In just under 2 weeks I’ll be standing on this stage at the beautiful Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, giving a keynote at World Domination Summit in front of just under 3000 people.
It is an incredible honour to be invited to speak at this event and I’m very grateful to Chris for the invitation – but honestly – the thought of standing in front of 3000 to give a 45 minute talk make me a little nervous!
As a result, you can imagine that over the last few months I’ve been putting considerable time into preparation!
I have:
- Filled many pages in notebooks with ideas and notes
- Mind-mapped the talk many times, on whiteboards in my office
- Spent hours fine tuning my keynote/powerpoint presentation
- Talked with family and friends many times about the points I’m sharing
- Read many articles, books and watched many videos on the topic I’m talking about
- Started practicing the talk and honing how it flows. This is something I’ll do a lot more of.
I’ve already put 50+ hours into preparing for this 45 minute keynote and I’ll put more in over the next couple of weeks.
Yesterday, as I was working on the talk I found myself comparing the preparation of this talk for 3000 people to the process I go through when writing a blog post. There are some definite similarities (and I’ll cover them in a future post) but there is one difference that hit me like a tonne of bricks.
I spend considerably less time on blog posts, despite the fact that they have the potential to reach a lot more people.
Here on ProBlogger this blog receives around 20,000 visitors a day.
While a single blog post doesn’t get read by all of them… over its lifetime it has the potential to be read by many, many more.
However, I’ve never ever spent 50+ hours on a blog post!
A blog post certainly is different to a keynote. For starters, there is a lot less content. I have written some long posts in my time but none would take 45 minutes to read! Even so, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we put as much effort into crafting each blog post as preparing for a public presentation.
What do you think?
