A few months ago I was browsing through LinkedIn and saw a post in my university alumni group. A career coach was hosting free Zoom sessions about various personal development topics. The sessions were scheduled for weekday evenings, and I had some free time so I signed up.

When I joined the first Zoom session, it was just me and the presenter. They had a whole slide deck prepared. Given that it was just me, I thought they would make things less formal and have more of a discussion than a presentation. That’s what I do when I have to give talks that few people attend.

That’s not what they did. They went through the whole presentation as if they were speaking to a large group.

I don’t remember the content of that presentation, but I do remember how much energy this person had presenting to an audience of just me. They did all the work and delivered, regardless of who was in the audience. I’m not sure if this was the first time they did that presentation, or if they regularly give these talks.

This was my takeaway: don’t let the size of the audience affect how you create and deliver content. Don’t get discouraged if no one’s there, and don’t get anxious when there’s a huge audience.

The interesting thing about blog posts compared to talks is that they’re much more discoverable and last a long time. Several of my posts got little attention when I first published and shared them, but over time have been discovered by various people that have linked to them. Now I regularly get new visitors to this blog to posts that are years old.

I recently started writing a newsletter. I wrote several weeks of issues privately without sharing them just to practice creating content and starting the habit of writing a weekly issue. That was a great decision because the first few issues weren’t that good, and now I think I have a format that’s more interesting.