Hi friend - Week 3!

By now you know the drill - I still send this update only to a handful of people

Thank YOU for being one of them. 

Please don't hesitate to respond, share your thoughts or just say hi. Or let me know you want no more updates. Two-way communication is always much more fun 🙌 - thank you for all the messages so far. 

The purpose of this 100-day challenge 🚀 is to get me to say “I speak for a living, I am a professional speaker” by Dec 20, 2024. 

You also might be noticing some formatting changes.

After last week’s mishap, forgetting to send this out in a blind copy (sigh and I am sorry), I realized it’s time to use an actual tool not just a multi-recipient Bcc.

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I am going to shake up the structure a little tonight, overlaying 😃 The Good with The Bad 💡Lessons Learned.

Let’s go!

Once upon a time there was a high-energy speaker …who felt like they had no original ideas and nothing interesting to say.  

Living right next to them, there was a professional with years of experience and strong opinions about how we should interact with each other… but without the guts to shout it from the roofs. 

They both felt a little sad and a little unfulfilled. Despite their immediate proximity, they never realized how close they lived to each other. 

One day they finally met. 

They realized they are a perfect match for each other 💏. 

And yes, this all just happened inside of my head 🧠. 

I realized only this week that

Duh! 

It is easy to connect the dots in retrospect. 

So yes, I spent countless hours 1) thinking about and (2) practicing Networking & Building Social Capital…and I formed some strong convictions in the process.

Now it’s time to talk about that. 

I did 🥇💩 The Holy Grail of The Shitty First Draft I coined in my last email.

But I just cannot create things in a vacuum, for the sake of practice. 

My 🧠 🥶 when I don’t know who my audience is. Hence, as of next week I will start posting my thoughts online.

Sharing, receiving feedback, iterating on what resonates.

This is currently my Bible for writing online - Ship 30 in 30 -  lmk if you want to do it as well, we can be accountability buddies! 

I do think I will double down on X/Twitter to get started and learn the consistency… and hopefully add LinkedIn to it too soon. Speaking of… 

The first part is self-explanatory.

The second part is about LinkedIn’s relatively new feature “Top x Voice” badge. See ⬇️.

LinkedIn rewards it to those who contribute most significantly to improving its AI written articles, basically crowdsourcing lived human experience to enhance AI, Reddit-style. 

Is this something YOU'd potentially be also interested YOURSELF to enhance your public profile?

Check out the ~2500 categories in which you can become Top X Voice. And since Linkedin’s native display of those categories suck, I got it all into 1 - easier-to-sift-through - spreadsheet.

Lmk if you want to give this a try and I’ll send you a detailed how-to which I am also following. 

I found this video describing how to build an effective speaker reel + a basic script template for it. 

I only need 2-3 high-quality videos from different venues and then all the b-roll (which I was completely oblivious to before). But this is not the priority right now. Parked 🚗.

Everything else is optional as my #1 priority right now is to get my thoughts from my head, out into the wild. 

Wow, if you made it here - you deserve something special:

I will have a media appearance soon - as a Talking Tree 🌳 🗣️ in a kids show.

It will air on SF City TV, some time soon.

My friend from the standup comedy times pivoted now into kids shows and asked me if my kid (Estee) would like to participate. Right before they started shooting, the person who was supposed to be the Tree cancelled, so I was the only around to jump in. 

And no, I am not going to share the link to the whole thing. I did promise you transparency but even I have my limits. Maybe one day ;). 

xoxo, Katka