TEDx countdown!

Whooooa this is the week!!!!!!!!!!!

I was offered the speaking role way back in April and wrote the first draft then over a weekend. Since then it changed many, many times and the last 4 months or so have involved a lot of writing and re-working of ideas. Then I made the slides and tightened them up, shortened them, and sharpened the message over the next couple of months. The last month or so I haven't changed the speech content, and focused only on practice, flow, intonation, emphasis, and a couple of silly jokes :)

I can't believe this is finally the week where I'll be presenting it!! Crazy!!! Like any creative endeavour, getting it prepared, re-worked, and finished up to your absurdly high standards is 99% of the work. Getting it "out the door" is really just the last step, and I of course will have a few butterflies on the day-of, but getting on that stage is gonna be SO fun. Can't wait to see all the smiling and laughing faces (I hope, if the jokes are good enough, haha!) and to have my chance to give my message of the benefits of enthusiasm and hard work in glorious combination - if there is any "secret" to my success, it's this, and I'm so happy that my TED talk is exactly what I want to say to the world.

Oh, happy days.

Also: I completely finished my Autodesk talk!! It's only 10 days after the TED conference so I had to do them in parallel for a little bit. But it's all ready to go, and quite different than the TED talk. It's 50 minutes long, I have notes and a podium and it's for a technical/programmer crowd so the vibe of it is quite different. It was pretty quick to prepare as the focus of that is just on the information. Now that's completely done and off my plate so I can focus only on TED now for the rest of the week! Exciting!!!!!!!! This is gonna be great. Super psyched to present and also really happy that lots of good friends are coming to watch, either in person or online. Thanks everyone for your kind support and encouragement through this entire process, and especially thank you so much to Mom, Dad, Norm, Kevin, Alex and Heev for a pile of great ideas, a stack of suggestions, and for being exceptional sounding boards and advisors through this whole process.

Here goes... EVERYTHING. :)