Sunday, January 22, 2006

considered: effortlessness

One of the high points of this last week for me was a talk I gave at the kickoff meeting. If you're one of those people who hate public speaking this may seem a bit odd, but I live for every chance I get to work a big room.

It's not an ego thing, which I know you may find hard to believe. It's just that I love the experience of being in the moment. It's totally, entirely exhilarating. I thrive on weaving the stories that turn a concept into a single, crystalline realization. Especially when the lights are up and the faces in the crowd are muted and indistinct.

Afterward, I often find it difficult to remember exactly what I said during those fleeting moments in the spotlight. Public speaking for a large audience is a time-out-of-time, transcendant space that admits and dismisses you, but which for a few, brief moments holds you, tranfixed and shining. For those few minutes, everything was in balance in my world as the story flowed from me,

In the aftermath of last week, as I try to figure out how to eat the elephant of work that awaits me, I'm reflecting on what this tells me about myself. About the essential wa of marketing the way I want to practice it, of effortlessness made manifest.

In short, what can you do to make your work effortless, a natural extension of yourself?

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