Yes, I did. And even though you immediately said it was irrelevant, you brought it up in the first place. That was supposed to mean something, wasn’t it?
You say you’re a football player. Apply that knowledge to this situation.
Suppose you met somebody who said he wanted to be a great quarterback like Peyton Manning. So you told him how to sign up for a team and what kind of practices to do and what kind of plays he’d need to learn. And this person said “No, you’re not telling me what I want to hear. I don’t want to practice or learn plays. I want to be a great quarterback like Peyton Manning is. You know, the way I see him playing on Sundays.”
You don’t just “acquire” skills. You build them through effort. If you want to be a good football player or a good public speaker, you need to start learning those skills and practicing them over and over again. You can’t just expect that somebody is going to be able to tell you the secret of how to “improvise” your way to the top.
rEVOL, it’s staggering to me how much you just don’t get it on the Hitler issue. There are some things - a very, very small number of things I can think of - that are so toxic that no sane person would even think to use them as a supporting argument or source. I can’t think of much on the list that’s ahead of Hitler and all he represents.
You could find an example of the kindliest, most thoughtful and inspiring act he may have one done - say, rescuing a little girl’s puppy from a well - and you would have no basis for using that as an admirable example because of the sheer scale of unmitigated evil the man propogated. You do understand that the Nazi medical experiments contain untold value in data on human tolerance to extreme conditions and abuse, don’t you? And that no researcher on earth would dirty themselves even glancing at it. I believe one team used some of the low-temperature data a few decades ago and their careers were destroyed as a result… as it should be.
So if you are so naive or unlearned or insensitive to think that expressing admiration for Hitler’s speaking ability - the very ability that fostered and led to the rest of his excesses! - is an okay thing and shouldn’t color our view of you… words fail. Good luck with the motivational speaking tour.
It’s been said and must be said again; the best improvised speeches are the ones that are actually planned out ahead of time.
If you want to be a good public speaker, practice. And there are a lot of public speakers who were way better than Hitler. Really, drop that one.
I’m a Toastmaster and there is a portion of the meeting called “Table Topics”. The speaker learns the topic right before he speaks. It’s my favorite part of our meeting, and “off the cuff” skills are gained by just doing it.
My dues (International and club) come to about $60 every 6 months. It’s an incredible value.
I never said I don’t want to practice and learn how to improve my oratory skills, I’m saying that I don’t feel as though reading from a teleprompter would help me appear to have conviction.
Where your logic fails is thinking that I am trying to cast Hitler in a good light. I do not admire Hitler, I admire his speaking ability, just as I do with many others that I disagree with, like Malcolm X.
I think Hitler was a great speaker. I think he was a piece of shit person. I disagree with almost all of his political views. What’s the problem?
I find ways to improve myself through studying Hitler’s speeches. I am not a proponent of Hitler’s dirty, disgusting policies, I simply realize that his power to persuade, whether acquired through circumstance or not, was second to none. Through extensive study and research, I improve myself in a positive manner. Again, what’s the problem?
You will probably never have a prompter. If you are a nervous and uncomfortable speaker, you won’t be able to communicate your conviction even if you have real conviction. Learn to speak well with some notes, then learn to do it with few (or no) notes. The rest of it is just a combination of public speaking skills and familiarity with your subject matter.
You can’t. It’s that simple.
That you already know all the answers.
You’ve gotten some excellent advice here. If you’re serious about your goals, shut up and listen to some of it.
That sounds like exactly what I’d like to improve.
That’s weird, because I did.
Personally, I don’t think that it’s an issue of “not getting it”.
I definitely get it. People see it as a taboo topic. They get emotional and offended when the topic is brought up. I simply don’t care, because I know that I am not doing anything wrong or casting Hitler in a positive light.
If people want to have negative, false opinions of what exactly it is I stand for, that’s fine with me. I know what I stand for, and that’s what matters the most.
If people want to think that I am some neo-Nazi or racist, good for them. That doesn’t make it true. If people want to think that I am anti-Semite, that’s awesome. It doesn’t mean it’s true.
I want to persuade people, but not at the cost of speaking my mind and keeping my integrity.
It doesn’t matter, people are still going to come away with the impression that you admire Hitler – even if you say otherwise. That’s how poisonous Hitler is. That’s one thing that’s important to learn if you’re going to want to be a good speaker. Saying anything good about Hitler, no matter what, will turn off your audience. Period. You want to persuade people of your views, then drop the Hitler shit. Otherwise, no one will listen to you, or take you seriously. On the other hand, if it’s more important to you that you that you insist on saying what a great speaker Hitler was, well, then you’re just going to have to accept that you’ll never learn to be a great speaker.
(And that speech you posted as an example sucked. Seriously, it was trite, cliched, and overdone.)
Why oh WHY do people come here, ask for advice, or opinions, and then just dismiss it all?
I disagree with everything the Nazis stood for, but damn they were snappy dressers.
As I said, I want to persuade, but not if it means not speaking my mind. Besides, I doubt the topic would ever come up in a speech or debate, unless someone asked me who I believed the best orators were.
Actually, I haven’t done that. I have entertained the Toastmasters idea that many people have suggested. I simply said I’d have to wait, as I need to save every dollar I make at the moment.
There’s an old adage: ‘It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.’
If you want to be taken seriously, you should not mention Hitler if people ask you who’s on your Best Orators list. Was Hitler good at making speeches? Of course he was. He got a lot of people to go along with his evil plans. (And he killed people who disagreed. But still…) But suggesting you would like to emulate Hitler’s speechmaking effectiveness is not the way to Win Friends And Influence People.
The first thing you need to learn is this: Do not alienate your audience.
The second thing is to never say anything that will come back to bite you in the bum.
That’s well and good. It also demonstrates that you lack the sine qua non of being a good public speaker: you don’t give a shit what your audience thinks about what you say, as long as you’re comfortable saying it.
Fine as a character trait. But until you decide to start giving said shit, you’ll never make it out of the gate as a speaker.
This principle applies to things a lot less severe than Hitler, too, by the way. If you want to be a politician, and you think that social security should be ended, and you mention that in a speech to the AARP (or to any other group for that matter–senior citizens have Twitter accounts too), your career will be over. Like it or hate it, that’s the way of politics. You need to give a shit about what your audience thinks if you want to be a good communicator.
Because communication isn’t just about the speaker. It’s also about the audience. A good speaker creates the intended thoughts and emotions in the audience. If you don’t care about what thoughts and emotions you create in the audience, you’re a failure.
Incidentally, anarcho-libertarians tend to suffer from the same sort of ideological blinders you’ve described yourself having, a blithe disregard for the opinions of others as long as they’re happy in their own ideological purity. (Vanguardist communists and deep ecologists suffer from similar problems, but you may be less familiar with them). That’s part of the reason why they all are such unsuccessful opinion shapers.
Yes, studying Dolfie’s techniques have clearly improved your public communication skills all to hell and back.
Excellent job; we can obviously do you no more good around here. Good luck on the football and rabble-rousing efforts!
It occurs to me that, given my loathing of libertarianism and my belief that it’s a foolish, illogical, ideologically blinkered, and highly harmful political approach, I ought to be taking Amateur Barbarian’s approach instead of trying to help this dude see the problem with his approach.
So yeah: you’re doing a heckuva job! Viva la rEVOLucion!