scream. In my bumbling state, I had tried to stick my poster to a $40,000 piece of artwork that I didn’t even notice. Some say I made a terrible first impression. By some, I mean everyone.
Several years later I found myself in Shanghai, China, the only Westerner working in China for Hult International Business School, the world’s largest business school by enrollment. This sole-Westerner status, apparently, was enough to make me the ideal candidate to host the Asian leg of the Hult Prize, a global competition run in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative. I actively tried to avoid it, but I needed the help of the organizer on another project, so I ultimately gave into the arm-twisting.
I was a nervous wreck as usual. As I took the stage, I had enough paper in hand to rival War and Peace. I stumbled through it terribly, relieved only by the knowledge that most of the assembled four-hundred-plus Chinese officials and participants had no idea how to comprehend an Irish accent. Of course, then I screwed up their Chinese names, too.
That certainly translated.
Three opportunities to improve my educational and professional standing, three tremendous failures that stemmed directly from my inability to stand in the front of a room and speak like a person. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t fit with my personality. I wasn’t a painfully shy guy. I was outgoing. I could hold a conversation with just about anyone and walk away seeming intelligent, competent, and capable of handling pointy utensils. But the second I was faced with a captive audience, I became a guy my friends jokingly referred to as “Shakin’ Stevens.” My alter ego sweated. He stammered. He shuddered. Sometimes he BYO-Corona’ed. You wouldn’t trust Shakin’ Stevens with a sharp fork, let alone a roomful of clients.
The time came to put an end to this sequence of embarrassment, but it was certainly not a decision I made on my own.
When my friend Arash suffered a severe spinal cord injury, I suggested organizing a comedy show and recruiting some top comedians to perform in order to raise funds for his continued physical therapy. As luck would have it, my old neighbor, Tim, was a headlining comedian and kindly agreed to do it. What I didn’t anticipate was Arash’s insistence that I host the event! He knew nothing of my fear of public speaking and had no idea just how bad I was at it. He just knew me as someone who was full of words in everyday life and scared of very little. There was no way that I could say no. To this point I would have described my fear of public speaking as crippling. A description that, in this moment, paled in comparison to the reality my friend was facing, and a more fearful, life-altering application of the word.
Knowing what I had gotten myself in for, I set out to learn all I could about stand-up comedy and public speaking before the event. Tim Ferriss is an author and entrepreneur who popularized the idea of “meta learning,” learning a skill in the shortest amount of time possible. In The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life, Ferriss deconstructed a skill he wanted to master into its most basic components and determined which of those components would give his ability the biggest boost. As a huge Tim Ferriss fan, I figured this would be a great way to raise the bar for my public speaking ability.
There was just one problem.
In The 4-Hour Chef, Ferriss opted to learn how to cook. It was something he wanted to do, not something that made him want to drop into the fetal position on the floor of his presumably very Zen kitchen. The idea of throwing myself headfirst into the ABCs of public speaking sounded terrible. There had to be another way, something else that I could learn that was aligned with public speaking but didn’t make me want to flee to Japan with my bow and arrows to study yabusame. But what?
Stand-up comedy.
The idea of stand-up comedy rattled through my brain for just a second, but I heard it loud and clear. I liked to make people laugh and, provided that they were my friends and not an audience, I was pretty good at it. Stand-up put you on a stage. In front of people. To sink or swim or run off the platform in tears. Yes, stand-up would be my gateway skill.
I wondered if stand-up comedy could be broken down into processes aimed at mastery, as tested and popularized by Ferriss in his top-selling books. Could I use comedy to craft more memorable, engaging, and effective presentations for the audience without making myself want to die? What should I focus on in order to obtain the outcome I desired? What are comedians learning the hard way on stage, often through trial and error as they clock those ten thousand hours that author Malcolm Gladwell says make a master? How does someone who feels they are not naturally funny kill it on stage? By studying comedy and the processes stand-up comedians use, can we make our presentations and key messages stand out while overcoming fears of public speaking? Can this be done quickly?
I’d soon find out that the answer to all of these is “yes.”
For one full year I became a comedian called “Irish Dave.” Being from Ireland, I thought this was a stage name that seemed far too obvious to bestow on myself, but Americans seemed to like it, so I committed to being Irish Dave for a year. (How hard could it be? I was already Irish and already called Dave.) New comedians, due to lack of experience, find it hard to get bookings on paid shows, so I made it look like “Irish Dave” had been around doing comedy for a while, back in Ireland of course. I created a website, a Facebook fan page, you name it: Irish Dave, “He’s big in Ireland”—a fact that surprisingly nobody questioned. Would “American Dave” make it big stateside? Probably not.
I am a keen kite surfer, and one day after a session under the Golden Gate Bridge, I told a fellow kite surfer my show-hosting predicament. As chance would have it, he was a comedian in his spare time and took it upon himself to organize my professional comedy debut. He contacted a booker friend, bending the truth ever so slightly by telling him I was a very funny comedian visiting from Ireland. Before I knew what was happening I was scheduled to perform for twenty minutes as part of a paid show. Twenty minutes! With the charity show for Arash looming, I agreed to take the stage. It was certainly baptism by fire but, amazingly, it wasn’t so bad. I got a few laughs along the way and it was a huge improvement from my days as Mustafa from Southern Yemen, the Corona-fueled madman with Shakin’ Stevens moves and occasional opinions on human resource management.
I decided I would keep the experiment going for a year, regardless of how the charity show went. I dedicated myself to applying the Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 Principle, based on the concept that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of the actions), which is to say that I would set about determining which set of actions to focus on to bring the greatest results. I would figure out what makes a joke funny, how to best craft and deliver it, and what comedians knew that business speakers did not. I have always walked the line between business and comedy in my own life, so this seemed like a great excuse to combine the two. If I could help a few others by documenting what I learned along the way, then the quest would be worth it.
I kept this experiment mostly to myself. I had just left a well-paying corporate job and was unsure of my next move. I didn’t really want to worry my family by telling them I was about to put my time into becoming a stand-up comedian . . . temporarily, with no goal to be an actual full-time comedian. The next booked show I did was five ladies and me. The name of that show: “Estrogen Entrée with a Side of Balls”—yes, I was that side of balls. I could imagine the conversation with my father: “So . . . David, glad to see you have left your job to become a side of balls . . . Do you think you might go back to being employed anytime soon?”
Why the focus on comedy? Beyond the demands of my comfort level, what made me so sure that stand-up would help me become a better public speaker?
For one, because science says so. “The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things,” notes biologist John Medina in his best-selling book Brain Rules. He writes that “emotionally charged” events like laughter trigger
