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In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes. --Andy Warhol Are you ready for your fifteen minutes of fame? If you are like me, you probably aren't. Here's why: 1. You don't really believe that your chance to tell your story will be brief. 2. You want to communicate on your terms, not someone else's. 3. You haven't provided for enough flexibility in your schedule to deal with something unexpected. 4. You don't yet understand what part of your message creates the most resonance among listeners. 5. You are too busy to look into what you don't understand about speaking to your audiences. Those five indictments were all true of me. Here's what happened: The good reviews of my first book brought invitations to speak before various groups. Early on, we had a hard decision to make. A leading computer manufacturer called to ask me to do a 70-city global tour talking about breakthrough solutions. Because of the North American book tour commitments, I didn't have the time to do that. Neither Carol Coles nor Robert Metz wanted to go on the road for long enough to fill in for me in North America. I've often wondered how the development of the book's ideas might have changed if I had been able to go on that tour. After the North American tour was over, Carol and I could accept speaking invitations. These engagements were a lot of fun. Our hosts treated us like royalty. Photographers took endless photos of us shaking hands with the listeners. Restaurants were cleared out so that we could chat over dinner with those attending the conference or meeting. The most fun we had came when the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) invited us to speak to a huge group in Washington, D.C. In exchange for doing a little speaking, we enjoyed great parties for days. One of the highlights we'll always remember was a lovely cocktail party and dinner at the Russian embassy. Unlike other times when we spoke, the YPO CEOs escorted us everywhere and took care of us rather than assigning the task to overworked assistants. We began to think that book writing provided benefits no one had told us about. So what should we have done instead? 1. Planned almost no other activities after the book came out so that we would be able to respond to any speaking invitations that came in. 2. Sought out a corporate sponsor for the book and tour who would have been able to use all three authors so the burden on any one author wouldn't have been very large. 3. Been open to thinking through how other peoples' messages could be combined with ours without diluting our ideas. 4. Practiced speaking during the book-writing process to find out what aspects of the message were most powerful (in our case, people liked that they already knew the answer and just needed to ask themselves different questions than they usually did). 5. Spent time with successful speakers to find out how to prepare for a sudden influx of interest in hearing about our work. I hope you will be better prepared after reading this article. Good luck! Remember that I knew you before you became famous.
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