Have You Turned Your Keynote Into a Ginsu Knife?

Hi! This is Peter Winick. I am the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. Do any of you remember the Ginsu knife commercials back from the 80s? I do. The promise of the Ginsu knife is that it did everything! It sliced. It diced. You could cut a steak. You cut a can of soda. You could fillet a cat. I don’t know why you’d want to fillet a cat. But it was one of those promises that it made. Why do I bring up the Ginsu knife other than I’ve been thinking about the 80s lately? That’s not why.

The reason I bring it up is I all to often too many speakers trying to Ginsu knife their content. They try to pack so much into that forty minutes that they’ve got with the audience, so much thoughtfulness, so much of their twenty years of experience, so much of ten books that they overwhelm the audience. That the audience comes out of there flooded and not knowing what to do.

It may feel counter intuitive to you but the best speakers, the best authors, the best thought leaders that I know bring their work down to a level where it is really really simple. There might be only be two or three takeaways from a keynote. But they are two things that are actionable. They are two things that I will remember as an audience member three weeks, six months, a year later. So don’t Ginsu knife your content. Take it down to the two or three things that I, a busy participant, as a busy audience member can actually do something with and it will create more value for you, your brand, and them.