First published 20 June 2022 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel came back from Cyprus with a browner face than me and an admission. He does next to nothing on the technical side of this podcast. I'm the one hitting buttons while we record. His point was that everyone needs someone like that. He can drive a car but can't fix one, so he has a mechanic. And if you keep trying to fix your weaknesses, he reckons all you get is strong weaknesses.
This is the bit school gets wrong for me. We spend years being told to drag the thing we're bad at up to everyone else's level, when we could be making the thing we're great at even better. Nigel's version was Tiger Woods. Time on his tennis won't help his golf. It won't do much for his tennis either.
Then he got onto people still blaming the pandemic for bad service. His answer is back to basics (he calls it forward to basics). Return the call when you said you would and get your slides in early. He even takes his own Diet Coke to gigs because venues never seem to have any. I'd sent my slides for an event that week, timed for when I knew they'd start chasing, and I carry three different adapters for my MacBook. Nigel told me that's just my job. Fair.
It's the same with DJing. The number of DJs who turn up to a festival without headphones, or ask to borrow your needles. And I told the story of speaking in a function room at a golf club when the projector flipped to Sky Sports halfway through. I could see the whole room drifting off into the sport. So I had them switch it off, pulled a flip chart over and carried on.
My notes from this one
- Find people who can do the bits you can't. Nigel talks, I press the buttons.
- Spend your time on your strengths. Working on weaknesses just gets you strong weaknesses.
- Stop blaming the pandemic. Do the basics properly and you're ahead of most people already.
- Know your talk well enough that you could lose the slides and keep going.
So you don't have to be phenomenal, you just have to be 5% better than the competition, who keep blaming external circumstances.
Nigel Risner
If you're experienced in giving the presentation that you're doing as a speaker, you don't need your slides.
Neil Martin
