The Public Dollar Lightning Talk

Estimated Reading Time: 2.5 minutes

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I would be doing a Lightning Talk about my idea about the Public Dollar.  Well, the talk happened (and some of you attended--thank you!).  It was a fun experience that I enjoyed.  What made it fun was that I was with other people presenting and there were lots of interesting and amazing ideas that others shared.

  

How did my talk go?  Overall, it went all right. The person before me was having trouble and so was bumped to later, which means I had to go sooner than I expected and that threw me off a little bit.  Still, the talk got a good amount of positive feedback which was reassuring.  With set up, the talk, and questions, my talk clocked in at about 11.5 minutes.   

My talk and all the others were pulled together onto this playlist, which I will be making my way through in the next few weeks.  

Still, my talk I wasn't entirely happy with in terms of its smoothness and delivery so I decided to give it another go.  I recorded it again and put it on my own YouTube channel.  I found this gave me the opportunity to clean up some of the stumbling in the original as well as the verbal crutches (I even missed a paragraph in my haste).  This version of the talk comes in at about 7:22 minutes.  For those that are interested, you can also just check out the script and the slides.

The experience as a whole was fun and a useful challenge.  The idea has been kicking in my head for a while and I found having to condense it to 7 minutes pushed me to capture exactly what I wanted to say (or rather help me figure out what I was saying, right?).  I hope to do future talks like this to help me hone some of the more rambling ideas that are in my head.  Activities like these, remind me of the famous quote (though unclear who said it): "if you want me to speak two minutes you give me a notification of two weeks; if you want me to speak five minutes, I should have a notification of one week, but if you want me to talk all day, here I am."  I feel very much exposed with this quote but that's also why I think this was a useful challenge for me.   

If you watched or read the talk, what did you think?  What was interesting, confusing, or challenging?  

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