On May 31, 2014 I gave my first ever TEDx talk in Hong Kong to an audience of 1,000. The video went live on YouTube around July 19, 2014, and in the past two days has been viewed by a larger audience of almost 5,000. It was a terrifying experience, made more so by my lack of preparation. Oh yeah, that post I made about how I was going to prepare for this TEDx talk? Ha! Not that I didn’t prepare–I probably put in more than 50 hours of preparation for this 14-minute talk. I’ve never prepared so much for a presentation of any sort. But it wasn’t enough. To be prepared I would have needed another 20 hours and a week or two. Instead, I finished my presentation, which I had rewritten three times in the past 24 hours, at 3:30 am on the 31st, just a few hours prior to delivering it. I’ll be providing more detail in a Forbes piece, but suffice it to say I wasn’t anywhere as prepared as I wanted to be. How did it turn out? I’ll let you decide for yourself.
Here are the accompanying slides I used during my presentation.
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