When Ozzy Osbourne was starting out, there was no Black Sabbath. There was just some random dude named Ozzy (he was probably sleeping on his mom’s couch at the time), and somehow he got a gig at some random bar, and he needed a band to back him up, so he put up some posters, some friends responded, and that’s how Black Sabbath formed.

Black Sabbath went on to revolutionize rock. They practically invented heavy metal, and as revolutionary as they were, now when you listen to them, you often think, “Well, pretty much all rock sounds that way now.” That’s how you know you’ve revolutionized something: 40 years later, everyone sounds like you.

You might be wondering what this has to do with your presentations, and it’s this:

The world doesn’t need you to hide. It needs you to let your freak flag fly. The board might be asking you to present on last year’s sales, or tell them how that big IT project is going. But that’s just data, that’s not what they really want. What they really want is to know the crazy behind the person who is leading this project.

Black Sabbath didn’t set out to revolutionize rock. They just said, “hey, instead of doing that, let’s try this,” and boom, 40 years later what they did seems obvious, but at the time it wasn’t.

So when you are putting your presentation together, and the little voice in the back of your head says, “instead of that, try this,” listen to it.