I was at a talk radio convention one time, I bumped into a friend, Jimbo Hannon, a much more successful talk radio show host than I ever was. And we were chatting. And he mentioned larry king. Oh, you know Larry's as well. Yeah, we've worked for the same radio network for years and years and years. We had the same office.
For many years, I would see him I'd see him speak all the time. I say, Oh, wow. Larry King, that must have been interesting. What's it like, seeing Larry King give a speech in person? He said, Ah, TJ it's just so awful. It's so boring.
Every time I saw Larry, I'd go to the back of the room, find a table, crawl underneath it, take a nap. So that's kind of disappointing. I thought Larry would be better than that as a speaker. You know, just curious. What was the reaction from the audience? He said, always the same laughter, tears, cheers.
Was standing ovation and a $50,000 check on his way out the door. It's kind of a contrasting reaction I don't understand. Teach a hate the same darn speech every single time. The same anecdotes, and it got laughs every time people remember it they talked about I've heard it 1000 times. What's three lesson here? Larry was smart enough to know that if you're on TV every night, it's the same audience.
Well, you can't say the same thing. But if he's giving a speech at some major national trade association convention, that's probably the only time most of those people ever see him in person speaking, so you can give them his best stuff. He told the same stories every time. And he gave his audience the best stuff that was it interesting to Larry to say the same thing each time. Probably not. But what interested him is he got that big paycheck to go out the door with.
That's what works for him. So remember this if you want to be a great communicator, a great presenter, it's not about you, son about whether you find it interesting. You have to get your audience the best material you have. Okay, so why do I give that story? Why do I use that this works for public speaking workshops, as well as media training workshops, because a big problem a lot of people have is they do media interviews, and they want to say something different each time because it's not interesting to them to repeat themselves. And then every article has different messages coming through Well, that's horrible.
That's no way to really communicate a message to the audience's you care about, you need some consistency. Same thing with speaking sometimes someone will give a great speech to one regional office and Mobile, Alabama one day, they got to give another speech to the identical sort of crowd and the Atlanta Office Two days later, they completely change their speech. So all the stuff that worked really well, in Alabama. Now they're giving all new stuff to Atlanta and it's not very good. When you have content that works, and you're speaking to different audiences, reuse, which you know, is your best stuff. That is the message of this story, the whole point of this story