[Clubber]

> Rehearse

I can't emphasize this enough. I was tasked to give a speech/presentation on new features to the company's annual user's group/conference many years ago. Features I wrote. I figured it would be easy because I feel comfortable in front of large groups and hell, I wrote the damn features. When the COO forced us to do a run-through the day before, it was terrible. My mind just had too many things going through it. I knew too much about the topic and needed to narrow it down beforehand. I tend to ramble. I spent all night rehearsing and it went really well.

Another time, earlier in my career, I gave a presentation of a website I wrote based on Oracle stuff to an Oracle user's group. Absolutely no rehearsal. I slugged down a couple of beers beforehand and it went really well. This is probably what lead me to believe the previous example didn't require rehearsing. This was more of a hype presentation than a rundown of features though.

FWIW, Steve Jobs, a great presenter of our time, was a rabid rehearser.