I Stopped Watching the Stage

For the first several years of my career, I spent almost all my attention on the stage. That probably sounds obvious. It's where the presenters were, where the big announcements happened, where months of planning finally became something you could see. If something was going to go right or wrong on a given night, it usually started right there. Watching it closely felt like the whole job. After enough years, though, I realized I wasn't watching the stage as much as I used to.

Without really thinking about it, I'd started watching the audience instead. I don't remember making that decision at all. It just happened, and once it did, I never went back.

Looking Beyond the Presentation

One thing I've always found interesting is how differently people listen to the same thing. Some react the instant a point lands. You can read it in their expression, or in the way they suddenly start taking notes. Others sit through an entire presentation without giving away much of anything. Then every so often, somebody who hasn't seemed the least bit engaged hears one particular sentence and sets their phone down, or leans forward a little in their seat.

I've probably spent too much of my life wondering what happened in a moment like that. Maybe it wasn't the sentence itself. Maybe it reminded them of something they already believed. Maybe it answered a question they hadn't been able to put into words. Maybe it just arrived at the right time in their life. I don't know the answer. What I do know is that I've become far more interested in moments like those than in whether people enjoyed the presentation overall.

Those are two very different questions, and over the years I've caught myself asking the second one less and the first one more.

What People Remember

I've seen more standing ovations than I could ever count, and I still enjoy every one of them. They represent a tremendous amount of hard work by a lot of talented people, and when a whole room stands up like that, it's worth appreciating in the moment. But some of the meetings I remember most clearly didn't end with that kind of reaction at all. They ended with people walking out in small groups, still carrying on conversations they'd started inside the room.

Sometimes I'd overhear those same conversations again weeks later. Every so often a client would bring up a story from one of those meetings months afterward, almost as if it had become part of how they thought about a problem they were trying to solve. That's always interested me more than applause. If someone still remembers one conversation from an event five years later, I'm honestly not sure it matters whether they remember the lighting or the staging or even who was speaking when they heard it.

I find myself thinking about that more now than I did earlier in my career.

What Stays With Us

People don't tell stories by recounting everything that happened to them. They tell you the single detail they remember. A friend recommends a book but only ever talks about one chapter. Someone describes a whole vacation and returns to the same story every time. A teacher from decades ago gets remembered for one conversation that couldn't have lasted five minutes. I've caught myself doing the same thing, and I suspect that's just how memory works for all of us.

Maybe we don't carry our experiences around as complete, tidy packages. Maybe we carry a small handful of moments that attach themselves to other parts of our lives, and over enough time those few moments end up meaning more to us than they did on the day they happened. I can't say for certain whether that's true. But it does seem to explain an awful lot of what I've watched happen over the years.

Why I've Started Thinking Differently About Creativity

When I was younger, I'm fairly sure I thought creativity was mostly about making something more interesting than it was before. I wouldn't describe it that way anymore. Everything that goes into a great event still matters to me. The writing matters. The visuals matter. The pacing matters. The technical execution matters. All of it is what helps people pay attention and makes an experience worth being part of.

But I've started to think every one of those things is really there to support something simpler than we admit, which is helping a single idea find its way into somebody's actual life. Most ideas never make that jump, and that's normal and nothing to be discouraged about. But every so often, someone hears something in that room that keeps showing up long after the meeting ends. It becomes part of another conversation, or shapes a decision they make months later.

Those are the moments I've grown most curious about as I've gotten older.

Before You Go

Lately I've been wondering whether we spend too much of our energy evaluating experiences while they're still happening in front of us. We ask whether people liked the presentation. Whether the audience stayed engaged. Whether the event earned its standing ovation or brought back good survey scores. All of that has its place. I'm just not convinced anymore that it adds up to the whole story. What I've become far more interested in is what happens after everyone goes home.

I want to know what people kept talking about once they left, and which idea followed them back to work on Monday, and which conversation somewhere changed because of something they heard in that room. Those answers are a lot harder to come by than a survey score, and some of them I'll never get at all.

What people carried out of that room belongs to them now, not to me, and I'd rather sit in the empty room afterward wondering about that than count up the applause while it's still going.