Here’s what I think. If you prepare a speech/presentation, and what you have to pull from is what you read for that particular speech, you’re not yet ready… The best speakers speak from “overflow.” They have this reservoir of material – books and essays they have read, speeches they have heard, life (with all of its difficulties and wonder) they have experienced, all ready to come forth in this particular speech. Oh, you still prepare for this, and every, speech, but you have to be the one delivering this speech. And the you that is delivering this speech is filled with so much just busting to get out. Yes, you have to be disciplined; yes, you have to guard against rambling; yes, you have to guard against resting on your past work. But, it is that past work that enriches this, and every, present day offering.
This is all summed up so powerfully in an answer by Steven Spielberg on why he took a while – a long while – to make Schindler’s List. Here’s the answer (from a Hollywood Reporter interview of Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis. I’ve bolded the key lines):
THR: Why did Schindler’s List take courage?
Spielberg: Because if the film had been a product of Hollywood and not of reality, it could have brought shame and disrespect to the survivors of the Shoah. That’s why it took me 10 years — not because I couldn’t have made it two or three years after buying the book [by Thomas Keneally], but because I just wasn’t ready to tell that story. I needed a couple of major milestones in my own development and my career before I could really find the courage to tell that story with all the obvious, apparent risks.
To Steven Spielberg, movies provide ways to entertain (and, make plenty of money). But it is pretty obvious that, to Spielberg, movies are primarily about communicating important messages. Messages he believes in; messages he believes the wider world needs to listen carefully to. And it takes a lot of attentive reading and living to be ready to deliver that kind of message.
First Friday Book Synopsis 