On May 24, I opened the American Marketing Association Awards as a speaker and judge, evaluating top projects in South Florida.
I can see now is that content abundance makes trust scarce.
Marketing is moving from attention to credibility.
The next advantage is real-time trust.
Competence and visibility are no longer the same thing. The internet rewards repetition, stimulation, and synthetic โpersonal brands,โ while many real experts remain invisible. That is why live public speaking is becoming valuable again: the stage verifies what algorithms cannot.
From the outside: congratulations, approval, signals that everything is working.
Inside, one of the hardest periods of my life.
What holds: discipline, knowledge, experience.
Practice reveals its purpose when strength becomes quiet.
At ManaTech, I watched strong companies with real traction lose attention because they explained too much and revealed too little.
A pitch is a compression test: if the value is not visible fast, the market will not wait for your footnotes.
A new essay on language and self-description.
Through corpus linguistics, I trace how Americans described themselves across seventy years, and what those shifts might tell us about culture.
https://t.co/Gdrfsirfz7
8 years ago, at the CEO Club in Kyiv with Singularity University, we were discussing the black swans that could destabilize the world as we knew it. Much of what felt theoretical at the time has since become reality.
Feels as if that conversation happened in a different world.
Chapter two of my book is done.
Language is not just expression.
It is part of the architecture of thought.
And thought shapes what we can create.
Link in comments.
Venture is still romanticized. A polished deck, data room, and performative talk are not enough.
Founders need sustainable relationships, social capital, real understanding of venture, and the ability to deliver with structure. That was the core of my session at @ManaTechMiami
My grandfather built a library of tens of thousands of books, and in my family ignorance was shameful. So I learned to study, even when I wanted rock and roll instead. Now knowledge is everywhere, but learning is bottlenecked by attention. Who owns yours?
I studied communication and influence science, then founders in 2017โ2018 pulled me into tech. Faster stakes, less time. Now at @ManaTechMiami Iโm launching a lecture cycle on communication and capital: positioning, networking, pitching, media. Link in comment.
As a speaker, you set the rules of the room.
You are responsible for the state of the audience offline or online.
Not everyone agrees. Thatโs fine.
Leadership begins with accepting that weight.
A thoughtful exchange with Mayor @StevenMeiner. Order within complexity โ a principle central to my approach in education โ is compelling to observe in political leadership within a city as dynamic as Miami Beach.
Conversations at this level open new perspectives.
Most people step on stage to sell or impress.
Real talks win by being useful, solve one clear problem, save the room time, and make the next step obvious.
Then conversion follows as a consequence, not a performance.