Lichtenwasser Lake
I used to sleep on snow and ice. And hard though it may be to believe, that's connected to your presentations at work. Here's how:
One weekend, I went to Lichtenwasser Lake with my friend Jeff, who was the only person I knew who thought sleeping directly on the snow and ice sounded like a great idea. There aren't too many of us. Jeff and I went during the winter, so it looked like this:
It had snowed heavily the night before, so the snow was very deep and very loose. In fact, even though we were wearing snowshoes, we were still walking in snow up to our waists. There was no one there, since it was so cold and had been stormy, so we had the whole place to ourselves.
Since everything was covered in snow, it was our favorite kind of hiking: Never mind the trails, just go wherever you want. Jeff, as was his nature, just eyeballed where he wanted to go and went, and I, by nature, buried my head in map and compass even when it was probably completely unnecessary.
Anyway, we parked the car and started climbing up the ridge, which was really hard work, because the slope was steep and the snow was waist deep, even under the trees. And then when we got to the top of the ridge, we walked the ridge a while to rest, and then began the descent.
By the time we got to the bottom, it was getting dark, and we didn't want to wander around looking for a campsite, so we just, with our feet/snowshoes, stamped out a flat area right on the snow and ice and threw our bags down right there (during the winter, we both used bags that were waterproof and very, very warm, so sleeping on the ice was never a problem).
We ate a simple dinner, probably just cold granola and some dried fruit and nuts. Some people like to carry a backpack stove and eat hot food, but we preferred to pack as light as possible, and we figured any human could go a couple days without hot food and not die, so it was okay to just eat granola, which is usually what we did on trips like this.
The next morning, when I woke up, the sun hadn't appeared in the valley yet, but the light was hitting the surrounding mountain peaks, and the peaks around the lake were this incredible fiery pink, unlike anything I've ever seen, and still remember vividly 25 years later. And those fiery pink peaks were framing trees that had gotten snowed on just 36 hours earlier, so they had that quality where every branch is carrying a triangle of snow, like you see in the picture above.
And there was no one else at the lake, not even one person (except for us, of course), so the snow on the lake was untouched, much like it is in that photo.
When I went to work the next day and described to people what I had seen, they asked me if I took pictures. I told them, "Sorry, no, if you weren't there, you don't get to see it." I figured that one of the reasons it was so beautiful was that we had done work none of them had been willing to do, and no photo, no matter how beautiful, would be able to capture how amazing something like that is when you are the only ones who were willing to do the work required to get there.
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What does this have to do with my presentations, you rightly ask? There is something you do that few others do, and, for whatever reason, some people (not all, but some) are going to find something about it fascinating.
So put some of yourself in your presentations. It doesn't have to be a lot, and you don't have to be the greatest storyteller the world ever saw. In fact, it could just be a couple sentences, like this:
"As some of you know, I feed stray cats in my spare time. And the other day, as I was putting together this presentation about insurance sales in Region XYZ, I was thinking about how selling insurance is a lot like feeding stray cats. Both require you to know your customer really well, or you won't even get your calls returned." Boom, now you can leap into your presentation about insurance sales in Region XYZ, and be all business if you like.
It's quite possible that someone in the audience will remember you better now, because you made them think about their kids playing with cats, or an uncle who also feeds stray cats, or god-knows-what, and you'll make a friend who is going to think of you anytime he or she needs to talk to an insurance sales expert. All because you inserted a couple low-risk sentences into your presentation.
A few months back, Alper and I did an interview with Natalia Talkowska, who runs a creative agency in London, and she talked about this very thing:
Natalia says that if you tell a story, someone will probably say "oooh, tell me more." You are getting what you wanted, engagement. And instead of having 5 people who are mildly engaged, it is better to have 1 person who is deeply engaged. That's what stories do. Don't bother mildly engaging the 5. Go for deeply engaging the one.
In these days of social media, people tend to worship large numbers of followers. But notice how people use things like Instagram. They scroll and they scroll and they scroll. The vast majority of people don't care much about what you are saying. So you don't want to get a lot of mildly-engaged people. You want a couple deeply-engaged ones. And for that, tear a page from Natalia's playbook, and put some of yourself in your presentation.
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