We make our way through life creating and delivering presentations.

In your mind, you play out how you will ask her out for a date, how you’ll propose, how you’ll have “the talk” with your son, how you’ll take the car keys away from your father—then you deliver these presentations. You imagine your presentations to your boss, your associates, your board of directors, your clients before you deliver them. Most people only do this: imagine, deliver. A small percentage of people choose to put a lot more into this as a process—conception, preparation, refinement, practice, delivery. We have a term for these people: professionals. You get to decide whether to be an amateur or a professional about this activity that controls so much of your life.

It’s worth noting that amateurs aren’t well paid.

Fortunately, I was introduced to the concept of presentation very early in my business life. By that I mean, I understood that just about everything we get or achieve is the result of effectively delivering effective presentations. This led me to the realization that most people were not conscious of this and even if they were, they were not strategic and deliberate about it. To the contrary, they were random. In this, I recognized the possibility for advantage, and at the time, I sorely needed to find some advantage, because I had plenty of disadvantages. So I became a very serious student of the architecture, engineering, craftsmanship, and writing of winning presentations.

I’ve never stopped studying it. One of the first books I found was titled Dynamic Selling by S. Robert Tralins. The hardcover edition I got at a used bookstore in 1971 was published in 1961. At the time, I was still in high school, and I was selling a hodgepodge of things to homeowners and to small-business people, basically door to door. Following the instructions and examples in that book, I sat down and, for the first time, wrote out my presentations, in paragraphs, on 4″ × 6″ cards. I organized and reorganized them. I rewrote them. I refined it all and got it, as I teach on this now, “tight and right.” I immediately got better results. What I found in that book was very primitive and simplistic compared to what you are about to find in this one. But both it and this book focus on structure. That alone was enough to make a significant difference, and I wondered how much better results I could get from presentations and how much better I could get as a presenter—or, more descriptively, a performer of presentations—if every aspect was identified and improved.

Structure is important. An excellent, modern book on this is Michael Masterson’s The Architecture of Persuasion: How to Write Well-Constructed Sales Letters. But, as with virtually every kind of success, there is no one thing behind it. In fact, the lust for the one thing, the magic pill, the secret ingredient is what dooms most people to frustration and recurring failure with just about anything they attempt—from losing weight and keeping it off, to golfing, to making and delivering effective presentations, to putting their ideas across, to influencing and leading, or to outright selling goods or services. So I drew from many sources to develop a complex, sophisticated approach to crafting effective presentations and to performing them as a presenter. I’ll tell you about much of this throughout this book. I drew from diverse and eclectic sources. Most importantly, I made myself very deliberate.

Let me summarize the results of this for me. I became a star salesman, and I have literally sold my way through life. I became a professional speaker, paid to speak, earning upwards from $1 million a year from speaking engagements and seminars for many years, including nine consecutive years as one of only two permanent players on the largest seminar stages and tour America has ever seen, with audiences of 10,000 to 35,000, in sports arenas. By speaking, I fueled development of a company that has since sold twice and a spin-off of that company that has grown very large, all of which made me rich. I created a reputation and a personal brand that has stood me in good stead for four decades and permits my conducting all my business on my terms with enormous autonomy. I even became a much sought after and highly paid writer and crafter of sales presentations and scripts for speakers, for TV infomercials, for online sales videos and webcasts, and for presentations in other media. My fees and royalties routinely run from $100,000.00 to $250,000.00 for one of these projects.

For all this, I have been self-educated, meaning no courses, instructors, mentors. Had I found something comparable to my co-author’s system for crafting presentations and his “incubator” where people come and craft great presentations with his team in a super-condensed time period, I believe I would have gotten to good, then great, and ultimately my greatest results much sooner, with a lot less time spent figuring it out. I was like Lewis and Clark making my way through wilderness and creating my own trail. They have a road map, templates, plug-’n’-play structure, and the experience of having helped hundreds of clients and thousands of students use their tools.

If you don’t own one, I’m sure you’ve seen the whiz-bang juicers demonstrated on TV. Into one, the person puts a cantaloupe, a head of lettuce, a carrot, an apple, and a fish, and maybe a brick for good measure, and out the other end comes an incredibly condensed, nutrition-rich juice. That’s what Dustin Mathews and his partner Dave VanHoose have done with all the ingredients of effective presentations. He’s built a juicer. Further, he’s developed a community for people committed to success as presenters called Speaking Empire. Throughout this book, Dustin offers windows to this world, online, and I hope you’ll take advantage of all of them.

What I can tell you with absolute certainty is this: Willie Shakespeare got it nearly right. All the world’s a stage. Most people are merely players. Relatively few people are its masters. To them, the world hands over any bounty asked of it.

In Willie’s day, the stage consisted only of the physical stage. Today, media is as much the main stage as is the physical environment—land, sea, office, and home. Being able to conceive and craft presentations for media, from four-minute videos to four-hour webcasts, from 140-character tweets to 4,000-word online sales letters, is now critically important. There are few captive audiences for anybody or anything, so knowing how to captivate and control an audience is of paramount importance.

Powerful presentations and being able to present them have always been keys to extraordinary success, rising far above peers and competitors. Thomas Edison. Steve Jobs. Separated by a vast span of time but sharing these same two great differentiators.

The foundation of success hasn’t changed: message, media, market, i.e., audience. The level of sophistication you can bring to this triangle keeps advancing and advancing and advancing. It’s really no place or time for amateurs. Make up your mind to be a pro.

When I first set foot on the campus of Florida State University, I was filled with optimism. It would only take a day before I was scared out of my mind. I discovered that, to graduate, I would have to take a course in public speaking.

The minute I walked into that classroom, my fear intensified and my heart rate skyrocketed. The classroom was set up like a mini-stadium, with stacked rows of seats that seemed to rise into infinity. Just the roar of 300 students in pre-class conversations was enough to make me want to shut the door behind me—and run!

I stayed, only to next hear the professor telling us we would each write and deliver ten different speeches over the course of the semester, some to the entire class of 300, some to smaller groups.

I am a technical guy. In fact, I was in school to get a degree in computer science. Having to “perform” was not for me. I’d like to tell you I had the courage to stay put, but I slinked away. I hoped to find a smaller class or a less demanding professor. When the next semester rolled around, I found myself with no choice but to enroll in the class again. When I opened the door, I found the same stadium, the same 300, the same professor. I again made myself disappear.

I next went to a lot of trouble to find a loophole. I found it by chasing a girl . . . right into an extracurricular class she was taking called Model United Nations. If you took that, you could exempt yourself from the requisite public speaking class. I didn’t get the girl, but I did graduate without ever having to stand up in front of those 300 other students and speak.

Fast forward a few years . . .

My business partner Dave VanHoose said, “Dustin, I’m not going to be able to give tonight’s presentation. You’re going to have to do it.” A lot of money was at stake. A commitment by our company. There was no loophole.