Its Thursday so that means its time for Three Things
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Big news from me this week as I decided to launch my own online course. Performative Speaking: A Trial Lawyer’s Speaking Secrets is live for signups. At this point, I am only collecting emails to figure out how many members of the community we will have in cohort 1.
Why did I design this course? Because its something I wanted to do and I believe that this course will change how people speak, think, and feel about themselves. I said during the finish of Write of Passage that I saw that course as a personal development course hidden in a writing course. My goal is that Performative Speaking will take that personal development a step further.
I say this because I have seen the change in students I teach at SMU Law School. I teach law students how to use Performative Speaking in the courtroom, negotiations, and everyday life. I will bring stories from my days as a trial lawyer where I tried murderers, rapists, arsonists, and child abusers. The methods I want to teach people have worked when the stakes were the highest. I have tested my philosophy and I have watched it work for others.
Its time to build.
I named it Performative Speaking for two reasons.
Performative: relating to or of the nature of dramatic or artistic performance
Performativity: the power of language to effect change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead or also function as a form of social action.
This is my hope as I build the course. This is my hope for the community.
The signup page right now is pretty basic but I ask you to sign up if you are interested in taking the course. If you are on the fence, just email me and we can talk. For this first cohort, I am promising to review every video that the members make and give my feedback and advice. I am invested in the success of this program.
Performative Speaking: A Trial Lawyer’s Speaking Secrets
Now for Three Things.
My newest article explores how music and movies can transport a person to feeling like they are somewhere completely different. I had this happen to me recently as I heard a song by 3LAU and felt like I was in the anime movie Ghost in the Shell. It was a crazy experience and something I will never forget.
I know its something I will use in the future when I create speeches. I believe that great speaking can be like music and movies. One of my favorite quotes is from the West Wing where they say “Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.”
This visual from Jack Butcher
To produce signal, mute noise.
Well said by the master of visuals. Jack’s work continues to be an inspiration and his motto of Build in Public has really stuck with me. That’s why I am building with yall. In the weeks, months, and years to come, we will see how far we go. The first step is to mute the noise and focus on the signal.
“Confidence is not ‘they will like me’ Confidence for me is ‘I’ll be fine if they don’t’” Harvey Specter in Suits
The final item this week is a tweet I sent on Saturday morning that went crazy viral. But stick around as I explain the interesting thing about it.
That tweet led to this illustration:
It’s an awesome visual. But let’s talk about going viral.
The stats for the original tweet:
53,340 impressions
2,165 total engagements
984 detail expands
707 likes
332 profile clicks
117 retweets
25 replies
So my takeaway from all of this is that impressions are cool but don’t really achieve a purpose if it doesn’t lead to meaningful connections with people. I still love the tweet I sent out but I only talked with 25-30 people out of 53,340 times it was seen. Focus on creating community. Community is the real magic.
Community is why David Perell has been so successful with Write of Passage.
I am focused on community building because that is the way. That is the way we build our New Rome and the Colisseum of ideas brick by brick.
Let’s build yall.
If you enjoyed this issue of Three Things Thursday share it with your friends or on social media.
If you need to sign up, here you go.
Have any questions or comments? Reply back and let’s talk.
Want to tweet at me? @robbiecrab
Check out my website for more: Robbiecrab.com
Check out the Performative Speaking Course website: Performativespeaking.com
See you next Thursday