On Saturday the Sydney SoapBox was held at the Opera House as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
In my usual fashion I jumped in, said I’ll speak and thought about it later. I hadn’t been to the Soapbox competition, didn’t know what happened, what types of rants were delivered or any of the details.
After a bad week of grumpiness, in which I was challenged to stick to my new found confidence and boundaries in business and life, I was over it before it began. Despite the grumps I had trouble finding a rant – no trouble ranting – just finding a rant worthy of an audience eluded me.
That is why I pretty much chose to shoot myself in the foot. This is a competition where the winner addresses 1500 people from the stage of the Concert Hall that night – as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
I had difficulty rehearsing a rant – didn’t know how it ran so just went armed with an idea. There was a microphone but the details and explanations weren’t explained and it wasn’t adjusted for every competitor.
That is why I chose in my grumpiness protest to just speak rather than speak into the microphone. Suffice it to say I didn’t make it into the finals. I comforted myself however by having achieved my aim with a number of people in the audience coming to tell me how much they liked mine.
Oh how very populist of me to satisfy myself with my appeal to the audience but not playing by the rules.
A much cleverer protest rant would have been to step right up to that mic, offer a controversial and topical rant about the difficulty of meeting expectations when expectations aren’t explained etc etc and actually trying to win.
Instead my actions ensured I threw the contest. Whether my rant was good enough to go through if I’d used the microphone well – I will never know! What I do know is the rants that caught my attention and that I thought were best were not necessarily the best users of the microphone and the majority didn’t make the finals.
When you have an opportunity in life it is always best to take it. Don’t throw it. Don’t make a silly stand that everyone else is oblivious to because you feel angry or frustrated. Do the best you can – a winning rant in this case would have been a far more powerful position to leverage!
