Boring

My podcast co-host Alper and I are both huge fans of Blair Enns. Have been for over 10 years.

For those of you not familiar with the name, Blair Enns is all about the selling of creative services.

Recently, Blair Enns released a new book and is doing a series of webinars about the book. Alper and I are both reading the book, and we commented to each other the other day that the book is actually quite, shall we say, “underwhelming.”

I joked that maybe Blair Enns needed a new boat or something.

(That’s an inside joke, by the way. Alper and I both know, from personal experience, that writing books is generally not a good way to make money. I’ve written three, and I think in my best month ever, the royalties from all three books combined were almost enough to buy me one cup of coffee. As they say, “Don’t quit your day job.”😉)

Anyway, here’s what this has to do with your presentations:

I bang on, on a regular basis, about the importance of having something to say. And yet, here I am, sitting down every Tuesday evening for a month, at a time I would much rather be watching a movie or listening to music, watching an hour-long webinar about something that’s quite boring.

Why?

Look at what I’m actually doing during that hour. Chatting with the other attendees on WhatsApp and the Zoom chat. When Blair Enns is boring, there is still tremendous value in the community that has built up around him, in the group of people who are there to say, “people like me do things like this.”

And that’s why you should have something to say in your presentations. Because as much as we might like to think that we are fascinating all the time, there are times when we are actually quite boring. And during those times we need a group of fascinating people to bridge us across to our next fascinating moment.

Blair Enns is boring today, but, because in his non-boring moments he has something to say, a community has built up around him to make him fascinating even when he’s not actually fascinating.

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