It's a brutal fact. Most audience members will remember just one thing about your speech. Your success depends on what that one, memorable thing is.
We're not talking just about content. It’s the whole audience experience. They might remember a startling statistic or a heartfelt, personal story. Or that you had too many visuals.
Here's the trick. You want to engineer that one memorable thing in your speech so that it's SuperGlued, riveted, and welded to your big message. Remembering the thing means remembering your key message.
Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man) would keep writing until he found his message, his one memorable thing. He'd cut out the words and tape them just above his keyboard -- always in his field of view while he wrote and rewrote.
Everyone who works on your speech needs to know what your one memorable thing is. Everything they do -- whether it's speechwriting, visual development, or PR -- needs to automatically lead to remembering your key message.
All of this is an exercise in precision focusing. It's really easy to let good material, interesting material, lead the audience away from your key message. Sometimes you need to ruthlessly cut away good stuff exactly because it loads up the audience with too much material.
You need to know, and deliver, that one memorable thing that will anchor your key message for the audience. Otherwise, why give the speech?
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