It is often said that people fear public speaking more than death. Seinfeld once joked that we'd rather be in the casket than give the eulogy! In other words, most of us will do almost anything we can to avoid it.
But at some point in our lives, we are called to stand and speak when it matters.
It may be in a boardroom, at a wedding, during a crisis, or beside a casket. Public speaking-perhaps the most democratic of all art forms-is the one we fear most and practice least. We often see speeches as obligations to survive rather than opportunities to influence how people think, feel, remember, decide, laugh, and heal.
Meet the Moment is about what happens when words are no longer optional.
In 2019, I was tested twice. Professionally, I was asked to be the lead speaker at my firm's thirtieth-anniversary investor conference, where hundreds of clients needed more than information. They needed confidence, clarity, and conviction about the future of our business.
At the same time, my wife was in the final throes of a long battle with an aggressive cancer. Within weeks of our twin daughters' thirteenth birthday, I would have to deliver her eulogy. That speech could not just be a listing of her virtues or a catalog of memories. It had to hold the grief of our daughters, her mother, and her many friends. It had to make room for devastation, laughter, and love. It had to capture the full force of a life well lived.
I had to meet the moment.
This book grew out of those two speeches-one delivered in the language of business, the other in the language of love and loss-and from hundreds of speeches I have given before and since. Part memoir, part practical guide, and part meditation on the art of human connection, Meet the Moment argues that great speechmaking is not performance. It is service.
