Badass beats pretty

There’s a guy who exercises in the park. He’s 85 years old. He’s one of the regulars (there are only three or four of us in that time slot, actually). He’s there, rain or shine. In late January, when it’s cold, and it’s dark, and it’s rainy, he is there, wearing his knit cap and his winter jacket and his long pants. His clothing is a bit old and threadbare, but no one in our little group cares, and besides, it’s too dark to see.

The other day he and I were leaving the park at the same time, so I slowed up and talked to him for a few moments. He has been exercising like this for 30 years. Six days a week, for 30 years. It is a habit for him now, an engrained activity.

As we go our separate ways, he waves goodbye to me. I wonder if he knows how much I admire him. I wonder if he knows that when I look at him I think, “When I am 85, I want to be like that too.”

Later in the morning, shortly before the sun rises, I am back in my apartment, showered and dry and warm, drinking my tea and looking out the window at the “kids” heading to the park to exercise in their multicolor compression socks and their microfiber shirts. I put “kids” in quotes because they might be in their 30s, but they are still 50 years his junior.

They have the pretty, but he has the badass.

You know the badass. It’s the unspoken thought, the gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach when you talk to your boss or sit in a meeting. It’s the voice inside your head that says there’s another way to see this, there’s a better way to solve this problem. But you shut it up, because the idea is rough, it hasn’t been fully thought through yet.

Maybe it’s rough, but let it out anyway. The group needs it from you, it is your contribution to the world. It is your badass. The other ideas being batted around the room are the shiny new multicolored compression socks and the microfiber shirts. Yours is the boring gray winter cap, but in 30 years people are going to be saying, “Thank god we did this 30 years ago.”

You might wonder what this has to do with presentations. And it’s this: The single most important presentation tip of all is “have something to say.” People remember the one who rocked their world, not the one who was safe. Speak your mind, don’t just be a pretty face up there on stage.

Whenever you are deciding to go badass or to go pretty, go badass, every single time.

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