Better a has-been

In doing my taxes this year, I realized that 2021 was the first year that I had not earned income from speaking or consulting since 1994. 

In ‘94, the New York School Library Media Specialists Association was the first professional organization to take a chance on me as a keynote speaker. I remember two things about the event:

• I mispronounced Sinn Fein - and a librarian called me on it after the talk.

• After socializing into the wee hours of the morning on which I was to speak, I learned that there were bets being taken on whether I would actually make it to the keynote.

Somehow I must have done OK since over the next 25 years I was asked to speak, give workshops, and conduct program evaluations for over 175 professional organizations and school districts ranging from schools right here in Minnesota to conferences in Beijing, Mumbai, Cartagena, and Addis Ababa. (Here is the complete list.) I missed only one engagement - the date had changed and I somehow didn’t record the new date. At two conferences the electricity went out and I had to improvise without my slides. One organization decided it would not pay my stipend because an administrator attending disagreed with a statement I made.  But it was nearly miraculous how many just plain went as planned.

A friend who is also a speaker/consultant recently commented that a number of people on the speaker circuit of tech, library, and education conferences have “retreated.”  I have a couple of good Facebook friends who have also retired from speaking as well. How many stopped doing this work voluntarily and how many stopped because of conferences going dark during the pandemic, I don’t know. 

I also don’t really know why my invitations to speak stopped. But they did - rather abruptly. I had voluntarily ended writing my regular columns. My last book was published in 2015. And I retired from my day job in 2019. So it really was time to “retreat” from my speaking gigs anyway. I had always been proud that I based my talks and workshops on real experiences from my district work as a technology and library director - not just theory and conjecture - and those experiences were now in the past.

As much as I enjoyed working with fellow professionals, meeting new people, seeing new places, creating and presenting new talks, and, yes, hearing compliments about my work, each trip came with a certain level of stress. Would the equipment work? Would my flight arrive in time? Would my ideas be well-received? Would I experience a memory lapse that would keep me from delivering my talk? Was I actually creating positive change?

I miss “the circuit” but I like that now travel for me is leisurely. I can leave the dress clothes at home. I can spend the time I would have used prepping for the talks for other things. I can “retreat” knowing that other younger, brighter, more inspired minds than mine are working on the problems of education, technology, and libraries.

It was fun to be sort of a big fish in a small pond for a few years. But it’s just as nice to be a minnow once again.