Get off the pot

When I was a kid, I heard my mom say to my dad, many times, “Jim, sh*t or get off the pot.” I’ve always loved that phrase, and its bias towards taking action, even if imperfect.

I’ve mentioned before, and I’ll say it again: People care way more about whether you have something to say, than whether you hold your hands in the right place. Boring presentations are a dime a dozen, and it’s because people are putting their effort in the wrong place, worrying more about their “presentation skills” than about having something to say.

Nobody ever got promoted for holding their hands in the right place. However, people get promoted on a regular basis because they have an opinion that rocks the world, and they let the world know about it.

Related Posts

Oxytocin

See this here? It's an oxytocin molecule: It causes people to trust each other. It gets released during sexual orgasm. It also gets released when you see the house you grew up in, or when you hug your mother. If you sell stuff, you need to know how to make it appear...

Riding the bus

A few years ago, I took the bus from Dinuba to Reedley, two small towns in California. Some of you will recognize the name Reedley — I am from there, and my mom lives there now. I was the only passenger on the bus, and the driver was very friendly, so we had a little...

AI is flatpack furniture

The other day I was helping a client with her presentation. She had fed her slides into AI, which produced a nice script for her to read. I went about fixing the script, adding in the transitions, popping the data that was crucial to the point, sinking the stuff that...