The room was full before he walked on.
He was at the bleeding edge of his field. People had rearranged their schedules to be there. The room was buzzing and no one was looking at their phones.
He walked on stage, the audience erupted in applause and then… he started reading.
The script was flat. You could tell immediately it wasn’t written by him. And it wasn’t built for this room.
His extraordinarily outgoing personality dissolved and he just became a guy and a bejeweled hat. The person everyone in that room had actually come to see — loud, bold, brilliant, funny — was gone. What was left was a man reading words that didn’t belong to him to people who had come hoping for something else.
I watched the room shift. Not all at once but gradually. People who had been leaning forward settled back. A few checked their phones, quietly, like they were trying to be polite about it. Then a few more. By the midpoint nobody was pretending.
He finished. The applause was polite. Nobody rushed to meet him as he walked off stage. Nobody pulled him aside to keep the conversation going. They just quietly left.
I feel for the guy. I really do, and I know exactly what happened.
He skipped some critical steps in the talk prep process.
Why → Who → What → How
He skipped Why. He didn’t know what he wanted the audience to feel, think, or do after the talk was over. So when he sat down to build it, he didn’t build toward anything. He assembled information.
Then he skipped Who. The room was full of people who worked in this field and looked to him as an expert. I have no idea who the talk was written for — it wasn’t them.
And finally he skipped How. His personality is unique and bold. He didn’t bring it on stage. He delivered words instead of himself.
This guy is not obscure. His reputation preceded him into that room and still couldn’t save the talk.
If you read my last newsletter, you know the continuum. He was somewhere between Survival and Delivery — getting on stage and getting through it. But nothing special was happening.
What’s counterintuitive about the continuum is that your reputation doesn’t move you farther along it. The craft does.
When I work with clients 1:1 we dive deep. But sometimes you just need to know where to start.
Pick Up the Mic is a 5-week accelerator for founders, operators, and entrepreneurs who need a talk ready for stage this conference season. You will learn how to build and deliver a talk that lands. You walk away with a title, a conference-submission description, a script, a slide deck, and a recorded delivery.
Pitch it today, deliver it tomorrow.
10 spots. Starts June 10. Beta pricing: $850. Newsletter readers get $100 off with the code P2E100.
The course works through four questions in order. Here’s what they are and why they matter.
Why and Who
The two most skipped steps in building any talk are the first two.
Why has two layers. The first: What do you want your audience to feel, think, and do after this talk? Two weeks later, what do you want to have haunted them enough that they act? If you can’t answer that before you open a deck, you’re filling slides with no destination in mind.
The second layer: why this stage, why now, what does this talk need to do for you and your work? That answer shapes which version of your story you tell.
Who is about identifying who’s in the room — the full audience, the critical subgroup, and who the follow-up assets are really for. Understand their knowledge gaps. Their skepticism. What they need to feel and know before they’ll move. Knowing who’s in the room before you write a single slide changes everything. The whole talk is a letter to a specific person. Write to no one and that’s exactly who you’ll reach.
What and How
Once Why and Who are settled, you build the content. What: the outline, the narrative structure, what makes the idea stick, what makes it land in a way people remember.
Then you learn to embody it — the How. Voice, body, how you take up space on stage. How to bring yourself into the room instead of a performance of yourself.
That’s the part people rarely practice. And it’s what separates the talk a room feels from the talk a room politely endures.
Most conference talks lose the room before the second slide. Let’s make you stand out.
Pick Up the Mic is a 5-week public speaking accelerator for founders, operators, and entrepreneurs who need to take the stage. You walk away with a title, a conference-submission description, a script, a slide deck, and a recorded delivery.
Pitch it today, deliver it tomorrow.
10 spots. Starts June 10. Beta pricing: $850. Newsletter readers get $100 off with the code P2E100.