And if somebody you know is stuck on a decision, send them the keynote. That's the fastest way this gets useful to somebody who isn't on this list.

The part that actually costs

Here's the part I skipped.

While I was on the road, my wife Domenique had the house. Mornings, pickups, bedtimes, alone, so I could go stand in a room I was thrilled to be standing in. Booking Brooklyn rooms means asking for more of that, not less.

Any parent knows the feeling. You're lit up by the thing, and underneath it sits a low guilt that won't quite go, because what you love is being paid for by somebody at home. It doesn't resolve. It just sits there.

So I ran the test on it. It'd be strange to teach this and not use it.

Is being away from my family hard? Yes. Is it wrong? No. The goal is right, the road reaches it, and there's a real price. That's what hard costs. Wrong would be doing it for a room that didn't matter, or doing it and pretending nobody paid.

The remedy I've got is not a system. It's gratitude, said out loud and often, to the person carrying it. And it's knowing my kids are watching somebody chase work he cares about without setting the family on fire to do it. That's the lesson I actually want them to take: you're allowed to want it, and you don't get to make everyone else pay for it.

One thing this week

Take the thing you want to be good at.

Count the reps you got in the last ninety days. Not hours spent preparing. Reps. Times you did the thing in front of somebody who could react.

If the number is under five, you don't have a talent problem. You have a volume problem, and it's the most fixable one on the list.

Then book one. A small one, a bad one, one nobody important will see. And tell whoever covers for you that you noticed.

Run the test on your own decision.

Or try the free deck