What I’m watching

The latest Colin and Samir video: We spent 24 hours with Mr Beast. I still find it baffling how much pull the top influencers have. I think we’re at an inflection point of the creator economy where it’s maturing to become established as an industry. It’s always interesting for me to see the different directions creators take.

Resource of the week

Eventbrite is not exactly a niche resource this week. I talk a lot about making a return on your investment in property, in reality, the biggest return I’ve ever had is spending time making connections with the right people. There are tonnes of great events and if you put in the effort few things put you in a better position than having a network of like-minded people.

Quote

During a conversation in his office in Irvine, he says, "The number one skill in investing is patience-extreme patience”. When the market crashed in 2008, he made ten investments in two months. In more typical times, he bought just two stocks in 2011, three in 2012, and none in 2013.

William Green - Richer, Wiser, Happier

Thoughts

This week Kings College were kind enough to host me for a talk on property. It was my first live talk on property and a great experience to have the chance to talk in a longer more structured form compared to my TikTok videos and the opportunity to interact in real-time.

There are a couple of things I learnt from the experience which I hope can help with your presentations/talks in future:

Preparation is key. The more time I spent prepping on my talk the less nervous I became in the runup to it. Making sure I was happy with the content and things being coherent and running through my talk.
Putting your audience first. Unless it’s a uni presentation, when you get the opportunity to speak about something it’s not about showcasing your knowledge or skills but giving value to your audience. Whether it’s an idea or insight, the goal is to give people something to take away that will help them. I am in the fortunate position of being a content creator so I have a pretty good idea of what people find interesting or what’s boring from my posts. But if I wasn’t, I would look to forums, subreddits and social media to find what questions consistently come up with the most to have an idea of what you can address. This way you’re more likely to get engagement vs it being a dry talk about what you want to go on about, that nobody resonates with.
Pitch it to as many different people as you can. As someone who is introverted, I don’t normally feel comfortable reaching out to people for help and that I’m bothering them. But I did anyway and was very pleasantly surprised how many people were willing to give time to help. So something I’m taking away to other areas of my life is to be more open to reaching out.
Familiarising yourself with the venue. If at all possible, try to visit the venue beforehand. I have a tendency to procrastinate but I found that visiting the venue helped make it more ‘real’ in my mind and helped me visualise. Also more practically, it might flag up any issues or adjustments that need to be made (like for example there being two screens for each side of the room so I told myself to try not to neglect one side).
Who are you speaking to? Balancing the content was a challenge for me. I had previously watched MIT professor Patrick Winston’s video about How to Speak, in which he said nearly everybody makes the mistake of putting too much in their slides. So I stripped everything back down but then wasn’t sure if it was too simple. But similar to my TikTok videos, I asked myself if roles were reversed whether I’d have something to take away.

Overall, I feel like there are some improvements I can make in the future, I’d like to work on being a bit smoother and not having to rely on my cue cards so much. Also to be more confident to increase interaction. The biggest struggle I’d say from live talk it talking for a long time without getting any feedback. It felt like I was just talking and talking without knowing whether I was going too slow, too fast, if people were getting it etc. But very glad for the experience.

If you’re interested and thinking you’ve missed out, fear not, I plan to record the content of the talk into a free Skillshare class in the coming weeks. So just stay tuned, I’ll be giving info on this newsletter first and foremost.

Hope you have a good week, as always hit reply if you have any feedback or questions. I read every single one and have a good week!

Hans