Negative externalities show up everywhere, and unfortunately they often show up dumped by the side of the road in the otherwise pristine environment around my home in the foothills of Australia's Great Dividing Range.

When you're presenting, you're not supposed to fit in. Stand out.

The first-order effects of an action are the immediate consequences. The second-order effects of an action are the consequences of those consequences.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to blend into the crowd when you’re standing up the front.

We react to events based on their outputs, rather than their inputs, which I think doesn’t really make any sense.

Public speaking, more than almost any other skill, has the potential to magnify your impact and supercharge your career.

Public speaking has the potential to massively shift your career fortunes.

It's possible there's no-one else in your life telling you this right now, so let it be me that says: Stop allowing yourself sit at your desk for unlimited amounts of time.

In all but a few specific circumstances, slides should rarely have more than a single (short) sentence on them, and many slides would benefit from having no words at all; just an image to provide a rich context for your talk.

The simple fact is that real world is much less stressful and scary than the realms we inhabit in our minds.

A good presentation establishes you as a trustworthy authority on your topic. The obvious (and dramatically underutilised) commercial play is to lean into that authority and trust, and ask for what you want.

Don't abandon the project of self-improvement. Instead, create experiments designed to work out what makes your inner puppy happy and achieves what you want to achieve.

If you can instead realise that you get to speak at events like this because of the expertise you’ve accumulated, and that it’s an incredible privilege to be educated and insightful enough that others want to sit in an audience to listen to you speak, I think you’ll find the whole process much more enjoyable.

Humans are naturally evolved to form judgements incredibly rapidly. That’s useful where quick decision-making contributes to avoiding death on the savannah; less so in the modern world.

Any practice, perfect or not, is better than no practice. The implication that it’s even possible to create perfect practice without first indulging in quite a lot of imperfect practice seems entirely misguided to me.

Speak seriously about the topic, and jovially about yourself. Be discerning with regard to the subject, and playful with regard to yourself.

Honouring this mistaken obligation to your content should be avoided, because it's bad for the audience, and bad for your commercial outcomes.

If you want to measure success in dollars (you don’t have to, by the way, but if you do), you need to add a commercial angle to your professional game.