106 How to Sell Yourself
Learn by practicing
Our role models have led us to believe that an audience is
most impressed by generalities, statistics, charts, graphs, num-
bers, big words, and pompous pronouncements. They are wrong.
Memorability, like the silent pause and eye contact, can be prac-
ticed. Anywhere. With anyone. You can even practice by watch-
ing TV interviews and paying attention to the answers. See if you
can produce a memorable response. What would you have done
to make a dull answer come alive?
A few years back, a man was arrested for conducting what he
called “eating tours” in a large metropolitan park. For a small fee,
he walked people through the park, cutting samples of edible and
nourishing plants that grew wild in the park and letting the tour
group taste them.
The park police picked him up. He was booked and jailed on
the charge of defacing the park.
A TV reporter saw this on the police blotter and decided to
make mincemeat out of the parks commissioner. He grabbed a
camera crew and raced down to city hall. He caught the parks
commissioner as he was leaving his office.
“Commissioner,” he said, camera rolling, “operating in your
park at this very moment are pimps, prostitutes, cocaine dealers,
crack dealers, heroin dealers, the dregs of society. Yet, your park
police have just arrested a man for making an honest living in the
park. Sir, what kind of thinking is this?”
The parks commissioner thought for a moment, smiled, and
said, “What you don’t understand is he’s not eating in the park...
he’s eating the park.”
Notice the question. There was crime in the park. The police
knew it and worried about it. The reporter’s question spoke to
that concern. The question was loaded with truth, but it was
loaded. It would have been natural for the commissioner to get
defensive about the problem. Instead, he cut through the gar-
bage in that loaded question and was able to ask himself what
the real question was. He realized that he was asked, “Why did
you allow the man to be arrested?” And that’s the question he
answered.