Marty worked with a man who recently retired after thirty years of teaching. He taught military history and was one of those rare and special teachers whose subject matter was also one of their greatest interest. Given his personal investment in the topic, over the decades Terry arranged all sorts of unique and next-level experiences for his students. War veteran guest lecturers, field trips to wo...
Last year I shared that Bella was graduating college and that she was throwing herself a party and that there would be speeches.
For those who might not have been invited or who were invited but could not attend, above are the speeches that happened at Baya’s self-thrown graduation party.
Best friend Mike, known around these parts as Bookpimp, recently turned 50. To mark the milestone, he had planned a gathering of his three best buds, which techinically is two best friends and a brother. The original celebration got axed by the pandemic but was salvaged in late 2022 when things started normalizing. Months before the gathering, I reached out to the other two invitees, unbeknowst to...
notes from a toastmaster's talk i gave titled JUST DO IT ... AGAIN.
*** THE INTRODUCTION ***
---------------------
not all minutes are created equal.
my next five minutes are going to be VERY different from YOUR next five minutes,
even though we are all sitting in the same room, breathing the same air, experiencing the same event.
part of...
i recently had to give a talk that had a humorous vein. i also realize that this really funny thing had happened in the past that i didn't talk about very well, or very fully here on the site, didn't do it justice at least. so in this talk i looked to fill in some of those holes and apply some texture to a funny moment in my family's past that didn't get it's due on the website. let's hope this tr...
when bella first shriekingly announced to the house (and zip code) that her public speaking hero, shane kyozcan, was making his first american tour (he resides in canada) i sat down with her to look at the dates and locations. i'm not sure what you call the tone parents get when they have to tell their kids that they can't get them something they'd like to get them but it just isn't practical. wha ...
notes from a toastmaster's talk i gave titled MY FINEST HOUR.
INTRO
---------------------
402,488.
as of this moment this is how many hours i have been on this planet.
402,488.
of those hours lived, one of them has proven to be the most meaningful and satisfying of them all.
my notes from a toastmaster's talk i gave titled FAMILY MANTRAS.
INTRODUCTION ------------------------------
you can do better.
this was the phrase i heard more growing up in my home than any other.
the words came from my mother. and the words came often.
if i brought home a C. you can do better.
if i brought home a B. you can do better.
if i b...
what follows is a talk my friend sam gave at a gave developer microtalk event. the talks of the night, expectedly, dealt with coding and development and the act of creating. mercifully batting cleanup, sam's talk, generically lableled PROCESS, blew the lid off the tenth floor of a twenty-five story building.
I still have a viola, purchased in a sprint of optimism two year...
my employer recently began a toastmasters group. the second i saw the opiton, i enrolled. one week ago today was our club's first meeting. and at this meeting i had the honor of being our club's first speaker. the first talk you are asked to do as a toastmaster is a six-minute ice-breaker. below is the transcript of my ice-breaker speech.
INTRO
the name of my talk is who i am and why i'm here.
for a man of my mature years, defining oneself can be a little tricky.
so, i'm going to solve this by starting with my birth and ending at this very moment right here.
that may seem an ambitious goal to achieve in six minutes but i'd guess that for many in the room, standing in front of an audience and told to entertain them for six minutes will feel like a lifetime, so it's actually rather fitting.
BULLETED LIFE
to begin.
my name is troy lane dearmitt.
i was born and adopted in lancaster pa.
when i was six, my parents poured their combined wealth on a twin bed in a one room space they occupied. the family fortune on this day came to 23 dollars and some change.
a few months later, my family left the state of pennsylvania in the dark of the night, my father, after fitting as many of the family possessions in the car as he could, rolled it down the hill past the landlord's house to escape detection.
we drove west along the canadian border until hitting the rocky mountains where he turned left.
the money ran out in fort collins colorado. this is where we'd spend the next twelve years. (the story goes, if gas was cheaper in cheynne wy, that is where i would have grown up, but my dad, ever the stickler for a good price at the pump, even to this day, didn't like what he was seeing in cheyenne and thought he could pull another sixty miles from the tank).
aside from puberty wreaking havoc with my hair, the twelve years i spent in colorado were quiet and uneventful which worked well for my demeanor.
when i was 18 my mother started a second career as an std woman for the cdc. translated this means a sexually transmitted diseases woman for the centers for disease control. and yes, your assumption is right, there is not an 18 year old boy on this planet that wants his mom working, publicly at least, in venereal disease, but i'd need another six minutes to get into the neurosis this brought on, but to give you a taste, i'll add the picture that i was usually the only boy in my college class who when pulling his book out of his bookbag would have five condoms spill into the aisle.
six months after arriving in st. louis i was thunder bolted by a st. louis girl. for those that might not know what getting thunder-bolted means, it means after seeing a person, the next thought to come from your mind's printer contain the words 'that is the girl i am going to marry'. and yes, this is like the greatest, most important, most valuable piece of knowledge a young man can ever receive. there is only one exception to this informational windfall and that is when the girl you were thunderbolted by did not get the same message, which was the case here. thus, i got to spend the next eight years convincing here i was the man she should marry (she had many suitors) which in time she did.
as our relationship solidified i assumed between st. louis and colorado we'd be living in colorado. but it is very true what they say about st. louis girls white-knuckling their zip codes because here we are some twenty years later.
and that is how i came to be in st louis.
WHY I'M HERE
next, as promised, let me share how i've come to be specifically in this room.
everyone i've mentioned this toastmasters affiliation with, who knows me, has expressed surprise.
the reason for this is for the past twenty years, every job i've had has included or been solely about public speaking.
so people who have seen me talk or work wonder why i'd join such an organization.
the reason is i have a secret.
the secret is before every speaking engagement i've ever done, a war has been waged in my mind.
a war full of shouting and intimidation.
this war was waged before i gave my first talk twenty years ago.
this war was waged last week when i guest lectured in a class of graduate students.
this war will be waged again this friday when i give an hour long talk to 100 law students.
and yes, this war was waged before this talk today.
the good news is in the last twenty years i have never lost this war. i've never avoided a speaking opportunity and every time i said i'd speak, i spoke.
but the smartest among us say that the true victory is not in winning the battle—the true victory is avoiding the war.
that is my personal goal—to not have the war.
and that is why i have come to be in this room today.
and that is who i am and that is why i'm here.
i just got tunred onto this ted video (by super-sam). i have no idea how i haven't seen it before now as it looks to have been out a few years (7 million plus views long at least). what a presenter! what a delivery! what a message! super strong all around. i watched it last night with marty and bella. when he talked about our need to stop teaching to the average and start raising the average, marty shouted and clapped as if she were in the original auditorium. when he talked about the ingredients to a healthy day (e.g. gratitudes, journaling, exercise, meditation, targeted kindness) bella backed away from me a little bit as she knows these are part of the metrics i track everyday. she knows this well because she has mocked me several times for my little LIFE spreadsheet i'm often found to be obsessively pouring over, by her telling, like gollum over his precious. obviously, i would like to describe it differently but it is close enough to the mark i'm left a mildly impotent to paint a more reasonable picture.
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence
New York City, April 4, 1967
and for those who are more hankering for a chicken mcNugget:
Wife texts husband on a cold winter's morning: Windows frozen, won't open.
Husband texts back: Gently pour some lukewarm water over it.
Wife texts back 5 minutes later: Computer really screwed up now.
a few years ago i asked my students to attend a talk given by a special guest visiting our school. the man speaking was an alum of the university and now the ceo of a large investment firm. he stressed, emphatically, the importance of excellence and making sure that all of your work and all of your interactions were thoughtful and nothing short of outstanding. in the class i teach, excellence in your work served as a cornerstone, if not the entire point, of our lessons and we were deep enough into the semester that my students knew being excellent and thoughtful took time, like a lot of time (e.g. to make a good, passable twenty minute presentation can take four to five hours, but to make a great, memorable presentation you're looking at more like like fifteen to thirty hours, depending on how soon the inspiration comes). to this principle one of my students asked the man, "i understand the importance of being excellent but can you speak to how one is to find the time and energy to be excellent all of the time?"
to say i wasn't proud and impressed by my student's cogent question would be a full-on lie, especially next to the other ridiculous questions being wasted on this guy. unfortunately the man's answer kinda just stuck to the rallying cry of there is no rest for the successful and they are always working and they are always excellent which was a mainstay of his overall talk.
the next day in class we discussed the talk. someone commented that they felt his answer to the girl's question was lacking. i agreed but then defended him saying that it's hard to have a bulk of questions fired at you, moments after completing a talk, and get all of them perfect (which unfortunately soils his be excellent all of the time argument). i told them given his experience and how thoughtful his talk was if he were given a few minutes to properly ponder the question he might have said something like:
being excellent does take time and energy and there are not enough hours in the day or cycles in our minds to make everything we touch be excellent, but the true mark between the successful and those relegated to basements and back offices is successful people know when it is important to be excellent. because not all tasks and moments are equal and thus not all tasks and moments should or can receive equal attention.
fact is, i wouldn't have been surprised to see this man clap his knee while in his first class seat home as he thought of a better answer to the young, eager girl's question. he might have even mumbled audibly as he realized the missed opportunity to have been excellent.
i'm a bit of a commencement address junkie. i reckon i've admitted this before. last year my employer put forth one of the best of the year. remarkably, they've come through again with what i'd say, even though others aren't, is again one of this year's strongest offerings. and i'm told by someone on the stage during the talk, the man didn't have a single note or scrap to reference through his thirty plus minute address. remarkably good.
each year as i spin through the selections i'm struck by how good the good ones are (and surprised that the bad ones aren't better--c'mon people, if given the platform you gotta get your obsess on).
each year before exiting from marty's birthday brunch i say a few words to marty and the guests. the first year, if memory serves, i shared how important marty was to me and i knew how important all of the ladies in the room were to her so it made perfect sense to devote a day to all of these people who are special and meaningful to one another.
this year held more of a "we've been here before - you know the drill" vibe that went something like:
thank you for coming again. after seeing the way marty lit up last year i didn't see how the day would be any less meaningful this year. and while i do know each and every one of you know the rigors and trials of motherhood i don't know that you know the rejuvenating power you provide to marty. no matter what might be happening in our home be it kids chirping and bickering or dealing with feces smeared on a wall, the second the phone rings and is answered and it is one of you, marty sends out a bright hello that would make you think she had just been running through a mountain meadow moments earlier. your friendship to her is like water to a desiccated plant. reviving and restorative.
later that night after the kids were down and the day was minutes from done, marty thanked me (again) for the day and said.
MARTY
i liked your speech today.
TROY
speech? it was like three sentences long.
MARTY
well, it was a good three sentences.
TROY
that may be the first time a speech that included the words 'smeared feces' ever received such a praise.
i've been sittin' on this one for a few weeks. a past student shared it with me before it exploded. it you haven't watched it yet, it's juicy good, like a just right porterhouse.
a few people named two of this year's commencement addresses as the best, or most inspirational at least. the first, by cartoonist mike peters, happened where i work, the second, by author neil gaiman, took place at an art school in Philadelphia. as someone who dabbles in presentations (and is a commencement speech junkie) i was struck by how stupendously different the two approaches were. peters started out in such a meandering fashion you wondered if he prepared anything. gaiman's talk was so dense the first thing i did after watching it was find a transcript and re-read it marking it up with my symbols and notes like it were an academic text.
while i enjoyed both, gaiman's was rich with insight. in example:
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.
that has to be one of the most cogent insights into the professional world ever made. and i know the guy writes for a living but the compact, precise articulation of his concept is breathtaking in a literary and observational sense. if i ever met that guy, the question i would ask him is how he came upon that insight. did it bleed out over months or did it appear in a flash while showering or exercising. furthermore, gaiman demonstrates how life experience blows the doors off most other forms of learning and how the art of introspection is the prism that allows you to understand what unfolds around us. spectacular.
circumstance recently led me to j.k. rowlings 2008 commencement address at harvard. for me, her twenty minute speech surpassed the combined value of all her potter books. mostly because she's pro-failure, something i'm quite ravenous about as of late. my favorite line, of many:
some failure in life is inevitable. it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default.
next, we just need to figure out how to move this message down from post-college to pre-kindergarten.
also, as i had to remind bella as she shoulder-hacked me crafting this post, the real meat of failure is not in failing itself, but in the building of tools needed to climb out of life's many divots, holes, ditches, cliffs and canyons. so maybe perseverance is the better term. less ambiguous is the fact that the landscape is treacherous and circumstance requires us to travel large swaths of it in the dark.
