No articles today. Matt’s still turning over the Your New Opening Line pilot in Denver, a small but mighty room of people each refining the opening to a talk, and he pulls out three lessons (plus a bonus). First, going blank. When you’re performing to a camera or working a talk, the harder you push, the more you get in your head, and it feels like driving straight into a ditch over and over. Get back in the car, start the engine, aim down the road, and it’s in the ditch again. Grinding the same way never works. You have to break the pattern: throwaway rounds, a joke from the person behind the camera, walking away, goofing around, anything that takes the pressure of performance off. One participant came out of the gate strong, then got in her head, and what finally worked wasn’t pushing through it directly, it was disengaging and re-entering later. Instead of driving, fly. Instead of driving, skip rope.
Second, you can’t see your own diamond. It’s easy to spot the story that shines in someone else, the one that explains everything about them, and almost impossible to see it in yourself. The things most central to our own story are the ones we take for granted or never bring up, especially when telling them feels promotional or like cheapening them. It takes other people in the room saying no, no, tell that story again, that thing about your father is the gold, not what you were focusing on. That happened over and over in the session. Third, how you think beats what you think. The way you came to an idea, what informed it, is more useful to other people than the conclusion itself. Matt’s version: how you came to know and believe something is more interesting than what you know and believe. It’s why “most people think X, but here’s the truth” posts fall flat, and why human narrative is so powerful, because even if someone disagrees with your conclusion, they can have mad respect for how you got there. The bonus thought: this format would be a phenomenal, indirect team-building experience for leadership teams, because engaging with each other’s stories builds trust and familiarity fast. His questions: what’s a throwaway fact in your story that others found fascinating, and what are you working on that would benefit from a group for a while? Nobody sees their own blind spots alone.
