At least once a month, someone in a 1:1 or a mentoring session will ask me why I write these articles or give talks at conferences and want to know how they could get started themselves.
It can be daunting if you’ve never published something with your name attached or spoken in front of a group of your peers. The most common fear I hear is that people are afraid that they “have nothing to say” or relatively nothing to say that is new.
I give everyone the same advice.
You are the only person in the world that has your experiences. If you tell your story, no one will have heard it before.
A talk on Typescript would be interesting to more people than you might think, but a talk on your experience using Typescript for the first time and the things you learned as part of that experience will be interesting to nearly everyone, even if they aren’t interested in Typescript itself. Every software developer has had the experience of using a new language on a project. Experienced Typescript developers are interested in the problems people new to the language face. People interested in learning Typescript will be interested in your experience. You have something to say that people will want to hear!
If you are worried about writing about something for fear that you will say something wrong and be called out for it, no one can correct you about your own experiences. If you want to give a talk but are worried that someone in the audience will contradict you, it’s important to remember that by being the person standing on the stage giving the talk, people will assume that you know what you are talking about.
While putting yourself out into the world can be scary, reminding yourself of the above may help you overcome that fear. Remembering that you can build up your experience in many small ways is also key. Very few people have their first public speaking experience in front of hundreds of people or have their first blog post go viral (for the wrong reasons).
Why do I write and talk?
Every person will have their reasons for wanting to share their knowledge publicly. I have several reasons why I choose to.
To share knowledge
Over the decades, I’ve gained a lot of hard-won knowledge and learned a lot from others who have been generous with their wisdom. I try to share what I’ve learned with my teams and the people I mentor, but widely sharing knowledge takes a long time. Posting and giving talks is a faster way of sharing the lessons I’ve learned.
To save time
In my mentoring, I often find myself repeating the same advice over and over. That will frequently prompt the subject of a new blog post or talk (such as this one). As a benefit of posting it somewhere, I can refer someone to it for more information. It helps me save some time in a conversation. If a person has already read the post or seen the talk, we can focus on the specifics of their issue and get deeper faster.
To understand something better by explaining it to others
Writing a post or talk also allows me to crystallize my thoughts on a subject. So often, we come to a way of doing things over time and don’t consider why we do things that way or how we came to our approach. Writing out how I approach a subject helps me understand myself and why I do things. My decisions became much more deliberate once I started blogging and talking.
Employer Branding
As a leader of an organization, I’m responsible for hiring well. One of the best shortcuts for hiring is for candidates to know how your organization functions. That helps to select candidates who are interested in your way of working and select out those who would be happier elsewhere. The Netflix Culture Deck is a famous version of this. Informing candidates about your company is employer branding. How do you tell them? Blog posts and talks are great ways to do this.
To Meet People
I’m an introvert, and meeting new people is something I need to force myself to do. When I attended conferences, I would hang out with people I already knew or sit by myself. Being a speaker makes things much easier for someone like me. People will approach me because they’ve seen my talk and have questions or comments. Now that I’ve been speaking for years, people approach me before I talk because they saw me speak at a prior conference. It makes things much less awkward for a person like me.
To Find Customers and Learn from Them
We build software for people. Speaking about our product or product development can be helpful information for potential customers. When researching a software product for my company, I often look at the tech talks or technical blog posts from the company’s technology team. I want to know how open they are about their issues, the kind of stack they use, and whom in the company I may want to reach out to if we have questions or a problem (and not have to go through the sales team).
Personal Branding
While many people think this is why most people blog or speak to promote themselves (carrying with it a sense of icky egomania), for most of my friends who are frequent writers or speakers, this is usually the least important reason or not a reason at all. There certainly is a benefit to having your name attached to a well-known talk or often-shared blog post. I’ve been approached for new jobs because people have read something I wrote or seen a presentation that I gave, but this happens far less often than you might think. If your primary reason for writing or speaking is to get “famous,” there are better ways to do that.
How you can get started
Just do it
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.”
? Ira Glass
The best way to do it is to do it. Create a blog. Give a talk to your team. It probably won’t be very good. When you are getting started, you aren’t perfect. It’s a skill like any other. You must develop it; the only way is to do the work. I’m an ok writer. My taste still exceeds my ability, but I write much better today than when I started blogging. My early posts are embarrassing to me now, but I’m glad I wrote them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have improved at all. I’m thrilled that my earliest talks aren’t on YouTube. They were cringy. Through practice and repetition, I’m a much better speaker now and can give an opening keynote to 5000 people without having a panic attack.
Pedestrian: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
Street Musician: “Practice, Practice, Practice”
Start Small
It’s easy to create a blog. Plenty of free platforms exist to do just that. Create an account and go! Give yourself a goal, such as one blog post monthly if you don’t enjoy writing. One blog post per week if you are ambitious. The trick is to make it a habit. Writing isn’t something I do naturally; I must make myself do it. My posting is extremely infrequent when I don’t have a blogging goal.
You can propose talks to every conference in the world from the day you decide that you’d like to become a speaker. Still, getting started with presentations in your own company or at a local meetup is probably better to build your skills and confidence. They are much easier to get into and more forgiving of inexperienced speakers. Some conferences pride themselves on giving first-time speakers opportunities and coaching. However, I would still look for any opportunities you can to practice giving talks and not count on those. While I haven’t tried it, many people have raved to me about their experiences with Toastmasters International.
Read/Watch
To be a writer, you must be a reader. Find blogs that you like and follow them. They don’t have to be about technology. Read not just for content but for style. You are trying to understand blogging, not just the subject. How do writers you like address their audience? Are they formal or personable? Do they use complicated jargon, or do they try to address wider audiences? Understanding what resonates with you in the writing of others will help you inform your style. It also helps you to understand the conventions of the medium so that you can embrace or ignore them (as you wish). Every YouTube video says some version of “hit the subscribe and like buttons,” for example.
Watch recorded talks from conferences, and find the presenters you like. How do they structure their talks? How do they organize their slides? How do they involve the audience? Similarly, what are the conventions? What things do you want to adopt or ignore? I can say that when I was trying to improve as a speaker, I would try to adapt cool things I saw other speakers do. I still do some of those things, but have found my version. Great artists steal, but eventually, you should find your version of an approach.
Build Up
As I said above, improving writing involves writing as often as possible and reading as much as possible. Improving speaking also requires repetition, but it is harder to find public speaking opportunities.
Giving talks within your company or local meetups will be easier than at national or international conferences. If you feel comfortable and want to grow your experience, expand your subject beyond technology. Find opportunities to give talks about your favorite hobbies. Try different structures, like Pecha Kucha or PowerPoint Karaoke.
You could also write talks and record them, then post them to YouTube.
Once you have some experience and gain some confidence, you can start applying to speak at conferences. Some excellent resources for CFPs are linked below (Call for Proposal/Participation/Papers). Writing talk proposals is a skill in itself, but it will also benefit from practice. If you strongly about a talk idea, try writing the proposal for it in different ways. Do your best to tailor your proposal to the conference. Reference prior year’s schedules to know the kinds of talks the organizers prefer and what successful proposals look like.
Be patient and persistent. It may take many submissions before your first conference talk is accepted.
Your talk was accepted!
Congratulations! It’s exciting and a bit scary. If the conference offers coaching or speaker preparation meetings in advance, take advantage of them! It’s an excellent resource for an inexperienced speaker.
Different people have different processes for preparing for a conference talk. What works for one person may not work for you. I will describe how I prepare; you can try my method. Feel free to adapt it and make it your own.
I often write my proposals based on ideas I have. Once one of them is accepted, I will sit down to write the actual talk. I usually start with an outline. It is usually far too long for the time I have to give the talk, but it is easier for me to remove than to add often. I typically budget for one slide per minute. For a thirty-minute talk, I will expect to need thirty slides. I don’t necessarily spend the same amount of time on each slide; it just helps me set my expectations.
I don’t focus on making the deck too pretty at first. I want to get the content and some initial timing correct. Once I complete the first draft, I will try giving the talk to see how it flows. Often, that will help me identify extraneous or missing elements. I then refine the deck, try giving the talk again, and further refine it. I may go through many passes of practicing and refinement before I feel comfortable with the flow and content. As the talk feels more “solid,” I will pay more attention to the timing. Am I close to the desired length? A bit over or under is easy to fix, but if the talk is far too long or short, I will need to make some more radical changes.
Once the content and length are close to where they need to be, I will focus more on the structure of the slides. I will break up slides so as not to have “walls of text,” or I may move the text off of the slide entirely and move it to the speaker notes.
Once the design and structure of the slides feel right, I will continue to practice to get a feel for the timing of each slide. I want to have a rough timing in the speaker’s notes to know if I’m getting behind or ahead of where I expect to be when presenting.
Finally, as the day of the conference approaches, I will continue to practice the talk. I don’t want to memorize; I may want to remember some key phrases, but I want to have the structure of the talk memorized. On multiple occasions, the projector or presentation computer has failed, and I’ve given my talk without slides, adapting the message and content to the lack of visuals. It gives me confidence that, as a speaker, I know my presentation. Because I do not memorize it, I can adapt my words to address members of the audience or earlier talks without worrying about losing my place.
A Secret about Speaking and Giving Talks
The more you do it, the more you’ll be invited to. I still submit CFPs for conferences I am anxious to speak at or haven’t spoken at before, but about half or more of the talks I give are now at the organizers’ invitation because they have seen me speak before.
Similarly, while I continue to publish on sites I control, I get many more invitations to contribute to larger sites because the editors have read something I have published elsewhere.
I wish you the best of luck on your writing or speaking journey!
References
- Matthew Dicks on Lenny’s Podcast, Matthew’s book Storyworthy
I like how Matthew speaks about storytelling and find his advice very valuable. - Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun
This book transformed how I approach my public talks. - Slideology by Nancy Duarte
If, like me, you are not a graphic designer, this book will help improve the design of your slides - Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics Ted Talk
One of my favorite speakers. Watching this talk inspired me to move to a much more visual slide style (with less text) and to vary the cadence of my slides. - “Thought Leader” TED talk Parody from CBC Radio, “How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk” by Will Stephen
These are parodies, but they do an excellent job exposing many of the tropes of popular public speakers, specifically the TED talk style. When I started speaking in public, I consciously adopted many of these tropes to help me be more confident. While I’ve shed many of them over the years, I haven’t shed them all. - Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley
A book meant to help novice writers get better. I found it recently, but I still found good tips in it. - Confs.tech Call for Papers list, Bizzabo Tech Events list, Sessionize Speaker’s accounts, Papercall.io events list, The SeeCFP events list, CallingAllPapers, cfptime.org
All good collections of CFPs (with a lot of overlap). I don’t follow all of them, but I’ve used all of them at one point or another.
