My First Million - One Question Friday: What Does It Take To Be An Ace Public Speaker?

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Episode #363: Sam Parr (@thesamparr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) answer one listener's question about what they do to make public speaking fun/interesting. To submit your question and hear yourself on My First Million, go to MFMPod.com and click on the circle with the microphone in the lower right hand corner. ----- Links: * Storyworthy * Talk Like TED * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

All right, it's one question Friday where we answer one question from one of the listeners. If you want to submit your question, go to mfmpod. Is it dot com? Mfmpod.com and click the little microphone to submit your question. This one came in through text message. Somebody said, hey, hey, dude, I'm giving my first talk at a conference. I got invited to speak at this conference. I'm given my first talk.

I'm excited about it, but a little bit nervous. He's like, I know it's going to be fine, but I just don't want it to be lame. He's like, you and Sam are really good at doing these kind of public speaking things. you know, what's the trick? You know, what do I do to make this good? What do I do to make this not just the same old, same old? So I thought we could give maybe our take on what we do to make public speaking fun slash interesting. What do you got?

Well, I would say first, public speaking is a skill. So a lot of people think, well, I speak all the time and I speak in public. Therefore, I'm probably going to be decent at public speaking. They don't really work that way. So public speaking, some people are talented and they are just better. at Gary Vaynerchuk's like that. I think he's just better than everyone else. But for most people, it's a skill. So I highly recommend reading a book on it or like Googling like how to be better at this. It's a skill set. And so there are tricks. I don't think that this is like the best time for us just to say like all

the tactics are. But a few of them are just like on storytelling. And it's very similar to stand-up comedy, which again, some people are just born better. But a lot of people, you just have to learn and try. And so buy a book on it. And I think that's actually the easiest first step. Is there a book you'd recommend on it or just not on top of your head? Yeah, I think what's the one that you and I were reading in storytelling by the guy who like won all the muse come storyworthy. Yeah, I think story worthy was awesome that I had a bunch of takeaways from that and then speak like a TED talk or something like that. It's called like the TED talker TED Talk speakers guide or something like that. That's quite good.

But the story worthy I actually thought was pretty phenomenal. So I'm going to tell you what I told him. I said, by the way, he had also said. he's like, I want to bring that showmanship that you guys talked about. So I think he was picking up on what we would talk about. So I said, all right, three things. I said, number one, be in peak state. It's very easy when you're nervous to go kind of like inward. You're kind of low energy. Your mouth's a little dry. Your shoulders hunched over. Like fundamentally, as soon as you walk out there, people are going to read your body language. They're going to read your energy and they'll

start to respond to it. When somebody comes out and they're electric, you can feel that they're excited that they got a like a bounce in their step, you're paying attention because you want to know what they're all about. I said, so just make sure before you go out there, do some pushups, go run a wind sprint, do some jumping jacks, do whatever you got to do physically to literally just get blood flowing and be in a like more like high performance state. I said, think about it, an athlete doesn't go on the field until they are warmed up until they're ready. A singer or a dancer or performer, they're not going to go on the stage until they're warmed up and they're feeling loose and warm. It's the same thing if you're going to go talk. You want to feel loose and

and warm, both in your voice, but also your body. So that's the first thing. Just do the physical. Get the physical part right. The second is, remember, this is the first of many. You'll do this 500 more times. So this might feel like a big deal now, but a year from now, this will be an afterthought. You'll just, you won't even really remember how it went. Just treat it as a practice rep one of 500 times you're going to do this. It's a chance to experiment with some things.

That'll de-pressurize this moment for you. And it'll teach you to remember that like this is just, like you said, it's a skill. You got to get good at it to get good at anything. skill, you need practice reps. I said the last one. I said, storytelling. I said, have a backpocket story. Right. So what's a backpacker story? It's like you started the podcast that we just recorded with the, dude, I got to tell you this funny story. There's something that happened to me today. Before we do this, I was walking through the park and these nannies were getting attacked with this guy. And I'm there in my fanny pack and me and the fanny and the nannies. We all fought these guys off,

basically. It's like this funny story. And it doesn't need to be a hilarious, extreme story like that. It can be anything. It could be like, let's say you're at a conference. You might be like, you know, before we start, I just talked to this guy in the back and he asked me a really interesting question. I want to ask you guys this too, because I honestly, I think we might be really split on how we answer this question. Already you really want to know what that it is. And I've taken control of the scenario and I've made it already an interesting talk before we jump in and say, hi, my name is this. I'm from this. And today I'm not here to talk to you about blah, blah, blah. So have a story in your back pocket.

It could be fun, interesting, controversial, whatever, something that's going to get them. And the trick is, I said, you need to be excited by it. If you're excited by it, they'll be excited by it. Remember the lesson that, what's her name, Miss Excel, that woman who's, she basically teaches you how to use Excel better, but somehow that's like going viral on TikTok. And why is something as boring as Excel tricks going viral on TikTok? One of the reasons is she comes out with this crazy energy. She seems really excited by this stuff.

And it's just enjoyable to watch her do it, even if you're not even going to use Excel that day. It's just enjoyable to watch somebody do that. And she says this in her interview. She goes, content is the transfer of emotion. I got to get myself into the emotion of being excited about something if I ever want you to be excited by it. I have to get myself to be fascinated by something

if I want you to be fascinated by it. And she's like, I just get myself into that state. Then I run to the phone, click record and I start to start to do my thing. And it's like, that's actually what it is. Content is the transference of emotion. And so what most people try to do is they think about what they're going to say, which is intellectual.

That's shit's words. People don't remember the words that you said. They will remember if you had some emotion and some energy behind you. And they'll remember the vibes. They'll remember how you made them feel. And they'll take away just a few nuggets out of what you said. Most of what you said, 90% of what you say will go in one ear and out the other. Our software is the worst.

Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. And that's the thing I tell people all the time. I told you this when you early on, when I was maybe six months ahead of you in terms of content,

you're like, how do I write these articles? And I was like, it's not really about what you want to teach. It's about what you want to make someone feel. And oftentimes when people give present. They think, well, I'm talking about this. I'm talking about like mosquitoes and how they like cause malaria in Africa. And this is like a really serious thing. It's like, yeah, it could be serious, but you need to weave in some stories.

And you need to do some crazy shit. And it's no different than a comedy show or a play where you capture attention. Yes, you're doing it about something important and isn't just entertainment, but you have to weave that in there. One of my favorite tricks I've saw is when they brought up malaria is when Steve, Bill Gates or someone talked about malaria and mosquitoes. And he goes, I want to show you why this is an important deal. And he opens up this jar and mosquitoes fly out all over the place.

He goes, I'm going to tell you about how many people die from malaria, which comes from mosquitoes just like this. And so people are like, you know, that's showmanship. And so it's the same way with any talk you're doing. You don't have to do something that extreme. But it starts with the story. It starts with the emotion. And then I would say the last thing is you have to treat people, your audience, regardless of if they're smart, you kind of got to treat them dumb. Meaning a lot of people, what they do is they put way too much emphasis.

on the slides. And in my opinion, most talks should be able to be, like at least a B level without any slide. The slide maybe makes it go from a 9 to a 10. But the slides to me, it's kind of like when you are in, when you're in a band, it's about how do I make this song great? It's not, how do I make this one little guitar solo awesome? It's like, no, dude, the guitar solo exists to make the song great. The song doesn't exist to make that solo awesome. It's the other way around. And so it's about my, it's about my performance. And it just so happens that this PowerPoint is just one piece of that. And I need to treat people stupid and assume that they're not going to read the small text.

And it's up to me to use my words, my body language in order to make them feel something. And the, the slides are just an extra added effect. That's right. All right. I think that's great. There's a ton more. I feel like we could probably, like there's probably 10 more things. But really the reality is you don't need to know all the things.

If you're just to the things we talked about, right, which is basically, you know, show up with energy, have some showmanship through either a little magic trick or a story or something like that and treat it like practice because you're going to need to do this 100 times before you're any good at it. If you just internalize those three, you're going to be, you know, ahead of the curve. You're going to be ahead of, you know, 80, 90% of people. Practice. We're talking about practice? Not the game. We're talking about practice? Yeah, we're talking about practice.