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Monday I'm speaking to students at the University at Buffalo, where I went to school. Tuesday I'm on a stage at Adobe, where I worked from 2009 to 2012.

I built both talks in six days, with four kids home from summer camp. No notes, no text on any slide. I'm going to show you the talk and then show you exactly how it got built, because if you've ever wanted to speak and had no idea where to start, the method is simpler than anyone makes it sound.

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First, the part where I was doing it wrong.

Adobe invited me to a creator event in San Francisco as a guest. Then they opened a few spotlight slots to people already attending, and I pitched a framework I use every day and had never put on a stage.

They said yes.

Which is when I realised I'd described a talk that didn't exist anywhere except in the paragraph I sent them.

So I started building it. Structure, sections, transitions, lines I thought sounded good. I kept adding. Every version got a little more crowded and a little worse.

Six days. Four kids home from camp. A talk that didn't exist.

Then I stopped and asked myself why I was working this hard.

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Here's what I'd been doing.

I was inventing a talk. When what I should have been doing was remembering one.

Everybody tells you to use stories because audiences remember them. True, and it's not the reason that matters.

The reason that matters is that you remember them. You cannot forget something that happened to you. There's nothing to memorise. You just tell it.

And that has a consequence most people never connect. If you don't have to remember your material, you don't need notes. If you don't need notes, you don't need text on your slides. And if there's no text on your slides, you spend ten minutes looking at people instead of looking at a screen.

That's the whole thing. My slides are photographs and black screens. Not one word on any of them. Because I want to talk to the room, not read to it.

Every version of the talk got better the moment I threw out anything I couldn't say from memory.

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So here's the story I ended up with.

My wife Domenique is venturing into business ownership.

I'm experimenting with a project called Social Studio. I bring in authors and creators, sit them down, interview them, and turn it into video their audience actually watches. Five so far. Still up in the air, still exploring partnerships.

I wanted her in it. Not helping out. Running it with me.

And my honest first reaction was that we've tried building things together before and it hasn't worked.

So I ran my own test on it. Is this hard, or is it wrong?

It felt wrong, and I had history to point at. But then I remembered something I'd been leaving out.

It did work once. Years ago, at Adobe, Domenique and I volunteered together at NY Cares Day, in a program I started at that company. That one went fine. So has every single time we've volunteered at our kids' schools since.

The difference wasn't the timing or the work. It was that we weren't building something for us. We were helping somebody else.

Which is a fairly accurate description of what Social Studio does.

So it's hard. It was never wrong. I'd been reading a pattern that had an exception sitting right in the middle of it, and I'd forgotten the exception.

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Now here's how that got built, in four moves.

One. Pick your hallway. One framework, and you use it on everything. Mine is three questions. It never changes, which is why I don't have to write a new talk for every room.

If you're sitting there thinking you don't have a framework, you probably do. It's the advice you catch yourself giving over and over without thinking about it. Write it down as a question and you're most of the way there.

Here's mine, so you can see the shape of one.

The Hard or Wrong Test Is this hard, or is it wrong? Hard is not the enemy. Wrong is. 1.  What am I actually trying to achieve? 2.  Is this hard, or is it wrong? 3.  What's the move?

Three questions, and I've never needed a fourth. If you'd rather borrow it than build one, the full version is here: bit.ly/3RslLwp

Two. Write your doors. Anthony Trucks described a keynote to me like this. Fixed start, fixed end, and in between there are doors. Behind every door is a story. Which ones you open depends on who's in the room.

So make the list. Ten or fifteen true things that happened to you, each with a person and a place in it. Mine lives in Notion and it did more work last week than anything else on my computer.

One filter, and this is the part people miss. Every story has to prove something inside your framework. If you can't say which part of it the story demonstrates, the story doesn't go in, no matter how good it is.

That's how I ended up cutting the funniest story I own. Nothing wrong with it. It just wasn't teaching anything I was there to teach.

Three. Match the story to the room, not to your taste. Stop asking which stories are your best. Ask which ones the people in that room will see themselves in.

Nothing about my marriage is going in front of those students on Monday. For them it's whether to drop the class, whether to take the internship that pays nothing, whether the major they picked at eighteen is hard right now or wrong for them. Same three questions. Completely different doors.

Four. Cut until you can say it without looking. Read the whole thing out loud, standing up, screen closed. Everywhere you reach for the phrasing, cut it or replace it with something true.

Whatever survives, you own. That's your talk.

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And since nobody ever gives you this part, here's the shape.

Ten minutes, roughly:

About a minute to open with something real about yourself. Forty-five seconds to teach the framework, once, plainly. Then two or three stories at a minute each. Two minutes in the middle where the room does something instead of listening. Ninety seconds to close.

That's it. That's a keynote. Add or subtract stories to fit the clock.

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Now, I know what you might be thinking.

That your life isn't interesting enough for this.

Two of the six stories in my talk are: a time I decided not to open a piece of software, and a small argument with my wife that I was clearly in the wrong about.

Neither is dramatic. Both work, because each one proves a piece of the framework and the room recognises the feeling.

You're not looking for the most impressive thing that ever happened to you. You're looking for the moment you were stuck, because everyone listening has been stuck too.

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A test you can run this week.

Write down five things that actually happened to you at work. Not lessons. Events, with a person in them and a place.

Next to each one, write what it proves. Three to show you what I mean.

The client who asked for a refund, and you gave it before they finished the sentence. Proves you'd rather lose the money than the relationship. That's the easy kind.

The project you were proudest of that nobody noticed. Most people file that one under failure and never tell it. It proves you can tell good work from popular work, which is exactly what a nervous client needs to hear before they hand you something.

The person you hired who didn't work out. Reads like a hiring mistake. But stop it after the interview and it proves you move fast. Stop it after the conversation where you let them go and it proves you do the hard part yourself. Stop it a year later and it proves you learned what you can't teach.

Same story, three doors. At least one of your five will do that.

Twenty minutes, and you've got the beginnings of a talk. Or at minimum, options on your next sales call instead of a script.

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Go write down five things that happened.

Keep building,
Terry

P.S. Half of what I teach is that people will pay for what you already know. If you want to test that, you can sell it on EveryExpert. One thing you're good at, one price, one link: start your EveryExpert profile

P.P.S. If you've got a decision you keep picking up and putting down, that's most of what I do on calls now. Thirty minutes, and we'll get to a move: everyexpert.com/terryrice