The Adjustable Entrepreneur

Here's a speech I gave at the Virtual Enterprise opening ceremony at South Pasadena High School, October 5, 2006.

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I'd originally written a speech that talked about hope and the future, and how you should be looking forward to becoming a better person, yadda yadda yadda. And then I remembered that I would be giving this speech to a roomful of high school kids wearing uncomfortable suits at 9 in the morning, all of whom have probably already heard or read speeches about hope and the future, and the last thing you want to hear right now is more of the same. As they say in business, "It was then that I reassessed my action plan." And so I bring flash cards. I'm going to talk about Being Adjustable.

What are flash cards about? Well, for one thing, it means you come prepared. You have your bullet points, your important topics to cover, and you didn't have to embellish them with unnecessary words.

That's a good thing. The bad thing is you only have fragments of complete sentences in these cards, so you have to piece together these bullet points into a coherent message. And no, I'm not that good, which is why I have everything written out beforehand.

But if you manage to pull it off, using flash cards says something about you. It says that you've done your homework enough to where you can probably do a presentation without these cards, but you're bringing them anyway because you want to be thorough. It also says that you have a system of organization. Your topics are laid out, prioritized, color-coded and laminated!

But what I really like about flash cards is that they don't necessarily have to be in any order. You can skip around, switch cards, regroup topics, so that you're not stuck in one linear way of thinking. It forces you to be Adjustable. Flexible. Adaptable. It even forces you, sometimes, to come up with a totally new idea during your presentation. Something that you haven't prepared for. And that's scary!

You wanna hear a scary story? For my industrial design senior thesis in college, we had to present our ideas in front of professionals, sort of what you're doing today. My idea was for a telescoping electric lady shaver that was designed for older or disabled women who wanted to shave their legs but couldn't reach down far enough. So I made a mockup of the telescoping electric lady shaver, all painted with actual shaver parts, and I presented my idea to a group of design professionals.

In the middle of the demonstration, my model broke in half.

It took about a second for the blood to leave my brain, travel to the tips of my toes, and surge back up again to my brain, after which I realized that my audience was still looking at me, my graduation depended on this moment, and fainting was not an option.

So I said to my audience, "Nevermind this model, what you really want to see is how it works." And that's when I took out a cardboard working model of the telescoping electric lady shaver, and proceeded to show how the telescoping part works.

The coolest part of all this was after I was done, the professionals who watched my presentation came up to me and were more interested in talking about how I salvaged the moment. They told me that models break all the time, and what was really interesting is how I kept going, and figured out a way to not let the accident stop me.

If it hasn't happened already, there's a chance that this moment will happen to you. The big question is, do you know your product well enough so that you can improvise in the middle of your presentation? Do you believe in your product well enough so that even if everything else goes wrong, you'll be able to convince your audience that your product is worth their money? And most important--do you believe in yourself enough so that you will spend the time and effort, and do the homework, so that you can present yourself, as well as your product, in the best possible way?

Reading typed words directly from a sheet of paper during a presentation will not allow you to gauge your audience. It will not allow you to skip, stop, rewind, shuffle around, and reassess. It will not allow you the freedom of improvisation.

Will you be linear (typed sheet) or multi-dimensional (flash cards)? Will you be a reader (typed sheet) or a presenter (flash cards)? Will you simply follow words (typed sheet) or will you come up with new ones on the fly (flash cards)?

Will you be a rigid employee, or an adjustable entrepreneur?