I received an email from one of my clients, Angeli Fitch, this week, along with some photos.
It read:
I got lucky…I WON!
Also: My secret weapon: Matthew Dicks
For the record:
She may have gotten lucky in terms of her name being drawn from the hat, but she did not get lucky when it came to winning.
She has been preparing for this her entire life.
As an attorney, she’s been speaking in front of people in high-stakes environments for a long time.
As a member of Toastmasters, she has been speaking and competing on stages for quite a while.
Then we started working together on storytelling, and a few months later, she won her first Moth StorySLAM.
Yes, I taught her a little bit about storytelling, but much of her success stemmed from a lifetime of preparation as a lawyer and a member of Toastmasters.
Probably other things I’m not even aware of.
She didn’t know it at the time, but her hard work and experience made her victory possible.
We often don’t know how the work we do today might yield results tomorrow, which is why we should keep moving forward, trying new things, engaging in our passions, and relentlessly looking for the next thing.
I, too, won my first Moth StorySLAM and 61 more since, alongside 9 GrandSLAM championships.
But like my client, I had also been preparing for storytelling for a long time.
As a writer, I had been deeply engaged in story for a long time.
- I’d already published two novels before I took the stage at The Moth for the first time.
- I’d already been blogging for about six years without missing a day when I told my first story.
- I’d already been writing every day of my life without missing a day for almost 25 years when I shared my first story about pole vaulting in high school in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan.
I’d spent much of my life putting sentences together long before I knew The Moth even existed.
But that’s not all.
As a teacher, I’ve made it my mission to share stories with my students as a means of teaching them that life is filled with failure, embarrassment, poor decision-making, nefarious actors, and bad luck, but we can survive it all and still thrive if we work hard, surround ourselves with good people, and keep a positive attitude.
I also told stories to entertain them. To make school fun. To make them laugh. To let them know who I am. Hopefully, to open the door for them to share their own stories as well.
I’d been performing for an audience of children – the worst audience imaginable — for more than a decade before I ever told a story at The Moth.
I had also been a wedding DJ for 14 years before I took that Moth stage. I’d stood before hundreds of audiences in venues all over New England, speaking extemporaneously to wedding guests and stripping me of any nervousness I may have had while speaking to an audience.
The Moth’s sound engineer told me after my first Moth GrandSLAM appearance that “I really know how to use a microphone.”
Years of practice at hundreds of weddings.
But I had been obsessing about stories decades before The Moth even existed.
When I was ten years old, I wrote to Stephen Speilberg, complaining about a scene in his film, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”
I still think the scene is terrible today.
Even at a young age, I was dissecting the movies I watched and the books I read, looking for things I loved and things I despised.
I also wrote all the time. As a boy, I wrote stories, essays, poems, Dungeons & Dragons adventures, songs, and political cartoons.
I wrote relentlessly.
I put in the work long before I knew I might someday take a stage in New York City and perform.
My client did the same.
The message:
March forward. Seize new ground. Acquire new skills. Amass experience. Work like hell.
It’s impossible to predict where and when these skills and experiences may help you, but simply trust they will, someday, somehow.
