48. The One-Eyed Man: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention

In the sixteenth century, Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Inherent in that statement is that a disadvantage can be an advantage. In the twentieth century, President John F. Kennedy frequently referred to the Chinese symbol for “crisis,” which is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and one represents opportunity.

As a presentation coach and writer, a major part of my technique deals with eye contact. But during a lecture tour about presentation skills—which, unsurprisingly, dealt with eye contact—I contracted an eye infection and had to deliver two presentations wearing a distinguished, but nonetheless distracting, patch over one eye. You might think that this challenge impacted my presentation negatively, but it had the opposite effect. The eye patch became my opportunity.

As you’ve read throughout this section, the overarching principle of the Power Presentations methodology is to consider every presentation as a series of person-to-person conversations. Whenever I present, I role-model that technique by engaging with one person at a time—with every person in every audience. Each time I engage with a different person, I rotate my head and shoulders to face that person directly, but the eye patch caused me to emphasize that technique and to make my rotations more deliberate. In every engagement, every person saw one of my eyes and one eye patch. But in each case, there was no doubt that we had connected. Imagine the power of doing that with both eyes.

I turned my minicrisis into opportunity. Seize the opportunity. Always present person-to-person—and always make eye contact.