One of the glories of the Internet is Maria Popova’s The Marginalian.  If you don’t know it, click on the link, sign up, and start having your soul fed every week in unexpected, thought-provoking, and beautiful ways.  Recently, she wrote about the sixteen things she has learned from sixteen years of doing her blog.  I was inspired by her wise list and thought how much of it – with a twist – was useful for public speakers.  So here, in no particular order, are the public speaking insights inspired by her brilliant work.

Great public speaking means knowing what to change and what to keep the same.  One of the most tenacious misunderstandings newbie speakers have is that they need to write a new speech for each speaking client.  It comes from a desire, naturally enough, to get work.  So, their answer, when someone calls is, “Yes, I can talk on that!”  (Thus, the surest sign of an inexperienced speaker is the website that has twelve speaking topics listed.)  Once they start becoming successful, then, the newbie speakers begin to feel exhausted, from writing a new speech every week.  And their performance is uneven, because they don’t have time to learn each new speech deep in their bones.

What you need to develop early in your career is one great speech that you modify minimally to customize it for specific occasions.  Once you’ve mastered that speech and can deliver it at the drop of a hat to doctors, lawyers, accountants, and surfers, then you’re ready to start working on the next one.

Great public speaking demands a long, and steep, learning curve.  Learning how to work a room, learning how to take the audience on an intellectual and emotional journey, knowing where the audience is at any given moment, knowing when to modify a speech on the fly and when to stick to the original plan, learning how to cope with everything and anything that goes wrong, learning what to do when the audience is 10x bigger than you expected – and 10x smaller – these and many other similar lessons from the art of public speaking are learned one by one, mistake by mistake, moment by moment.  I’ve been privileged both to soar and to crash in front of many audiences, and you naturally learn more from the crashes than the successful flights.

Test your beliefs regularly against new audiences and new knowledge.  I once worked with a woman who had been giving the same speech for twenty years.  I mean, exactly the same, with the same now-tired jokes at exactly the same places in the speech.  Her audience had dwindled to small lunch crowds.  It was well past time for a new speech.  And yet, when she finally started working out the new one, she was too frightened by the fresh information and learning it required her to master to stick with it.  She went back to the old one, like Linus with his security blanket, and her audience continued to dwindle.  Don’t let that happen to you.  Constantly seek out new information in order to “falsify” what you think you know, test your current facts against new developments in your field, and be prepared to jettison the old when the moment is right.

This is the first of several pieces inspired by Maria Popova’s work.