A few months ago – before moving to NZ – I did a presentation on behalf of my Metal Masters for some record company bigwigs.
It was going to be quite a contentious presentation so I asked my wife to read it to make sure I was on the right side of the ‘asshole’ line.
Maybe it’s because she’s had to put up with me for 17 years, but she said I wasn’t “too bad” with my kicking, but she did say one thing about one slide she had noticed.
It was this one.
She said to me:
“Don’t call it a slide, call it a page. People value books more than presentations”.
She was – as usual – right.
And while it made me wonder how the hell I had managed to convince someone so smart to marry me, it also made me wonder why I had made such a rookie mistake.
If you don’t value you what you do, why should someone else?
And while you may think using the word ‘slide’ for ‘page’ is very small … it’s what it signifies and conveys.
Rather than communicate something personal, it comes across as something ‘production line’.
An ability to easily ‘write it off’ from their memory.
When the point I was making was very important.
Once upon a time I worked with a creative who insisted all his creative work was covered in trace paper. When I first saw him do it, I thought, ‘what a pretentious tosser’.
But then I saw the reaction from the clients when he showed it to them.
It was treated a bit more nicely. A bit more preciously.
It wasn’t for theatre, it was because he wanted his work to be valued like he valued it and he found a way to create an environment that made that happen without having to say it.
Like calling a slide a page.
Details matter.
Not just for craft, but for your own reputation.
