82 – Dress for Success – Your Presentation

Dress for Success, that is, appearance and perception is extremely important. This is a time for taking a look at what we’re doing in public or online, which is basically public. You’ve all probably heard about a book a long time ago called Dress for Success. If you haven’t, you’ve heard references to it or something. What it’s about is what kind of impression you make or have to the general public, to other people. They’re really talking about job interviews and while you’re at work, trying to move up or be exposed to a better audience.

The same thing goes if you’re in business for yourself. Remember and keep in mind that first impressions are crucial. You’ve all heard how important first impressions are. I’m actually kind of surprised that people sometimes can’t relate A to B, or B to D, or whatever. They know this, they hear it, but then I hear people turning around and saying: “Oh, just go ahead and do it, and learn on the way.” You learn on the way, and what do you do? People hear your first attempts, and those are their first impressions. I hear so often people recommending to people who are going into podcasting: “Oh, don’t worry about it. Just do it for a while and you’ll fix it up. You’ll learn, then get better skills, and you’ll start doing better and you’ll sound better.”

I heard that, but I also remembered and related the idea of first impressions and success. Make sure your sound is good. Low and behold, now more and more you hear that the most important thing is the sound. It’s even true in video. The video is not as important as the audio that’s in the video. People can put up with a little bit of static or a little bit of interference that just affects the video so it’s not quite right, but they really want to be able to hear the sound. So, you must make sure that it sounds well.

What I’m getting to with first impressions is also some of the things that we see out there today that are going kind of crazy. I’ll use an example. Colin Kaepernick. Everybody’s heard, it’s been all over the news, guy makes a dumb statement, turns around, and he decides to sit during the national anthem. So, what happens there? First of all, let me clear up one thing. Everybody’s turning around, running around, saying: “Oh, he’s got freedom of speech and there’s free speech.” First of all, let me share a big surprise to everyone: No, he doesn’t. That’s right, he doesn’t. Why? He’s at work and he’s representing the company, which is his football team. You try to do something like that in your job, and you can find yourself kicked out if it’s something that the company thinks doesn’t represent them well or doesn’t perform properly.

Let’s push that aside. The other part is: What’s he doing? First of all, he was sat down for the last five games of last year. Why? Because he wasn’t performing, he lost his starting job. So here he is trying for a starting job, fighting for it, and he becomes controversial to a brand new coach who happened be at Philadelphia the last few years and got fired from the team. Everybody on that team who was controversial or not toeing the line and not being part of the team, they were kicked off. So maybe it’s not such a good idea. It may not be bright, unless he’s taking a look at the 11 million dollar guarantee he has and saying: “I don’t really care. Maybe they’ll kick me out and I’ll just go home with my 11 million dollars.” I have no idea, but it doesn’t make sense if he’s looking at a future.

Then there’s a guy at Philadelphia, Myke Tavarres, he turns around and says: “I’m sticking with Colin Kaepernick. I’m not going to stand for the national anthem either.” What a dummy! This is an undrafted rookie who’s hoping to get on the roster. Keep in mind it starts out with like 90 players at the beginning of training camp,