An obnoxious story about learning by experience

When I was a toddler – I don’t think I had started Kindergarten yet – I taught myself to count by twos.  I didn’t actually know that was what I was doing, or even that it was a valuable skill.  I was just playing a game I made up, counting playing cards while dropping them on one side or another of a picture frame on my grandmother’s living room table.  When a card dropped on the far side of the frame, I would say its number out loud: (one), TWO, (three), FOUR, etc.  I didn’t attach any significance to my game until sometime later, when I was in the car with my mother and one of her teacher friends and the friend said something about when (at some later point in my schooling) I would learn to count by twos.  I declared, “I already know how to count by twos” and proceeded to demonstrate.

Is that an obnoxious story?  Forgive me if it is, but this week’s assignment is to write about “learning by experience” and that's my earliest memory of doing so.  My mathematical prowess did not survive into adulthood; I grew up be neither an astrophysicist nor (to my abiding regret) a champion poker player.  But to this day, if you need to count something by twos, I'm your gal. 

Looking back, I see that “doing” has always been my favorite mode of learning.  Sometimes this has happy results (the card game) and sometimes not (my first experience of riding a bike with hand brakes left me with a broken tooth in the front of my mouth until a dentist friend repaired it decades later), but I’d still much rather (as Nike says) "just do it" than spend hours reading about it first. This correlates moderately well with my learning styles profile: My card game was "solitary" (the adult Elaine scored 13 out of 20 on that mode), and "aural" (14), but I'd have to say it was also "physical" - which was one of my lower scores (8).  Perhaps toddlers learn by physical means because they are less developed verbally?

Of course, learning-by-doing has its limitations.  It’s fine to dive in and write a speech when you’ve never really written one before; less fine to dive in and perform brain surgery under the same conditions. (Fortunately, I’m not a doctor – though I have written speeches for them.)  As a speechwriter who learns by experience, I read a great deal – and not just business books.  And I analyze well-written speeches, see what makes them work for me – and where I think they fall short.

In the movie Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray character relives the same day over and over again, until he learns the things he needs to do to grow as a person.  People who learn by experience have to be careful to take in a range of experiences and inputs, or we risk rehashing what we know over and over again.   This might work well for someone in a factory, who repeats the same action every day; but knowledge workers must recognize that the world’s store of knowledge increases daily, and unless our personal stores of knowledge follow suit we will render ourselves obsolete.

Who teaches? Who learns?

My journey to teaching writing in a corporate setting continues: For the next month or so I'll be blogging occasionally about issues related to designing and teaching courses online.

Most of the online training I've had so far has been very passive - clicking through screens full of text for hours on end (okay, maybe half-hours, but it sure seemed like hours) and answering the occasional multiple-choice question.  In that kind of asynchronous web-based training, the "teacher" remains invisible - the Great & Powerful Oz behind a curtain of html.  Web-based training was not a particularly rewarding experience for me as a student; I'm not a passive person. And it's hard for me to imagine that it's rewarding for the instructor/designer/creator (or if we're sticking with the Oz metaphor, the Wizard). 

One of the things I enjoy most about training is collecting feedback from the students.  Since all of the training I've done so far has been real-time, real-world-based, that feedback has come from seeing the light dawn on a student's face or hearing well-reasoned answers to my questions.  So far, no applause.  But I'm still hopeful.  But Oz, our web-based trainer, will never get to experience those things.

Synchronous instructor-led online training offers slightly more feedback for instructors: they can see and hear the students and interact with them in something close to real-time (though the magic of technology can't eliminate the awkward pauses of dead air in between speakers).  In instructor-led online training, instructors function in much the same way they do in classrooms: as facilitator, expert, authority, resource, coach.  Additionally, they are able to personalize instruction to clarify confusions or suggest additional resources.  And students are able to ask questions and enrich the "classroom" discussion with their own thoughts and insights.  These things are not possible with an asynchronous, web-based program.

Winner!

It's official: I am now an award-winning speechwriter!  The folks who judge the Cicero Awards decided that my speech "The Sound of Leadership: What women know and businesses need to hear" was this year's best-written speech on the subject of diversity.

Back in May I blogged about the process of writing the speech.  Now it's been published in a special issue of Vital Speeches of the Day. 

I'll probably write more about this later, but right now I have a victory lap to complete.

Shipping News

I don't usually obsess over my work.  I write; I edit; I send, or as Seth Godin puts it, "ship." No problem.

It's easy to ship when you know the reaction will be favorable.  I just signed my fifth or sixth annual contract with my main client.  I know they love me and respect my work, and even if I should happen to fall short on an assignment (hasn't happened yet, but you never know...) or try something a little too off-the-wall for them, I trust they'll give me the benefit of the doubt: They know what I'm capable of.

Absent that warm reassurance, shipping turns out to be not so easy.  Case in point, the Test Speech.

A prospective client recently offered me the opportunity to be one of several speechwriters creating a speech for the same event.  All of us would get paid, but only one of us would win a new client.

It's nerve-wracking enough to write for a new client when you get to meet the speaker (or at least the communications team) first, talk about their expectations for the speech, and ask questions.  It's even more nerve-wracking to write for someone you've never met and never heard speak - they wouldn't even send me written copies of the guy's speeches!  And although they sent me a detailed outline, I found I disagreed with it at several points (I think that was part of the test), so the speech I turned in was not the speech they were expecting.

They gave me a week to complete the assignment; I did it in six days.  And the last day or day and a half was just pure obsessing.  Is this word right?  Could that be said just a little better?  I finally gave myself a stern talking-to and just pushed Send.

The good news is, once the speech was gone, so was my obsession.  Even better news, I aced the test and won myself a new client.

I can't wait to meet him.

A trip in the Wayback Machine

I needed to find a financial services-related speech for a potential new client.  Problem is, although I've written a ton about financial services, most of it hasn't been in speech form.  So I had to step into the Wayback Machine and I emerged in the year 1991.

Now, 20 years ago I was...well, 20 years younger, and 20 years less experienced as a speechwriter.  So I wasn't exactly sure how well the writing would hold up.  But from the very first paragraph, it made me smile:

Many more books have been written about the financial industry in the last five years than are worth any serious person's attention.  While some of them may give you a sense of the industry, most are little better than supermarket tabloids.  The most widely read book around [our firm] is Liar's Poker.  The plot is relatively simple: The boys from Animal House trade their togas for suits and go to work on Wall Street.  It's a sometimes funny book, with amusing caricatures.  But The New York Times has it on the wrong best-seller list: the book is more fiction than fact.

That voice you hear, that's unmistakably my client's voice.  Gruff, opinionated, no patience for fools.  And of course he had been one of those "amusing caricatures" in Liar's Poker.  We knew everyone in the room had read the book, so we dealt with the issue first thing.

Then, a few paragraphs later, some words that would work just as well in a speech dated 2011:

Many people entered the securities industry in the last decade expecting to be made millionaires before their skin cleared up.  One commentator noted a few years ago that "one of the best ways to make money is to be standing around when large sums of cash are changing hands."  But most of the people whose skills consisted of merely "standing around" are now standing around in minimum-security prisons.  The people who thrive at [our firm] - and elsewhere in the industry - are innovators, people who seek to participate meaningfully in the international flow of capital and investment.

Yes, I know it's fashionable these days to trash the financial services industry.  And yes, there have been excesses - no doubt.  But without some intermediary to funnel capital from those who have it to those who need it, the business world couldn't exist.

Anyway, I enjoyed the speech.  I hope my potential client does, too.

"We'll call you within two days"

My furnace died yesterday morning.  I called some local heating guys and I called our electric & gas utility, too, because someone suggested it to my partner.

The locals were at my house almost before I hung up the phone.  The utility said, after I got through the computer responses and managed to talk with a human being, "We'll have someone call you within two days."

I guess the concept of "dead furnace" means something different to a guy sitting in a phone bank with some headphones wrapped around his head than it does to the person sitting a freezing house.  The small businesspeople know that. The big business doesn't care.

For the record, the utility called in less than 36 hours...While my new furnace was being installed.

"I played an important role, but not the determinant role"

As counselor to John F. Kennedy, Jr., Ted Sorensen was present at the creation of some of the most stirring oratory produced in my lifetime.  And that's about all he would ever admit to.  The first fact makes him one of the best speechwriters in modern times; the second makes him one of the classiest as well.  A life well worth emulating.  I'm grateful to have met him and heard him speak.

Be sure to watch the "Last Words" video feature embedded in the Times' obituary.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Sorensen.