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As one of the worlds leading charity auctioneers and a seasoned keynote speaker for companies like Goldman Sachs and Google, I have spent 80 to 100 nights on stage every year for over two decades. Since I am typically one of the last people to take the stage at a fundraising event, I have watched countless people in various stages of panic just moments before they go on stage. After they find out my role, I usually receive a predictable set of rapid-fire questions from upcoming speakers in the hopes that some last-minute tips from a pro can help them do more than keep from passing out when they hit the stage. Here are five things I tell people in the final moments before they take the stage to help them walk out looking and feeling confident, collected, and ready to rock the room. Reframe Your Story It doesnt matter how many times you go on stage; you will still get an adrenaline rush in the final moments before you walk out. Instead of thinking of that shaky, nervous, finger-tingling sensation as nerves, think of it as energy that you will bring to the room. You want to fire up the audience? You need that energy. The next time you start worrying that your nerves are going to get the best of you, reframe the narrative: This energy is going to fire me up, and Im going to use it to fire up the audience. Find Your Strike Method When I first started taking auctions, I realized that to calm my nerves and center my focus, I needed a solid routine. I decided to start every auction in the same way; banging down my gavel three times before I launch into selling. This movement allows me to channel my nerves into one action that grabs the audiences attention at the same time. I also came to understand that this personal routine which Ive since dubbed my Strike Method had an unexpected benefit. By doing the same thing every single time, I took away the guesswork. Now, every time I go on stage, I know the gavel will go down. This predictability allows me to focus on other things beyond myself, like strategically garnering bids and engaging with an audience that wants to be entertained. To define your own Strike Method, look for something that feels authentic to you. Is there a mantra, a phrase, a physical movement that helps you focus and bring yourself to a point of strength? Spend time figuring out what you can do and do it every single time you get onstage. Own the room The first seven seconds of any presentation are the most important because seven seconds is how long it takes for people to make up their mind about you. You want to grab their attention in those seven seconds and keep them focused on you. When you are walking to the place where you present, whether it be a podium, center stage, or among the crowd, you want all eyes on you. Keep your shoulders back, make sure your eyes are level, and make eye contact with people as you walk out with purpose. Do not slouch, cower in fear, or look down at the ground that will only make people fearful that your speech or presentation will be painful to listen to and even more painful to watch! Sell as yourself When you get on stage, do everything you can to act as natural as possible. An audience can sense when someone is playing a part which can immediately turn them off as it seems fake and, quite frankly, boring. Use your own words, your own voice, and communicate in a way that feels authentic to you. Now is not the time to try on a new character. Authenticity will always win on stage and in life so be yourself and sell your message as the trustworthy communicator that you are. The audience wants you to succeed Never forget that the people sitting in front of you are rooting for youthey are your biggest cheering section. The audience doesnt want to sit through an hour-long presentation with a terrible speaker. They want you to do a great job. Get on stage ready to give them a great show and they will be asking for you to come back every single time!
Category:
E-Commerce
Many prominent law firms have recently found themselves in President Donald Trumps crosshairs. Skadden, Arps attorney Rachel Cohen encouraged the firm to fight the governments pressure, only to have her attempts rebuffed and to be effectively forced out from the firm. Cohen shares her fears about how the rule of law is changing in America, raising questions about the legal industrys role in the checks and balances of the U.S. system of government. Cohens experience encourages leaders everywhere to navigate the relationship between their business and broader society. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. These accommodations to the Trump administration, whether from law firms [or institutions like] Columbia University, some people start saying, Oh, they didn’t give up that much. It’s mostly sort of posturing and optics, and why pick a fight if you don’t have to?” Yeah, I think a lot of people think that it’s 2016 and are so convinced of their own intellectual superiority that they are ignoring that the Trump administration is outplaying them. There’s a real problem with people being convinced that we are once again in a situation where you have a disorganized president who is blustery, who doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a real indictment of judgment to be able to say, “Donald Trump is stupid, so it doesn’t matter. We’re going to just beat him.” I had people say to me in meetings, “Well, this will all work itself out in three years, because people are going to be coming out of the Trump administration trying to get jobs, and nobody will hire them because we’re all mad.” We are fundamentally misaligned on what we think is going to come in the next three years if we fold on this now, because I do not think that there is an end to the Trump administration if we do not hold the line and act collectively. I’ve been asking the CEOs on the show and other CEOs the extent to which business, and I guess law firms as part of that, are part of the checks and balances in the American political system overall. It feels that way to me that it should be, but is there any legal basis for thinking that? I think business, less so. I certainly would argue that there’s a moral obligation when business leaders want to be listened to, and respected, and dismantle guardrails on American capitalism so that they can achieve certain profits, that then there becomes a moral obligation for you to continue to speak on those things even when it’s hard. But I don’t think there’s a legal one, and I think that’s just the nature of capitalism. I do think with law firms it’s different because you swear your oaths. Most of us swear an oath to the Constitution. If you work in this industry, and especially if you’ve made millions and millions of dollars off of it, and your industry is crucial for the functioning of American democracy, and you also swore an oath to the law and the concept of this American experiment broadly, then yes, I think there’s an obligation for you to ensure that the law continues to exist. The decisions to make these accommodations to the Trump administration by Skadden, by Paul Weiss, by other law firms, they’re doing that not necessarily for legal reasons, but for business reasons, right? Because otherwise, it’s going to cost them money. Isn’t it ultimately a business argument to say, “Oh, we want to keep doing that work for the government, or we don’t want to be blacklisted in some way?” I think number one, it’s a bad business decision in the long term, and I’ll come back to that in a second. I’m going to read to you the profits per equity partner at Paul Weiss and Skadden, Arps. This is the average, what the average partner earns in profits on an annual basis. 2023 profits per equity partner at Paul Weiss, $6,574,000. Skadden, Arps: $5,403,000 annually. I just want to make sure that when we’re talking about what profits are being lostand also the people who, again, swore an oath to the Constitution who are working in this industry, who need it to exist, who are clearing $5 million a yearI think that the long-term business strategy of capitulating to someone with authoritarian and oligarchal tendencies. We’ve seen the way that Elon Musk operates and how he turns on people on a dime. Skadden represented Elon Musk in his Twitter acquisition, and that man has no loyalty. Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t have loyalty to each other. To hedge your bets on being in good favor with someone who does not respect people, it’s much less about policy aims of the Trump admin, and that I certainly would not be quitting my job. I didn’t quit when he got elected. That’s a political thing. I don’t expect the firm to speak on political issues, though they have in the past, but I certainly don’t expect that from a business. That’s not what this is. It’s not about politics. It’s about existential infringement on American values, and the existence of a constitutional republic in this country. What’s next for you and what’s your goal? In some ways you’ve become a bit of a pied piper. I know you created a tool kit for lawyers who want to protest internally. What’s your goal in all this? I don’t have a next career move. With the nature of my educational credentials, my financial situation, having worked at Skadden for several years, all of these things, I already felt that I had an obligation to try to prevent the bad thing that I see coming. For some of those folks who are listening to this who may be like, “It’s a little bit too extreme. Is it really that bad?” Maybe there’s some other impact that could be had between here and there about what an alternate view of America’s future looks like? Oh, that’s the path that I’m on. That’s the path that we go down if people collectively act now and intervene. That’s the path that we’re on, is some bad things will happen. We’re already seeing them happen. There’s people with legal status being deported to Salvadorian prisons because of clerical errors, because the’re deporting people over judge’s orders. I think that there’s absolutely a path to not just interrupt these harms, but to channel the kind of response and reaction right now to make a much better version of this country. I think no matter what, things get darker before that happens, but I think at the end of the day, I’m coming on and saying, “These bad things could happen,” but I’m acting in a way where I’m very confident they don’t have to. The fear of retaliation is so strong right now, and where is the bravery going to come from? I guess if you’re already making $5 or $6 million a year and you’re not brave enough to push back, but I don’t know. Jeff Bezos is a billionaire, and he’s not pushing back. Where is that bravery going to come from? It’s going to come from people of color. It’s going to come from people that understand theory, and allyship, and are plugged into their communities and care about them deeply. Hopefully, we also get some people that have a little bit more agency, but if we don’t, that’s all that’s ever worked anyway.
Category:
E-Commerce
As Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to reshape the U.S. governments digital infrastructurescrapping websites, eliminating jobs, and dissolving entire departmentsarchivists have been racing to preserve a vanishing record of public history. For months, volunteers have worked to undo the damage caused by DOGEs mass deletion and rewriting of federal websites. But now they face a different challenge: not destruction, but misguided innovation. Earlier this month, DOGE announced on X it would save $1 million annually by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes of government records into permanent modern digital records. The problem? No digital medium is truly permanentand the tapes DOGE discarded were already well-suited for long-term storage. Unlike past changes to government archives, this move doesnt appear to be malicious. Instead, it seems driven by a tech-bro fondness for the new and a disregard for the old. (Musk did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.) Many assume cloud storage is infallible, but it still relies on physical hardwarehardware that can fail. Typically in my experience . . . you do this kind of decision based on a cost-benefit analysis, which Im not seeing, says Roberto Di Pietro, professor of computer science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. The saving is $1 million, but what is the cost [of the overall project]? (One commentator likened it to archiving the Declaration of Independence on CVS receipts to save ink.) Cloud systems experience 1% to 2% hardware failure annually, with hard drives wearing out in three to five years. In contrast, magnetic tapes have error rates four to five magnitudes lower than hard drives and last around 30 years. Tapes have a very long life. If you have SSDs, data decays much faster, Di Pietro says. Every five years you need to move data . . . and thats a cost. Others say DOGEs announcement lacks clarity. When it comes to archiving, you well may have different goals, says Peter Zaitsev, cofounder of the open-source software developer Percona. Offline magnetic tapes are more secure and long-lasting, but harder to access than cloud storage. For data which must be kept forever but also needs to have easy on-demand access, storage both in the modern cloud . . . as well as on tape may well make sense. The digitization push may come from the same enthusiasm that led DOGE to announce plans to rewrite government systems still running on COBOL, a 1950s-era computing language. It may turn out that taxpayer money gets spent on buying new equipment that is . . . not an actual upgrade, warns Mar Hicks, historian of technology at the University of Virginia. Just because a system is old doesnt mean it needs to be replaced.
Category:
E-Commerce
Researchers at Northwestern University just found a way to make a temporary pacemaker thats controlled by lightand its smaller than a grain of rice. A study on the new device, published last week in the journal Nature, found that the tiny pacemaker delivered effective pacing in both animal subjects and human hearts from organ donors. The device is designed specifically for patients who need temporary pacemakinglike newborn babies with heart defects or heart surgery patientsand its made with materials that allow it to safely dissolve into the body once its no longer needed. The current standard in temporary pacemakers (called an epicardial pacemaker) involves sewing electrodes to the heart via wires, which then protrude out of the patients chest and connect to an external box. By contrast, the Northwestern researchers new device is small and dissolvable, and it can be implanted without any wire. The design could potentially help patients avoid complications involved with temporary pacemakers and open new possibilities for heart synchronization. From left: A traditional pacemaker and leadless pacemaker dwarf the tiny new device. [Photo: Northwestern] ‘Wires literally protrude from the body’ Generally, pacemakers are small, implanted devices that use electrical impulses to regulate the heart’s beating. Temporary pacemakers are a subcategory, and they have a few primary uses. To start, around 1% of babies worldwide are born with congenital heart defects that require surgery, after which the child needs a pacemaker for about seven days to allow the heart to self-repair. According to study lead John A. Rogers, a bioelectronics engineer, and co-lead Igor Efimov, an experimental cardiologist, pediatric use-cases were the main motivation behind designing the tiny new pacemaker. Theres a crucial need for temporary pacemakers in the context of pediatric heart surgeries, and thats a use case where size miniaturization is incredibly important, Rogers explained in a press release. In terms of the device load on the bodythe smaller, the better. Outside of pediatric cases, temporary pacemakers are also commonly used for a period after heart surgery in order to support recovery and minimize complications. However, Efimov notes, the standard temporary pacemakers can also present complications. Wires literally protrude from the body, attached to a pacemaker outside the body, Efimov said in the release. When the pacemaker is no longer needed, a physician pulls it out. The wires can become enveloped in scar tissue. So, when the wires are pulled out, that can potentially damage the heart muscle. A less invasive pacemaker Rogers and Efimovs new pacemaker is designed to address the risks presented by the wires used in existing temporary pacemaker models. Instead of using wires to transmit the small electrical pulses that keep the heart on track, the new device relies on a surprising tool: light. The patient wears a small, soft device on the outside of their chest (just a bit larger than a penny), which is tasked with tracking their heart rate. When their pulse drops below a certain level, the wearable is triggered to emit a tiny pulse of infrared light through the skin and tissues to the pacemaker. Inside the body, the pacemaker has a kind of light-activated on and off switch, which is calibrated to give an electrical pulse whenever its in the on state. Alongside eliminating the need for wires, the light-based activation technology also allowed Rogers and Efimov to scale their prototype down so significantly. The researchers had previously developed a quarter-sized dissolvable pacemaker powered by a form of wireless communication, which required the device to include a receiver antenna. Once they swapped that with the infrared light scheme, it allowed them to scale the pacemaker down to just 3.5 millimeters in length, making it the smallest pacemaker ever made. The pacemakers size and lack of wires also allow insertion to be minimally invasive. Typically, a surgeon will attach (sew or glue) it to the heart after surgery, when they have direct access to the heart, Efimov explained in an email to Fast Company. In cases where a patient needs temporary pacing but isn’t having heart surgery, he added, the device is small enough that it can be inserted through just a small incision in the skin. Efimov’s team is also working on a syringe-like device that will safely inject the pacemaker into the heart for emergency pacing, like in the wake of a heart attack. After insertion, patients wont have to worry about a potentially dangerous removal surgery, given that the tiny pacemaker is made from dissolving, bioreabsorbable materials. The current prototype is designed to dissolve after a weekwhich is the standard amount of time needed for the heart to return to normal pacing after surgerybut Efimov says the design might allow researchers to expand the lifespan of the device up to several months. In the future, Rogers and Efimov believe that their pacemaker design could have broad applications for various heart conditions. For those with arrhythmias, for example, multiple small pacemakers could be placed around the heart to correct its rhythm. Beyond heart conditions, the researchers posit that the light-based, dissolvable implant technology could be applied for nerve problems, wound treatment, and pain blocking. Currently, the tiny pacemaker is still in its testing phase. Efimov says the regulatory climate makes it difficult to know when the device will be ready for use in human patients, but he believes it could be available within the next five years.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its an ordinary morning. Youve woken up from what you thought was a blissfully restful nights sleep. To ensure your body and mind arent playing tricks on you, you check the activity tracker that youve recently strapped on your left wrist. You hope itll turn you into a fitter and healthier version of yourself. But your sleep score says otherwise. It indicates that youve woefully underperformed across all stages of the sleep cycle. It’s also the end of a long month on the job. Youve completed all your deliverables on time, impressed your bosses, and, by all accounts, been a pleasant and reliable colleague. You decide to check your bank account. The balance staring back at you offers a sobering reality check and bleak forecast for the month(s) ahead. Once again, youre compelled to adopt the mantra keep your head down and keep plugging away as your professional credo. Surely, things will eventually get better, right? Why were drawn to numbers Numbers can have that effect on people. They turn feelings of restfulness and satisfaction into dust in the blink of an eye. They can also trick you into believing the complete opposite. Your wearable technology might measure a bad nights sleep more favorably than youd expect. At work, a shockingly mediocre work performance might result in a pay raise or bonus simply because you touted the corporate line. What is undeniable is that humans are magnetically drawn to abstractions of realityboth their own and those of others. Numbers is the true universal language that transcends cultures and geographies. And thats not necessarily a bad thing. After all, quantification helps us measure and organize the world around us. Its how we tell time, keep records, conduct financial transactions and scientific experiments, administer medications, and write computer code. Numbers have even changed the way we communicate. People find percentages and simple frequencies astonishingly persuasivethe more abstract they are, the more they capture attention. Here are two ways I could promote this Fast Company article to a broader audience: I could say, Many people have read and enjoyed this article. This version relies purely on qualitative evidence. I could also say, The click-through rate for this article is 55%, with two-thirds of readers finishing the entire piece. To our 21st-century sensibilities, the latter strangely sounds far more credible and captivating. Fred Hargadon, a former dean of admissions at both Princeton and Stanford, once said: Because we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most meaning to the things we can measure. We see this reflected in the cost-cutting efforts of Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), or our obsessive monitoring of global stock market indexes. When numbers dont tell the whole story The real issues arise when we try to apply the same logic used to track a golf handicap to the complexities of the human experience. We assign a numerical representation to someones creditworthiness. In Canada, scores range between 300-900. The higher the score, the more worthy an individual appears in the eyes of a lender. But quantification doesnt stop at the individual level. The Gini coefficient reduces the wicked problem of economic inequality across countries to a single score ranging from 0 to 1. The World Happiness Report uses a 0 to 10 scale to evaluate the quality of life and well-being of entire populations, then assigns them to a global ranking. In 2025, Finland was ranked the happiest country for the eighth year in a row. Does this ranking mean there arent any unhappy Fins? Far from it. When numbers ignore humanity Matters become even more complicated when we pressure organizations that prioritize people and the planet over profits to justify their existence and demonstrate their impact through dataeven though we can’t (and frankly, shouldn’t measure their contributions, at least not in the short term. Global climate action is a prime example. If we judge the efforts of an entire industry devoted to combatting the climate crisis solely by meeting ambitious targetslike achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050we risk overlooking the true stories of progress, resilience, and adaptation that occur along the way. Relying on numbers can also be downright sinister in instances where it has a dehumanizing effect. Assigning prison inmates numbers instead of using their names, or publishing casualty statistics during a war, reduces individuals to mere figures, which strips away their humanity. People are not numbers, and life isnt always a data set that we need to optimize or manipulate. Sometimes, we need to hear the full story. Otherwise, we risk reducing human existence to mere abstractions and approximations of reality. The added benefit? Several studies have shown that people can retain qualitative information much longer than quantitative information. While numbers and statistics can have an immediate effect, like ruining a perfectly good night’s sleep, a well-crafted story or anecdote leaves a lasting impression.
Category:
E-Commerce
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