#79 - Mostly Shares and Art
Busy Presenting; A.I. to the Rescue
Hello, my friends,
Big week this one, I delivered a presentation on library careers on Tuesday morning (more below), attended the first of two sessions of a class on doing stand-up comedy on Tuesday evening, Michael’s first day of kindergarten was on Wednesday, on Thursday (and Friday) nearly my entire workday was doing job interviews, so needless to say, I’m a little bit tired. Hence, this week’s newsletter is going to be shorter than usual with more shares and art than hard-hitting parenting stories and cynical critiques of supermarket advertising.
Busy Presenting
I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but doing presentations is one of my favorite parts of my job. I used to do more in-person programs, but since the Pandemic I’ve been producing and hosting 1-2 virtual events for the library every week. These days, it’s primarily the Work Ready program that has my attention. Sometimes, I hire presenters and other times I’m the speaker! Like the past two weeks where I presented “Using A.I. in Your Job Search” and this past Tuesday, “Careers in Libraries”:
After nearly three years of running these virtual events for job seekers, I have a fairly good understanding of what the audience likes and I thought careers in libraries would do pretty well, but I did not expect it to be the second-best attended event of the entire run (in case you’re interested, the first is “How to Get LA County Jobs”)! As you might imagine, library work is a topic about which I feel pretty strongly so putting together this presentation was an exercise in including what I felt was most important out of hours of potential content. It was gratifying that my interest was also the interest of 499 other people! Our average is just over a hundred, so this was a nice spike!
I’ve had people ask me if I get scared or nervous presenting to so many people and my honest answer is that I don’t. The reason is fairly simple and sensical: I’ve been doing public speaking for many years and I’ve felt fairly comfortable with it for a long time, though I did used to get nervous. However, when you do something so consistently (and frequently), you get used to it. I’ve hosted around 200 programs for many thousands of people since 2020 so speaking to a bunch of people all at once is not special anymore, it’s just a normal Tuesday. I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that when presenting on Zoom, the experience is not so different when its an audience of 10 or 500.
When I’ve trained people on public speaking in the past, I would give strategies for overcoming nervousness: Breathing, re-framing, plenty of preparation are all still useful, but as with most areas of life, the best answer is both obvious and difficult. The best way to overcome nervousness during public speaking remains getting in front of people a couple of hundred times. Practice is still king!
A.I. to the Rescue
Even before the explosion of large language models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other chatbots), I’ve dreamed that technology has the potential to help us make better decisions for our lives. The example I always gave myself was that it would be great if a chatbot could help me decide the best thing for me to do in an evening out of all the possible options. What activity would best help me meet my bigger life goals? Moreover, what are my bigger life goals? This week I read Naomi Kritzer’s 2023 story, “Better Living Through Algorithms” and saw my vision enacted in science fiction! It’s a very good story, you should read it.
More Paintings by Léo Gausson
Time Machine
Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #26):
The Whole Body Problem: A full-length essay on nudity.
you gave a great class! I mentioned the library one to someone who works at my local library & although they couldn't make it, they'd been interested -- wondering how many among the audience work for the library, hoping to move up, etc?
That is a very good story!