This woman has NO idea that I am obsessed with her. She is a legend among my friends
Standing in the dark on the edge of the forest, I peer down at the piece of paper in my hands, lit by the flashlight attached to my head. As I read what it says, I screw up my face.
“AGAIN????????”
Three of my friends, on camp chairs in front of me, were laughing. We mostly hadn’t stopped laughing for the last hour…
Well that’s depressing
I’m on a zoom call, looking at the man with a big smile and blue glasses, feeling the familiar buzzing in the pit of my belly, when he says something and I’m like, “Wait, WHAT? Why aren’t we talking more about that?” I get that fizzy feeling in my stomach every time I’m on a call…
Few things make me this mad this quickly
The noise starts again. Sitting on our table at the back of the room, T and I flick our eyes towards each other, glaring. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, before we both look back towards the speaker.
The room is huge and we’re on a sort of mezzanine level to the side, and so it’s hard to tell where the noise is coming from. But it does not stop. Sharply, I blow breath out of my nose, and go to stand up.
T knows she needs to move so she can get out of my way and looks up at me with confusion, her eyebrows asking, Where are you going?
I look down and whisper (as loudly as I can so its still quiet), “TALKING POLICE”.
Last Tuesday night, T and I went to cheer on our brilliant friend Micha at a speaking competition. He’d already gone on first — he SMASHED it! — and now we’re watching the other nine speakers. Except…
…someone at the back of the room keeps TALKING.
LOUDLY.
And it is MAKING ME RAGEFUL…
How to keep people engaged in your presentations
As we sit up in the gods (section 512 row 10) my kid is on my knee. I lean down so my mouth is close to her ear — I need her to hear me over the noise of the crowd.
“Ready, baby?”
She nods, and we lift our right arms into the air, making our hands into fists at the top.
There’s a trumpet sound before the voice on the PA, the two of us, and 38,000 other people in the stadium yell,
“CHAAAAAAAAAARRRRGE!!!!!”
Having now been to four (count them!) baseball games, I am a fan — but mostly because of a regular thing that happens…which is also something that makes the best presentations engaging.
In instructional design, these are called “Colorful Activities”. Before I explain what they are, I’m going to explain why we need them.
This is what people remember from most talks, keynotes, TEDx’s and workshops….
How to sneak in your agenda when you’re given a platform (as a speaker or anything else)
It’s last Monday at 8am. I step out of the elevator and, as my feet hit the carpet, my heart is suddenly pounding and my breathing is short.
As I notice what’s happening in my body, I think, INTERESTING.
This week, I got to do one of my FAVOURITE things:
GOING ON THE RADIO. In this case, CBC Radio 1 (for non-Canadians: this is our National Public Radio’s speech station, and the one I listen to every morning of my life). I was a guest on the breakfast show, Metro Morning with David Common. Going on the radio is one of my favourite things for two reasons:
1) my first career was in radio, so stepping into a studio kicks up warm, familiar feelings
and
2) i *LOVE* playing at being famous.
Like, I think being ACTUAL famous would be a kind of…
You’ll either envy me or think this is WEIRD
Standing on the park’s grass in the evening light, I bent down then stretched out my arms to pick up two loops of the giant fabric before asking, “So….how do we do this?”
Thirty seconds later I am bent double (as much as I can while flapping my arms up and down), laughing harder than I’ve laughed all year.
A few months before this, I had made an investment to become a co-owner. Not of a car, or a home, or even a cute-but-fancy timeshare condo in the Florida Keys.
I became co-owner of one of those parachutes that kids play with in gym class…
My FAVOURITE EVER piece of advice
I wave at the receptionist then push my way through the giant glass doors of our building, out into Leicester Square, and think,
Did that just HAPPEN????
I’m 30 years old and I’ve spent seven years doing what is almost my ideal job. Almost.
I’d wanted to be a radio DJ for as long as I could remember; amazingly, I’ve managed it… sort of. After a few years in the business, I’d landed a job at my dream place — an indie radio station called Xfm. And while people who aren’t in radio assume I am wildly successful, I know that I haven’t “made it”-made it. Because to make it-make it means having a regular show on weekday daytime. I have only ever been on late night or weekends.
Having a meeting with one of my mentors earlier that week, he says, “You know what, you should go and talk to Keith Pringle. I feel like you two would get on!”
I am surprised and kind of delighted. Keith Pringle is the boss of our sister station Capital Radio. Capital isn’t just London’s biggest pop radio station, it is legendary, the station we all listened to as kids. I can still sing you most of the jingles — “Ninety five point eight! Capital, effffff eeeehhhhhhm!” “Pat! Sharp! Woo! Woo!” “Doctor Doctor! EFF! Doctor Doctor! OH! Doctor Doctor! EX! Doctor Doctor! FOX! Di-ni-ni-niiwwwwwww!!”
It also has a breakfast show hosted by Johnny Vaughan, a former TV presenter who is one of the funniest and most famous men in the country. Capital Radio is a HUGE deal. And, it turns out, my mentor is right: Keith and I get on a treat. He tells me about how they’re in the process of auditioning to find the new co-host for the breakfast show. I know that lady who’d been doing it has left, and I also know the rumour that she was on £100,000 a year (translate that into today’s money and USD and it’s around $215,000). A YEAR.
Then Keith says, “You know what, YOU should audition.”…
One of my greatest ever naps (and my most important Storytelling lesson)
“I can’t eat! If I eat, I vomit!”
Lucy, the old lady I’m sitting with, is upset.
I’m at the day centre for seniors with dementia, where I volunteer once a week. Lucy is my favourite. Six foot tall and rake thin, with short, scrappy hair and clothes that hang off her, she’s usually very sweet. A big smiler. And she loves to sing.
LOVES.
It’s clear that, in her younger days, she was some kind of professional. You can tell from the sharp, clear vibrato she randomly lets out at various points in the day.
Her memory is almost completely shot. She asks if her daughter is coming, and is placated when I tell her, “Later, Lucy”. Then she asks again in thirty seconds time.
Lunchtime is always stressful. And always the same…
Biggest opportunity of my life…and I was dreading it
G looks at me with something that is a cross between confusion and horror.
She says, “You HAVE to stop this!”
“No, I don’t, it’s fine. I’ll handle it,” I reply, trying to convince myself as much as I am her.
When I was 31 years old, Sony offered me my own record label.
A few months earlier, I’d heard about how a friend of mine, Imran, had an imprint (a sort of “sub-label”) on XL records. He’d put out the first UK single by this new band Vampire Weekend, which had blown up. One night, I’m out with my music lawyer friend Martin, and I’m feeling hard done by.
I whine, “Imran has a label. Why don’t I?”
Martin smiles and says, “Let’s get you one.”
A few weeks and several meetings later, Martin and Sony’s lawyers are getting the contracts ready for Huckster Records, an imprint of the Epic label (whose parent company is Sony). On Epic are artists like Abba, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, and now… whoever I decide to sign.
In the meantime, I am figuring out the logistics. It’s going to be a 7” vinyl records label and Epic are giving me an extremely generous budget: they’ll pay for the vinyl, radio promo, press promo, a *music video*, and a small live tour. And — because I don’t yet have either — they are also going to buy me a laptop and an iPod (this is before the days of smartphones). All I have to do is to take care of finding someone to print the actual vinyl and the record covers, then figure out distributing those to record shops.
Which, it turns out, is really hard. And really stressful. And not my skillset. And I don’t want to do any of it. Like, ANY of it.
But I don’t tell anyone that…
This book changed my life. No hyperbole.
2024 was the best year of my life. HANDS DOWN.
And the thing is, it wasn’t the best because of what did or didn’t happen to me*. Sure, there were some nice things (I ran some fun live shows, had nice friend hangs, joined TikTok and… immediately blew up on there), but there were probably an equal amount of cruddy things (some weird friend dynamics, some work-related angst, a death in my family, the not insignificant facts of *gestures* all the awfulness happening in the world and how much pain it causes me).
2024 was the best year of my life because of how I responded to what did and didn’t happen. And how I responded changed drastically from previous years in most part thanks to this book…
