Make Terrible Presentations

In order to make good presentations you will need to make a bunch of terrible ones. The story on this blog highlights my point.

I haven’t really talked about this before, but I’ve failed more times than I can remember.  I’ve tried starting up several businesses, tried patenting inventions, tried starting up online communities, tried building several websites, tried to win contests… and failed almost every single time.  But I never chalked any of them up as failures in my head, because I learned so much in the process each time.  So now, when I’ve finally reached a point where things seem to fall into place with far less effort, I can’t help but think about all those times where I didn’t succeed over the course of the last eight years.  And I look back in fondness, because those lessons learned are the reason I’m here.  None of this stuff happened over night — in a way, I’ve been working to reach this point since I was 15.

I actually shouldn’t even call them failures, because they were really just attempts.  There’s a huge difference there. Everyone has failures, but most people never attempt things just for the sake of trying out something that looks fun, interesting, or challenging.

If you want to be good at anything you need to be willing to fail, repeatedly, in order to gain the experience to be good at it. It might be intimidating to start using PowerPoint now because you feel pretty confident in your preaching skills. Adding something new could make you look like a rank amateur instead of an experienced professional.

My advice - get the church in on the project with you. Let them know what you're doing and why and ask for help. Vulnerability like this will actually boost your credibility and be a great example to the church. I dare you.