I was originally going to call my book Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Personal Impact (which launched a year ago this week) by another title: Mastery.

Now, unless you’ve been through the book writing and publishing mill, you may not know a curious fact about the process: the title of the book is one of the two things that a publisher cares about and reserves the right to change, choose, and ultimately decide over the protests of the author and agent. It’s a tug of war that an author can win if she’s willing to fight, but the pressure is heavy if the publisher has a desired title. (The other thing is the cover design.)

There can be a lot of emotion behind the title. Feelings run high. In this case, everyone loved Mastery – the agent, the publisher, and I all did.

Then, six months before publication, another author came out with a book by that title in a related (but different) field. It was judged close enough that we couldn’t go with our title. So Power Cues was born, and I started re-writing around that theme.

Writers learn to be flexible, at least about some things.

And I’ve grown to be very fond of Power Cues as a title and concept. The book has sold well, and so a big thank you to everyone who has supported it, my latest baby. I just had word from our agent that the book has “earned out,” meaning that it has sold enough copies to earn back the advance, paying off, in short, the bet the publishers made on it. Thank you, Harvard. Thank you ZSH Literary Agency. And thank you, again, readers. That modest accomplishment means that I can hold my head high in the author-publishing world, at least until my next book comes out.

All of this is on my mind because we’re about to launch a very exciting, very nerve-wracking venture, an online course on how to create a great presentation. Presentation Prep: 10 Steps to Persuasive Storytelling lays bare my secrets of great speechwriting in a series of videos, text boxes, infographics, exercises, and so on. I’m hoping it will reach a wider audience than my one-on-one consulting can, or even my books. There are still too many boring speeches out there, and too many people suffering in audiences around the world!

And we have a second online course planned, if the first one goes well, on how to deliver a great presentation. All the performance secrets I teach my clients about, and that I talk about generally in this blog.

Here’s to better presentations everywhere.

On this anniversary, and this soon-to-be-a-launch-date, I got to thinking about mastery, the title that might have been. We could have called the online course Mastery too, because that’s what we’re all trying to achieve – mastery of this difficult, fascinating, maddening art form, the speech. How do you capture the attention of an audience, take them on a journey, and change the world together?

I think mastery of the content creation of a presentation has five aspects, and in honor of this anniversary, and Presentation Prep, here’s my offering on what mastery looks like. Come to think of it, it really applies to any field, doesn’t it?

Relentlessly improving.

You go through stages as a speaker. You think, I have no idea what I’m doing; they’re going to kill me when you’re starting out. Then, you learn a few things and you start to think, I got this; I know what I’m doing – I’m cool. Then, when you really start to get deeply into what you’re doing, you realize, I’m going to be learning forever. Any art worthy of the name – and public speaking is performance art – is always becoming, never arriving.

Finding an order.

As you delve more deeply into any art form, there’s the secret order, the way that art is put together, that begins to reveal itself to you. It’s typically not the superficial rules that everyone talks about. It’s something underlying, something you may not even ever articulate precisely, but it is a way that you think about what you’re doing. Without that awareness, you can never truly learn.

Showing up.

When you truly engage in learning an art form, you show up not only every single day, but every single moment. You’re always thinking about “it.” You’re having dinner out, say, and something about the presentation of the food on the plate makes you realize that the chef is telling a story — and you need to understand that in order to tell your presentation stories better. It’s not a burden, not an assignment. It’s a joy, and simply a way of looking at the world.

I loved acting, and thought I was giving it my all. About 15 years ago now I had what I thought was my big chance. An independent movie producer and director were making a movie about a spy, and I was the first person they were considering for the lead role. I was so excited. I immediately started imaging the James-Bond-uber-cool-shaken-not-stirred character I would become. I worked on what I thought was an upper-crust British accent all weekend.

Monday morning and my audition finally came. I showed up, dressed to kill, and ready to wow the director and the camera crew. I had been working my “sides” all weekend – the pieces of the script that they had shared with me – and I was ready to go.

We did the first take, and the director said, “Thanks, Nick, that was great. But we’re thinking of a seedier, more down-at-the-heels spy, a kind of failure in life, more Graham Greene. Can you give me that?”

So for Take Two, all my dreams of Bond-like suaveness dashed, I tried to go seedy.

There was a moment of silence. Then the director said, “Nick, can you give me a Cockney accent? We’re thinking of Cockney for this character. And a little more seedy?”

Now, my glaring weakness as an actor was my inability to switch accents quickly. It takes me a lot of time to work up a new accent, and the process is not pretty to listen to. I panicked.

All I could think of in the moment was to talk like a pirate.

“Aaaaarrrrrr,” I said, and proceeded to deliver the lines again with a growl from the back of my throat like a Disney automaton pirate on Talk Like A Pirate Day.

There was a very long silence when the take was done.

Finally, the director said, “Thanks, Nick. Really appreciate you coming in.”

And that was the end of my acting career. The casting agency, ears no doubt ringing from the feedback ire of the entire production team, dropped me and I couldn’t get any work. Even my voice over work dried up.

It felt horrible at the time. But looking back now, it’s easy to see that I wasn’t fully committed to the art. If I had been, I would have worked six different accents that weekend in preparation, knowing my weakness. I would have been ready for a dozen different ways to play the role, and it would have been a joy.

You show up every single moment. It’s not about ego; it’s about service to the craft.

Of course, it’s all about having the passion. It’s obvious, but it has to be said. To sustain yourself through the work, you have to have the passion. If you don’t, you won’t make it. I loved the idea of acting, but I didn’t have enough passion for it — to be willing to suffer for it. Public speaking, on the other hand, endlessly turns me on.

And then there’s that final thing: having a touch of obnoxiousness. Any art, any life pursuit, involves patience and compromise. But you have to have a clear internal code that lets you know when to compromise and when to say no. If you don’t occasionally piss other people off, you’re not doing your job. The price of any art is that you will make some enemies along the way. If you’re not willing to do that, you don’t care enough about your art and you won’t ever achieve mastery.

Of course, if you’re the kind of person who always pisses everyone off, then you better be really, really good – and prepared to be appreciated only after your dead. Have a touch of obnoxiousness, and be willing to compromise. Belong to the community, and serve it.

Here’s to the journey.