Article on Seth Godin’s blog about what makes a good presenter. He says it’s just two things: love to the audience, and respect from the audience.
I think this is true, not just for presenters, but also for bloggers and writers. You can’t be a good blogger if you hate the people who come to your site and are not trying to help them. You can’t write for people if you don’t care about them. I’ve seen some people try their hand at blogging who were so self-absorbed that they couldn’t type a sentence without the condescenscion coming out. Needless to say, they failed.
On the other hand, if your audience doesn’t respect you, nothing you say will affect them. You need to earn this respect by either providing good material or by helping the dialogue.
No related posts.
But here is an...
I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
Ideally you want to love your audience and earn their respect. But I’ve seen some gurus who are such experts in their specialized fields, that they can get by with abusing the readers to a small degree. Kind of like the Soup Nazi.
There’s a sandwich shop in SF that’s similar to the Soup Nazi in NY. I think it’s called Mama May’s and you can look it up on Yelp. Due the woman’s limited English, you have to order the sandwich a certain way or she’ll open a can of whoop-ass on you. And yet people line up out the door around the block for her sandwiches.
Haha…I think every city has one of those. We’ve got the sushi version in SE Portland. The line is out the door, you wait two hours to get in, they let you order one time only, and if you stay too long, they’ll ask you to leave. They had this one nasty chick whom they got rid of a couple years ago, and the service has since improved somewhat.
Have you ever seen Hell’s Kitchen? Gordon Ramsey yells at the customers sometime. Some doctors are like this too. I think these people love the specialty more than the people, but the specialty is so unique or beneficial that customers will come anyway.