TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

19 Jul 2016 · 2 min

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Excerpt from a TJ Walker live-stream (The Habit Influencer) where Walker uses Abraham Lincoln’s public-speaking career to argue that effective speakers must be versatile in speech length. He notes Lincoln’s famous two-minute Gettysburg Address but emphasizes Lincoln’s regular practice of long-form speaking (90 minutes–five-hour debates with Stephen Douglas) and concludes the lesson: choose the time needed to deliver your message, not necessarily make it short.

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In my most famous speech, I spoke for only two minutes. But what people don't realize is I never would have had the opportunity as President to deliver this speech at Gettysburg if I hadn't regularly spoken for two hours and had been a part of five hour debates against Stephen Douglas when I was running for the US Senate. My name is Abraham Lincoln. Folks, there's a lot, there's obviously a lot of commentary and talk about Abe Lincoln. He's the most written about person in the history thousands and thousands and thousands of books. But quite often people draw the wrong lessons. Everyone likes to say, oh, make your speech short, concise. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was two minutes long. The poor guy who spoke after him spoke for two hours. Nobody remembered it. And the thing to understand about Lincoln is he had tremendous versatility as a public speaker. If he needed or wanted to speak for two minutes, he would. But if he needed to speak for 90 minutes or two hours, he could do a great job of that as well. The famous Lincoln Douglas debates were often five hour extravaganzas and he would speak for 90 minutes, two hours plus in some of these events. So it is an absolute false lesson to say that Abe Lincoln was a man of few words or that shorter is always better. No. Pick the amount of time you need to communicate the message you need. That's the real lesson.