A Canadian astronaut's framework divides how you start something into three categories: negative, zero, or plus one. Most people chase plus one and crash into negative. The better move is aiming for zero: do the job, stay steady when things break, skip the perfectionism.
there's this Canadian astronaut, and I read his book, which is really good, and he's got this concept in there that he's applying to jobs, but it also applies to speeches. The concept is be a zero. He says, okay, when you're starting a new job, you can be a negative one, a zero, or a plus one. And obviously nobody wants to be a negative one. Everybody wants to be a plus one. So what most people do is they try to impress immediately, but then they wind up like skipping steps and in trying to be a plus one, they actually become a minus one. So I think the same thing is true for speeches. I also think you can be like a -2 with a speech. So his whole thing is like, aim to be a zero. Like, just aim to get the job done. Whatever the chaos you feel is, the slides didn't work, the livestream hasn't started, like whatever that is, in that moment you need to lose the drive for perfectionism. Just be a zero.
