The other day, Alper and I recorded a podcast episode with Wes Wheless.

(Wes is on this email list, so if you are seeing this email Wes, hello!)

Wes and I do very similar things in our work, so it was a pleasure to talk to someone of a like mind and see how they do things.

But you know what I secretly enjoyed most about our conversation?

It’s that Wes lives in Seattle. Has, since 2014.

I used to live in Seattle, about 20 years ago, before I moved to Turkey. I love that place. I consider it home, even though I haven’t been there much in the past 20 years. It’s my second-favorite city in the whole world (Hong Kong is first).

The third, I don’t even know what it is. Chicago, maybe, especially during the summer. It’s a distant third though, so far behind that it doesn’t really even matter.

I saw Seattle for the very first time early one morning when I was 10 years old and pulled back the curtains of our sky blue van. I fell in love with that city right then and there. We weren’t even going to Seattle, we were just passing through on our way to somewhere else, but I promised myself, “I’m going to come back and live here some day.” I finally moved there on my 24th birthday, so I guess it took me 14 years to get there, but I got there.

My favorite spot in all of Seattle is a wooden bench in a tiny park called Marshall Park in the southwest corner of the city’s Queen Anne neighborhood.

Why is this my favorite spot in a city full of places that drive me delirious with happiness? It has one of the best views of the bay next to Seattle and the peninsula across the water.

I used to live a few blocks away from that bench, I ran past it a thousand times, and I would often sit at it and read on Saturday mornings.

Anyway, here is a link to that podcast we did with Wes. I tried so hard to stay on topic during the podcast, and to stay away from reminiscing about that city I love so much.

And on that note, before I go yapping on and on into infinity about some city, let me sum up what this episode has to do with your presentation skills: The value of clarity, and of giving someone else the vocabulary they need to describe their world clearly, is immense.

So next time you worry about where to put your hands in a presentation, realize that you are worrying about 5% of the value you could be bringing to your audience, and what you should probably be doing instead is recognizing that you are misallocating your resources, and putting even just a small dent into the other 95% would give a much better ROI on your time invested.

And here’s a Google Street Maps view of that bench at Marshall Park. It’s still there, I see. At least, it was 10 years ago, when they apparently took that photo.