Suppose you were chosen to represent your company to make a presentation in front of hundreds of people, at a big event or competition. Suppose you have never done it before… How can you overcome your introvert self and gather enough courage to deliver a good speech?

One of the biggest fears inside each human being is the fear of public speaking. There are several reasons for you to feel like vomiting whenever you think about having to talk in front of a crowd. First of all, the intimidation one can feel from being looked at by so many people at once. Second of all, the expectation one set for him/herself before going on the stage. Physical condition or the amount of practices also contribute to the overall performance…

But that’s normal. Almost everyone gets cold sweat before giving a public presentation. Anyhow, be assured that by following these 10 guidelines, you can conquer the fear inside and shine at any public speaking event:

1. Plan carefully. Understand how much time you have for the presentation. Write down every key points you want to deliver to the audience. Prepare and polish sentences to support those key points.
2. If the presentation includes visual support (e.g PowerPoint), make sure that each slide has fonts bigger than 20. It’s also important to find and use nice graphics in the presentation, too.
3. Familiarize yourself with public speaking by watching videos of famous public speakers. A few examples would be Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, Barrack Obama…
4. Practice the presentation 10 times a day. 2 when wake up, 5 during the day and 3 before going to bed. For better result, multiply the numbers by 5 or 10.
5. Learn about body language and notice how your body moves in front of the mirror when practicing the speech.
6. Keep your body as healthy as possible. Eat healthy food, sleep 8 hours a day, do exercises 1 hour daily,
7. Before the presentation, familiarize yourself with the stage before the audiences come inside the hall.
8. If there are other people presenting before you, ignore them and go walk around outside. This would help calm you down and prevent you from being distracted by the others’ speaking.
9. Before going on the stage, breath deeply and keep this thought in your mind: “I love my audience. I will make sure they have a good time listening to me.” You have made a lot of effort for this day, so just go out there and have do it like you have always been practicing.
10. After the presentation, if there is any difficult question that makes you scratch your head, the first thing to say is “That’s a (very) good question.”. After that, either you can or cannot answer the question, it’d be all ok. You have acknowledge how important the issue is; that’s what matters most.

Having applied the above rules before, I was able to win an award at Mindtrek Startup Launchpad 2008 for my team. At a personal perspective, that was a big leap in self-development for me. I’m not yet a professional public speaker, but I’m confident about such future. And should there be any public speaking event, I’d know that I can perform well with sufficient preparation. The same goes to you, too. Good luck!

Working on a medium-large client project is like participating in a long distance running. You can make a short dash without water. But a marathon requires people riding motorcycles besides you or kiosks at specific milestones to supply you with water.

Similarly, you can do a small client project for free (either for portfolio additions, for personal preferences or for business relation building). But a medium-large project (i.e building a “Facebook of…” type of application) requires payments at specific development milestones, most of the time.

Medium-big project development is like marathon running

CC attribution kk+

Bad pricing and timing in such project is like bad calculation of how much water you need to supply the runners, or how far the distance between each 2 milestones is; in a marathon, that is. Never let personal issues get on the way of deciding the price and time for a project. You’ll just die of thirst before being able to call for more water; let alone changing the milestones.

Last week was one hell of an experience. First of all, I sleepwalked and stepped on my laptop, crushing the poor thing. It was…unexpected of me. But at least it cost me only 98 dollars to change the screen. Now the second thing is an expected one.

It took me half a day in order to find an “honest” repairing service to change my laptop’s screen in Ho Chi Minh city. And this was the first time I’ve ever had a chance to compare the different “layers of services’ quality” in my own home town.

Normally, it’d take only half an hour to do the work. However, at the first building I came into, the one who’s in charge tried to take advantage of the situation. He mumbled “Hmmm… I wonder what size this screen is.” and took my laptop upstairs. I was told by a friend before, that in this kind of situation, most likely the guy is trying to cheat you (aka. take the good components inside your stuffs and replace them with cheaper or broken ones). And to my surprise, when I told him that I’d come upstairs with him, he refused immediately, returned my laptop, and said: “Sorry, we don’t have this screen size here.”!!!!

I thought to myself: “If you’d known there hasn’t been any spare here in the first place, then why the hell did you want to bring my laptop upstairs?”, but couldn’t say it out loud. I took my leave and went to the second building.

There’s a young guy who threw an ice-cold statement at me: “Leave it here for 1 day, or we don’t take the job.”!! Oh, now this one is much, much more obvious. “Noob. I’ve seen worse. Bye bye then.”. Again, I thought to myself and said to the guy “Ok, then I’ll take my leave.”

The third one I came into was on a different street. This is a real honest firm. 40 minutes, 3 months guarantee, no tricks, no pretenses, just plain laptop preparing service. Here’s a shot of this lovable firm.

In the end, I think it’s true that my home town still has many vicious firms like the 1st and 2nd ones I visited that day. But there are always good and honest businesses here. We just need a better system (online, most likely) to record and inform each other. For now, if you ever visit Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam; and if your laptop ever need some repairing or upgrading, remember to come to this one.

The Urban Legends: Entrepreneurs can…

1. sleep 4 hours per day.
2. work 72 hours straight without any sleep.
3. eat nothing but beans for a whole week.
4. sleep, eat and work inside a space of 3 square meters.
5. work continuously without any means of entertainment.

… and a lot more of such legends. In my opinion, there may be certain people who are physically and mentally capable of achieving such feats. But is it true that anyone who do exactly like that would become a successful entrepreneur? I don’t really know.

CC attribution MichaelMarlatt@flickr

I, also, yearn for being able to do just like those urban legends. There are times that I really did the same things. Even now, sometimes I might end up becoming an ultra workaholic. But most of the time, I find these to be much more common practices:

Real Life Practices:

1. Sleeping 4 hours a day can make one becomes more cranky than usual. This can affect human relations in&out-side the startup. Not something to do daily and for a long time.
2. 24 hours without sleep would damage thinking ability, 48 hours without sleep would cause heavy headaches and 72 hours without sleep would damage the brain pretty much.
3. With too little nutrition in the body, everything around you looks more eatable than they normally do.
4. Too little space can prevent the mind from thinking creatively.
5. Too little relaxation can cause deep depression and stress.

In the end, I think there are always balance in life. It’s important to live life to the fullest and sometimes get into a frenzy of working and thinking. But generally, there must be times when we need to reward ourselves and get back to the balanced state of body and mind. For almost anyone, this sounds pretty normal. But I believe for entrepreneurs and entrepreneur minded folks, this can be a hard learnt lesson.

“What does it mean? — It doesn’t mean anything. — Everybody falls the first time.” Those are the lines I remember most after watching The Matrix 9 years ago. It has been so true in many cases, either with me or with people I have met, that in order to master something, falling at some point along the way is unavoidable.

Yes, I want to admit right here, right now in this post: the fact that I’ve made quite a few mistakes being an entrepreneur in the last 1 year.

Failures… It does feel a bit embarrassing to talk about this topic. But I think for any one of us, admitting that we screwed up and thus learned valuable lessons is much better than hiding the truth and pretending that we never fail. So here goes, some hard-earned lessons I’ve got from my first year being an entrepreneur:

Prepare the pitch, plan the talk, so the best can be shown.

One of the biggest mistakes I made from the very beginning was being too carefree with personal impressions. First time meeting with a VC in Finland, I dressed up casually and talked about my business only on impulse. As a result, I got my first rejection, along with some really harsh words.

Being informal is not always a bad thing. Sometimes there are people who can see potential through your rough appearances, and they are definitely the most pleasant ones to work with. But many others can’t. So we take the risk of losing valuable partners with poorly planned presentation.

Anyway, the little embarrassment in the past inspired me to improve my presentation skill. It took me 3 months to learn pitching/ presenting our business in a professional manner. I studied the 30/20/10 rule of Guy Kawasaki, I understood the respectable formal dress code, I practiced pitching before important meetings… and it was all hard work.

October last year, we won the MindTrek start-up competition. A lot of amazing start-ups were there, with really interesting presentations. I learned that dreaming big is great; but being able to show others your dream and inspire them to have the same dream… it feels more than great. My next goal is to be able to deliver good presentation like Mohamed, CEO of Muxlim.

Communication is essential.

I learned, in the hard way, that no matter how tiring things can be, communication must be maintained at all cost. In the past I couldn’t manage my time (and also health condition) well enough to ensure the information flow. Hence we lost 2 talented team members, and some potential investors, simply because they didn’t have enough information to understand and believe in the situation.

The thing is, without continuous flow of communication, people tend to become anxious. And in the case of start-ups, insufficient communication is a fatal mistake. The stress, doubts and uncertainty can build up very fast, like fire spreading wildly without enough water in the air. No harsh word of a VC can make me feel more depressed than having a team member left for an opportunity elsewhere.

Again, it took some time to repair the mistake. Now, we are investing more time to communicate through various channels and update important news as soon as possible to interested parties. To our ex-team-members, I wish them best of luck. And to our current team members, I promise to always give you guys the latest and most honest news.

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And even though things are still rough ahead, I believe in the path we are walking on. There are many opportunities and we are making the best out of them. I hope that this entry is of help to everyone. Let us all look forward to the upcoming challenges and succeed together.