This Is Something You Have To Get Good At

I’ll tell you, very few people become writers because they want to stand up in front of a room full of strangers and talk.

Often, in fact, it’s the opposite. What draws most people to writing in the first place is that they’re introverts. At least, that’s what drew me! We like to sit quietly, alone in a room, working through our thoughts on the page. That’s the whole appeal.

So one of the strange ironies of having any success as a writer is that you are then invited to do the opposite of that. To leave your quiet room. To get up on a stage. To talk in front of people. 

It was actually before my first book even came out that I got my first invitation to talk at an international marketing conference. And I remember thinking: this is precisely the thing I became a writer to avoid.

But over time, I started to feel differently about it. Partly because they weren’t just inviting but offering to pay, but also because I could see that it was a way of reaching people that really matters. People don’t just want to read the things you’ve written and shaped on the page. They want to hear you talk about them. They want it straight from the horse’s mouth. Think about the State of the Union Address. For over a century, the president didn’t deliver it as a speech—it was just a written report sent over to Congress, the “President’s Annual Message.” But eventually, people realized there are things you just can’t get from a letter. They wanted to hear the president say it. To watch him explain it. To hear which words he stressed and which he didn’t.

And then there’s the fact that public speaking is just part of life. There is no line of work where this is actually avoidable. An entrepreneur has to get up and pitch investors. A coach has to get up and address the team. A professor has to deliver lectures. A salesperson stands before a skeptical group of buyers. A freelancer has to sell themselves to a potential client. An athlete has to talk to the press. A friend has to get up and give a wedding toast. My nine year old and six year old just had their school’s annual showcase.

We will all have to leave our comfort zone from time to time. Yet many of us would almost rather die than do this. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that people rank public speaking as worse than the fear of death, which means, quite insanely, that at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

In Courage Is Calling, I tell the story of Crassus. In ancient Rome, there was perhaps no better orator than Crassus, famed for his brilliant speeches and prosecutions of the corrupt and the evil. At least that’s how he appeared to his audiences. You would not have known, as he later admitted, that at the outset of every speech he would “feel a tremor through my whole thoughts, as it were, and limbs.” Even as a master, he still experienced doubt—still felt waves of overwhelming anxiety and fear crash over him before he went onstage.

At the beginning of his career, it was even worse. He recounts his eternal debt and gratitude to a judge who, at one of Crassus’s first public appearances, could tell how “absolutely disheartened and incapacitated with fear” the boy was, and adjourned the hearing until a later date. We can imagine those merciful words from the judge, sparing Crassus as he no doubt prayed he would be spared, as we have prayed a thousand times, second only to his hope that he might be struck down and killed rather than have to go on.

Yet we would not be talking about Crassus had he not cultivated the ability to push through that fear. There are unfortunately no tricks to cultivating this ability. You can’t read your way to it. You can’t think your way to it. You just gotta do it. You make the pitch. You get up on the stage. You deliver the pre-game speech. You give the toast. And then you do it again and again. 

That’s what I was telling my sons and one of their nervous classmates. I get stage fright too. It is scary to get up there. But it gets less scary the more you do it. Confidence is built by competence, there’s no way around it. 

Come see me take the stage to talk Stoicism on the Daily Stoic Live tour—grab tickets here!

There’s another irony in all this. The philosophy I’ve spent my life writing about isn’t really a written philosophy at all. Because so much of Stoicism comes down to us in books, it’s easy to think of the Stoics as writers.

Isn’t that how we got Meditations? Or Seneca’s Letters?

Yes. But that’s not how we got the philosophy itself.

Stoicism began on a porch in Athens—the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Porch”—where Zeno would talk and trade ideas with whoever happened to be around. The playwright David Mamet had a good way of putting it: what he loves about the Stoics is that they were just “porch guys.” Regular people, hanging out, talking about how to become the best version of themselves.

Cato, the man widely admired as the greatest Stoic of them all—there isn’t even a secondhand record of his words. We know that he liked to do his philosophizing on foot. Plutarch tells us he would take meandering walks through Rome, talking with whoever he met “on his rounds.” And for all his austere habits, his other practice was hosting philosophical dinners, where he talked about ideas long into the night.

Epictetus never wrote anything down. His Discourses comes from a student, who tells us that “whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression.” That’s how Epictetus taught—in person, going back and forth in real time.

So for most of its history, Stoicism was a spoken, conversational philosophy. It’s meant to be heard, meant to be talked about, meant for that back and forth. And this is a long, unbroken tradition that goes back thousands of years, one that continues to this day.

I’m thinking about all this because I happen to be right in the middle of it. As I write this, I’m preparing for the Daily Stoic Live tour. I’m going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of the year making the rounds, talking Stoicism all over the world: Portland (on Monday!), San Francisco (on June 11th), Chicago, Boston, and a bunch of other U.S. cities, before heading all the way to Australia and New Zealand in October. Night after night of overriding that introverted part of me that would rather just stay home and write.

Over the years, though, this is something I’ve really tried to get good at. I’ve done it hundreds of times now. In big venues and small venues. To American audiences and international audiences. With slides and without slides. With technology and with no technology. Long talks and short talks. 

And I’ve come to see it as a meaningful and exciting way to share these ideas with people, but also as this high-wire act that forces me to get better. That’s why I don’t make it easy on myself. I could give the same talk every night, the same way, until I had it down cold. Instead, I’m changing it each time. I add things. I cut things. I try one delivery one night and a different one the next. I prepare some stuff I know works, and some new stuff to work out right there on stage.

Because that makes it harder. And harder is what makes me better.

So now…I’ve got to get back to preparing to talk to rooms full of strangers. Hope to see you there!