I gave a talk this evening, to a really wonderful crowd of enthusiastic people. And I made mistakes.
In particular, I spent too much time on the canned portion, the platitudes, the sound bites reiterating receive wisdom. Not nearly enough time on the live demo, the good stuff.
After all, it’s the live demo, the high wire act, the part that might at any moment fail, which puts the audience on the edge of their seat. That’s how they know you really mean it, that you are putting yourself at risk, that you are not merely reciting platitudes from some position paper you wrote back in the day.
Next time, caution be damned. It’s all going to be live demos.