Scott H Young

What’s a faster way to become a great public speaker: works slowly, giving a small speech every month, or finding the time and courage to tackle a big crowd every day. Tony Robbins, perhaps one of the world’s best known public speakers gave three speeches a day when he was starting out.

I believe the reason for a lot of failures is simply choosing the weaker options. Failing to be completely bold and maximizing every step possible. Although on an individual basis trading down to weaker options seems to have little cost, in the big picture it adds up.

Weak or Bold Options: Which to Choose?

When I make the comparison between weak and bold options, it seems obvious which to choose. If you really are committed to a goal, you pick the boldest option you can do. The problem, is that it is really easy to trade down to weaker options if you feel the difference is minimal.

If I had to distill the key metric that I believe makes a blog successful I would have to say post rate. Not because people would rather read 5 articles a week instead of 2. But because when you write 5 times per week you learn more than twice as fast as the person who only does two.

Bolder options usually have sharper learning curves. Fear of the unknown keeps people from learning at a high rate. The more you don’t know, the more mistakes you’ll make and the more you’ll learn.

Blind to Bold Options

I think a lot of people are blind to the bolder options. Not because these options aren’t available. They are usually abundant. Or because they are difficult to think of. Usually the bolder options are obvious.

The reason you blind yourself to bolder options is because you’ve accepted a predetermined level for the amount of fear you’re willing to handle. Doing one speech a month in a small audience is acceptable. Doing one speech a day for a crowd is terrifying.

Increasing Your Threshold

You can shift up your threshold for fear by seeing where it is and forcing yourself to live slightly above it.

When I started public speaking, I’d recognize what types of speeches I was comfortable giving, and then strive to pick ones that went out of that comfort zone. The surprising truth is that usually when I did this I made mistakes. I’d do speech contests where the tone of my speech didn’t resonate well with the audience. I’d do presentations where aspects of my speech were completely missed.

When you pick bolder options, you screw up more.

I don’t think you should shy away from this, but accept it as a fact. The entire reason you fear activities outside your comfort zone is because there’s a bigger chance you’ll make mistakes. The fear isn’t usually an illusion. You’ll make mistakes and you might get embarrassed or fail.

But over a period of time, picking bolder options will improve you more. Picking these options ends up being a shorter route to success, since it forces you to learn lessons you would otherwise avoid.

How to Recognize When Your Being a Wuss

Sometimes it’s easy to tell when you’ve traded down to weaker options. Dating, public speaking, networking and negotiating are often sources of acute fear. But I’d like to state something that might sound surprising: I don’t believe these are the biggest places people choose weaker options.

Social fears like approaching strangers or physical fears such as heights have very sensitive levels of fear associated. You know clearly where your threshold is. For this reason, it can be difficult, but many people are able to slowly increase their threshold.

The problem is in places where there are vague fears. Without a strong emotional reaction, many people don’t realize when they are picking weaker options. Here’s a few examples:

1. Getting in shape: Should you go to the gym every day or just try running every once in awhile?
2. Starting a business: Should you e-mail every person in your field to ask for advice and interview potential customers who are strangers or just talk to a few friends you know?
3. Writing a book: Should you set a firm deadline, amounts you should write each day and contact publishers and agents, or just write when you feel like it and see how things go?

Vague fears, such as worrying what you look like at the gym or e-mailing people you don’t know, won’t create a sense of terror. But they will subtly cause you to pick easier options. Take these vague fears and pinpoint your current threshold, otherwise you can’t push it higher.

Look at each area of your life and ask yourself if you were absolutely fearless, what would you do to improve. The answers might surprise you in how different they are to what you are doing now. The next step is to shift your path so it can be more bold.

“I don’t have enough time.”

Being busy is a good way to avoid risks. You’re too busy doing the routine things to try the non-routine things that might scare you. If you aren’t sensitive to the words you use, you might not even realize you do this. The fear of unknown gets excused so quickly, you don’t even realize your just being gutless.

In Toastmasters, I often find new visitors hesitate to take larger roles. They often tell me that they are “too busy” to take on the added work.

But many times, the role would require little extra work, but has a lot more fear. They automatically use the too-busy excuse to avoid doing something that might scare them. Stepping up requires more courage than time.

How to Avoid Doing Anything New

Fill your life with a routine so packed, it can’t possibly hold something new. By building a fortress of regular work, you can bet that you’ll never have time to do anything unknown. Every activity you do has a known cost and benefit. Nothing too risky, everything too bland.

Don’t use time to build your coffin.

The busyness might be genuine. The last two months have been some of the busiest weeks of my life. But I can’t let that extra pressure cut myself off from taking new risks. When you stop taking risks you stop learning.

I recently met with a friend who is a professional speaker. I haven’t done any paid speaking yet, and was interested in the business. He pointed out a couple opportunities. My initial reaction was simply to put them off when I have more time. But “having more time” might be a day that doesn’t come too soon, so I decided to plan for it now.

Fear of the Unknown Costs

When you don’t have a lot of extra time, it seems useful to avoid activities with unknown costs. Stick to what you know when you’re under pressure, right?

In the short-term, avoiding unknowns because you’re busy makes sense. If you only have one day off what which would you choose:

• An activity you know you’ll enjoy.
• Something you’ve never done before and might hate.

When time is precious, speculative randomness is the first thing that gets tossed. You’re afraid that the costs might be too high.

But over the long-run this behavior is dangerous. Continually avoiding the unknown costs insures that you slowly cuts you off from new information. The worker who is so busy she can’t experiment with freelancing might be surprised to find that she enjoys it more and it pays better.

The Price of Being Busy

Imagine we’re inside a special casino. In this casino the odds favor the gamblers, even though most of them don’t realize this.

The first machine you try gives an average of eleven coins for every ten you put in. Amazed at your 10% profit, you play this machine fiendishly, refusing to move.

What if, the slot machine next to you paid out twenty coins for every ten you put in, ten times the profit. That machine is far more profitable. But because you refuse to move from your seat, you can’t try out the other machines. The best profit you can ever receive is 10%, while other gamblers might be enjoying profits of 100%, 1000% or more.

This casino is like life. It is easy to fall into a routine and refuse to seek randomness. Especially if things are going moderately well, you might be tempted to avoid taking risks and just stick with the machine you have.

In the short run this strategy might even benefit you. Trying out different machines can take time and some might be less profitable than your first one. But as long as you use busyness as an excuse to try new things, the 10% machine will be all you’ve got.

The 20% Rule Applied to Life

Employees at Google are required to devote 20% of their time to personal projects. Google management recognizes that this 20% might be wasted. Engineers might come up with horrible products that nobody wants. But by allowing gutsy and creative ideas, they can come up with innovations faster and cheaper.

I suggest applying the 20% rule to life. That means that 20% of your time is being invested in speculative activities. Activities that you’ve been doing for less than six months or have changed enough that the learning curve is still steep.

Applying the 20% rule requires guts and it requires a bit of initial sacrifice. You need to give up the guaranteed sources of money, productivity or fun, to make room for unknowns. But by taking a 20% cut now, you might stumble upon opportunities you never new existed.

Here are some jumping off points to get you thinking:

1. 20% of your work. Spend twenty percent of the time you spend working trying something different. If you do most your work through an employer, spend 20% to try a bit of freelancing.
2. 20% of the people. Network outside your group. Don’t just spend time with your friends but strive to spend twenty percent of your social time meeting new people or getting to know people you’ve known less than three months.
3. 20% of the fun. Keep your leisure time varied. Force yourself to try new hobbies, activities or professions. I’ve had hobbies that include: music composition, woodworking, Latin dancing and public speaking.

Don’t let your busy life make you gutless.