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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Hyper startup accelerator is open for applications!

If you're thinking about joining an accelerator or raising capital for your startup, Hyper is a new accelerator backed by the biggest venture capital firms in tech.

A few reasons I’m a huge fan:

More competitive terms than competitors ($300k for 5%).

Hyper is the sister company of Product Hunt—companies get unique access to Product Hunt, the team, and launch support.

World-class advisors including Sequoia’s Alfred Lin, Ryan Hoover, Deena Shakir, Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, and a lot more.

Small batches make for a far more personalized experience.

Efficient 4 week long program.

Participants get time with me on how to scale your storytelling!

This is an amazing opportunity for startups all around the world. Apply for the program here.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Air!

If you’re still using Google Drive and Dropbox to store your files, you’re going to want to listen up. While those tools are fine for people who just need to store everything, they fall terribly flat when it comes to creative collaboration and scalability on images and videos.

Walk with me…let’s talk about Air. 

Air has built a solution—a platform that allows marketers and creatives to collaborate seamlessly across the entire content library of a business. All the work happens directly in the visual asset. The end result? Businesses can 10x the power of their content to become storytelling machines.

Air is the “holy s*** why didn’t this already exist?!” solution for marketing and creative collaboration. My startup portfolio loves it and you will too. Get a demo today and level up your content.

Today at a Glance:

Public speaking is scary. So scary that a number of surveys and studies have found that people rank public speaking ahead of death on a list of their greatest fears.

It’s also one of the most critical skill sets for your career and life. Confident, powerful public speaking—whether informal or formal—will accelerate your personal and professional life.

Strategies for more confident public speaking: avoid memorization, study the best, strike a power pose, practice relentlessly, find the anxiety killers, play the lava game, slow down to 0.75x, engage the audience, implement a storytelling structure, move with purpose, never self-sabotage, and cut the fear.

The Power Speaking Guide

"There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars." — Mark Twain

Ok, so public speaking is scary.

How scary?

Well, a number of surveys and studies have found that people rank public speaking ahead of death on a list of their greatest fears…

THAT scary.

Unfortunately, public speaking is also one of the most critical skill sets for your career and life. Confident, powerful public speaking—whether informal or formal—will accelerate your personal and professional endeavors. It sits in the all-important top-right quadrant of the Scary vs. Beneficial 2x2 grid.

So we can’t just hide from it. We need a set of strategies to increase our confidence and level up our speaking game.

In today’s piece, I’ll propose 12 such strategies. Some of the strategies will appear non-obvious or even counter-intuitive—but trust me, they work.

Without further ado, let’s dive in…

Avoid Memorization

When we’re nervous for a speech, toast, presentation, or talk, our bias is to memorize the content word-for-word.

We memorize in a valiant effort to avoid screwing up.

Ironically, memorization often has the opposite effect.

Imagine you are driving to a friend’s new house. You look up the directions before leaving—they seem simple enough, so you just memorize them. On the way, there’s a bit or roadwork that forces you to make a slight detour. Suddenly, you’re completely lost. You memorized the directions from A to B, but the slight twist has taken you off course and you have no clue how to get back on track. You only memorized the directions for one specific scenario (going directly from point A to point B), but the situation became more dynamic.

For most people, the same general principle applies to public speaking.

When you memorize material, one tiny slip-up can throw you off. You only know the material in one fixed direction, so you're unable to adapt. All it takes is a glitch in the slides, an off-track question from the audience, or a slight stumble in your opener and all of your preparation is out the window.

Furthermore, rote memorization can make you appear distant to the audience.

Instead of memorizing:

Focus on a few key moments. Perfect the opening line, transitions, and closing. When you nail these, you create momentum—with the audience and yourself. It instills a confidence you can build on. Manufacture these small "wins" that compound.

Create “lego blocks” that you can piece together. Hone small chunks of stories and ideas that you can naturally weave together depending on the situation. You’ll be able to pick and choose from your toolkit and be more dynamic in the moment.

Study the Best

We live in an amazing era—we literally have the best speaking coaches in the world at our fingertips.

Identify 3-5 speakers you admire. They can be politicians, business leaders, comedians, motivational coaches, whatever.

Go on YouTube and find videos of each one delivering a speech.

Slow down the playback speed—a great recommendation from my friend Ankur Warikoo—and take notes.

Study the following:

Structure: How are they structuring their talk?

Cadence: What is the pacing of their words? When are they pausing and when are they accelerating?

Tone: When are they raising their voice? When are they lowering it?

Movement and Gestures: Note their movement on the stage (if any). How are they gesturing?

Audience Engagement: How are they engaging with the audience?

By analyzing the best, we naturally move to embody the traits we've identified.

Strike a Power Pose

A "power pose" is a stance that embodies a feeling of power—standing tall, arms spread and raised.

The original discussion around the power pose entered the mainstream when social psychologist Amy Cuddy delivered a now famous Ted Talk on the topic that has been viewed over 20 million times.

Cuddy asserted that executing power poses can actually create feelings of confidence and power...