A Lesson in Taking Opportunities

“Figure out what you know, and talk about it”

I have no idea where I first heard this advice, but it sounds like something you’d hear on Twitter.

Over the years of reading advice for content creators, as a blogger for nearly the past ten years I’ve developed a bit of an obsession trying to understand the magic of what makes people stop and pay attention.

There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day (and increasing) new things published on the Internet everyday, and it would take a many number of lifetimes that I’m not mathematically clever enough to work out for it to ALL be consumed

So when it comes to creating digital content I’m always thinking

“Why should anyone care to read this?”

Entertainment is one factor. Solving a problem is another. Keeping people informed is also a good one.

Whatever it is, it’s about fulfilling a need.

I realise I’m going off topic and what I intended for this post to be about. So let’s get back on track.

“Figure out what you know, and talk about it”

Throughout the years here I’ve written about things I know a bit about, and other things I thought I knew what I was talking about.

This self-awareness of my competencies (or lack of) has been a blocker, and my imposter syndrome comes into my head

“Who are you to give advice – you don’t know enough to talk about that!”

So for every one item I’ve written, there’s probably a dozen opportunities lost that never left the concept stage because I told myself I didn’t know enough.

And I was left with that burning question

“What do I actually know about?”

In my day job I’ve done some good things. I write that with humility – it’s not a brag I have the facts and testimonies of my success to back it up.

Over time I began tossing around ideas in my head of what I’ve done – what worked, what didn’t, and what I learnt.

It would be really good if one day I was able to tell people my experiences.

Taking the opportunity

It was a Friday when I was doing my usual job of scanning Twitter – to the layman when you say that it sounds like “I was slacking off…”

But in reality looking at the trends, and observing what people are discussing in my industry has an advantage. As I mentioned earlier, seeing what problems people are having and spotting the opportunities to fill the need.

On my timeline I spotted an opportunity for me.

CommsHero, an event bringing together communications professionals, was having an open call for speakers.

For a moment I thought about putting a pitch forward.

But then I imagined all those seasoned pros coming together for this weekly event, many having years, decades experience even of leading campaigns and creating content.

Why would they want to listen to me, someone who was relatively new to the industry who 18 months earlier was questioning his future as a project manager.

No, it was stupid to even think about it.

I closed down Twitter and did something else.

What do I know?

Although I wasn’t going to do a talk, I began thinking

“If I had to give a presentation, what do I know enough to talk about?”

I began evaluating all the work I’d done:

Building a members website from zero to 1000+ members,
Managing two social media accounts with over 10,000 followers and one million impressions received in the last year,
Writing a keynote speech for an Executive manager for a packed out session at a high profile digital healthcare conference,
Creating a successful bulletin keeping in contact with people interested in our vision.

Okay now I am bragging – but my eyes were open to how much I did know.

What was I going to do about it?

Inspired by the people I worked with in my team and wider networks where it was common to take on a few speaking gigs, I opened up Twitter and found the tweet, and clicked the link to the submission form.

The first big question “What is your session title?”

The second one: “What is it about?”

“What is it about?” I thought.

Determined not to stumble at the first hurdle I pulled through a generic title that I could mould, into what I would speak about if I got approved – not that I was going to be approved to speak at such a big event.

“Building and bringing together online communities”

A title in hindsight I wish had included more details about my job and that it instead said “communities online”.

I filled in the rest of the usual boring details, and clicked submit.

“Well they won’t take that seriously, but at least you tried.” I told myself.

Later…

About a month later I’d put speaking at the event to the back of my mind, it was one of those things where it was more important of trying and getting rejected, rather than not trying at all.

But it came back to my attention when an email notification popped up with “CommsHero”.

Oh well, it’s still nice of them to go to the effort of sending the unsuccessful a rejection email.

And I began to read

“Hi James,

Thank you so much for your application to speak at CommsHero Week 2023.

We have had an overwhelming response from the comms community and it has been a tough decision for our team but we are pleased to say you have been selected for a speaking role this year.”

I re-read it and read it again. I then double checked at 10 o’clock in the evening to check that I wasn’t so delirious from getting the email that my reading comprehension had failed!

“Oh s**t!” I thought “They actually want me to speak!”

As I came down from the excitement I thought “what did I say I was going to speak about again?”