Public Speaking Competition

Choosing the harder room

You get to pick your subject, and the safe move is to pick one the room already agrees with. I picked the one where I could see, from the list of who was going to be sitting there, that a good part of the audience had professional reasons to start out against it.

That is not bravado, it is the only version of the exercise that teaches you anything. A talk to people who already agree measures how well you can phrase a thing. A talk to a police lieutenant about drug policy measures whether you have actually understood the objections, because you will be making them yourself, out loud, before he can.

What it changed about how I argue

The version of the talk that worked was the one that led with the strongest case against and dealt with it first. Not as a rhetorical move. If you cannot state the other side better than they would state it, you do not understand the subject well enough to be at the front of the room.

I use that constantly now and it is the single most transferable thing on this page. It is how I write a design document, how I argue for a technical decision, and it is why most of the comments in this repository open by saying what the previous approach was and why it failed rather than announcing what the current one does.

If you cannot state the other side better than they would state it, you do not understand the subject well enough to be at the front of the room.

Second, and rightly

Second place. I have never been sure I would have voted for myself either: a subject that difficult buys attention it has not yet earned, and the delivery had to carry more weight than it could. But it is the only thing I have ever been marked on where the audience was the point, and I have been more careful about who I am actually talking to ever since.