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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

>I admit I am one of those conference speakers that doesn't prepare a lot.

I've been running meet-ups and speaking at and attending conferences of all shapes and sizes all over the world for years and I assure you, unless you're exceptionally talented and experienced at public speaking (which you may be), then a lack of preparation is painfully obvious to the audience.

I completely agree that building a bond with the audience is the key difference between a good talk and a great talk but to anyone relatively new to public speaking, I promise you that there's no such thing as too much preparation.

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I'm in the speaking circus now for 12 years, so I will happily admit that I have a solid pool of experience and knowledge to build upon. Preparation as in learning and practising the stuff I talk about is my daily job anyway, so in that sense I prepare a lot.

Some people call my style "storytelling" because that's the new buzzword, I guess. To me it comes very natural to be on stage and entertain the audience while delivering my content.

My main point is that speaking in public is not a one-size-fits-all thing. So what works for most doesn't have to work for all and vice-versa.

As long as the audience feels they learned something and were entertained, I'm happy.

You can do a lot of preparation and perfection, over years, and finally get up there and suddenly realize that you are not an entertainer, or even a teacher, and don't want to be either of those, even though the assumption was that this was a good idea, or the main idea. Then what, you're the guy from the Advanced Bashing The Shell talk, or a like guitar player who does not want to play for an audience, what do you do?

Not everybody can become a good speaker, granted. Training and experience helps a lot, though. But if you don't feel comfortable on stage then by all means, don't force yourself to.

There are loads of other ways to share your knowledge. Maybe you want to try podcasting, blogging, vlogging, writing articles for relevant magazines/web sites?

Heck, you could even make funny songs to get your message out :-) As a speaker though, I feel at home on stage and the feedback has been positive over all the years, so I feel comfortable with being a speaker.

As always, do what you makes you feel good, don't force yourself into something you don't like. The audience will notice immediately and some audiences can be very hostile. Most of the time though they are very forgiving in my experience.

Kind of depends on how you define a “good speaker”, right? Your style and mine style are obviously very different (lots of it is also due to English being my third language of course) but people still have expressed that they consider me a good speaker.

It’s like with everything: talent or grind. Or both if you want to be an amazing speaker. :)

The different approaches and results of speakers is what makes a conference interesting, when the mix is right IMHO :-)

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