Usually in this newsletter I take whatever little story I start out with and find a way to tie it to presentation skills. If presentation skills are what bring you here, sorry man, couldn’t do it this week. So if you’re one of those people, come back next week, and in the meantime entertain yourself with this or this.

Anyway, for those of you who are still here:

There was a guy some years ago, Hugh Macleod, who had this great framework for life, Sex and Cash. According to Sex and Cash, there are the things you do for fun and fulfillment (the Sex half of the framework) and there are the things you do for money (the Cash half of the framework), and in real life the two are usually not going to be the same (the ultimate goal is to bring them together, but that’s called prostitution, and the metaphor kind of breaks down quickly there, I guess).

BTW, I read a couple of his books about 10 or 15 years ago, “Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity” and “Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination.” Today he’s still around and going strong. He runs a company in Florida called Gaping Void. I’m glad to see he found a way to integrate Sex and Cash in his life.

It was clear at the time I read those books that Sex and Cash were not fully integrated in Hugh’s life, but he had the vision in his head, and things were heading in the right direction.

My point is that if Sex and Cash are not integrated in your life right now, that’s fine. It doesn’t mean that anything is wrong. We hear a lot of this “do what you love” crap, and it’s easy to feel like if we’re not doing what we love, the dream is getting further and further away. Truth is, and I think Hugh Macleod would agree, there will be times in your life when they are integrated, and there will be times when they are not, and once they reach integration, it’s not going to stay like that forever, they will break apart and then you’ll thrash around a bit while you bring them back together.

So whether your dream is to move to Belize, sell garden gnomes in Seattle, or open a pilates studio in Istanbul (yes, that example was for you, you know who you are), keep the dream in the front of your head where the sinuses are, so that when you take a deep breath, air runs across the dream. In other words, keep the dream alive, keep it up front where you can see it, and always be doing at least something to be getting closer to it, it’ll come.

Okay, I know I told the presentation people they needed to leave this week, I couldn’t figure out how to bring it around for them. But I’m going to try, here we go…

Remember that humans are social animals, and they take their cues from what they see others doing. So if you want your audience to see your dream too, you need to see it during your presentation. Keep the dream front and center in your mind. That’s why you practice a lot, to get all those other things out of the way, to build them into muscle memory, so the dream can come back and dominate you and the rest of the room.

Oh, and before I go, back to Hugh Macleod for a second. In one of his Gaping Void blog posts this week, he mentioned the Acquired podcast. As many of you know, I am a huge Acquired fan-boy and go all ga-ga like a preteen girl at a Beyonce concert whenever someone mentions them.