Charlie Fink

SPEAKING.COM: What do you want people to learn / take away from your presentations?

FINK: Wearable, invisible, contextual computing is reaching a tipping point, which will be apparent to pretty much everyone in the next five to ten years. I truly believe in its potential to transform the workplace and the home of the future – and it’s not going to stop there. When we talk about augmenting reality, what we’re really talking about is the evolution of humankind.

SPEAKING.COM: What kind of special prep work do you do prior to an event? How to you prepare for your speaking engagements?

FINK: I try to understand the needs of the audience. Big ideas are the most fun and compelling to me personally, but people in the audience want to know what’s in it for them. To answer that, I need to know who they are. Once I understand and internalize that, I can craft the most relevant presentation possible.

SPEAKING.COM: Have you had any particularly memorable speaking engagements / unusual situations arise while on the road?

FINK: Here’s what I love about speaking: getting the hype out of the way, and sharing a realistic vision of the XR industry today and the limitless potential of tomorrow. XR is the Internet in 1992; no one knows about it yet. It is a thrill and a privilege to be its practical evangelist. I love it when people get as excited as I am.

I come at this as someone who’s lived through the computer revolution, which has taken up forty years of my adult life. Now I’m seeing – and sharing – what I’ve always wanted to know: where this goes.

I’m a pragmatist, though. I like to say I am “planting a tree whose shade I shall never sit in.” But those young people in the audience, those thirty-year-old kids, my kids, are going to live it, do it, and make it happen. Being with them keeps me young. It gets me up in the morning.

This work also suits me since I love to travel, meet new people, and make new friends. I come away from every conference with twenty ideas for new Forbes columns. Plus with the gray beard and whiskey voice, I’ve come to look and sound like the professor from central casting, a supporting role that I’m content to have. I’m filled with gratitude when so many smart people appreciate what I have to say. It’s fun, too, so I don’t see stopping any time soon.

SPEAKING.COM: What types of audiences would most benefit from your message?

FINK: I honestly can’t think of anyone who couldn’t benefit from hearing more about the technologies that are going to be integrated into our work and personal lives over the coming decades.

XR is going to touch every industry and consumer. I believe everyone needs to be aware of what’s on the horizon. We always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

My grandfather was born in 1892. He lived his early years much as his ancestors did on a little farm in Lithuania. He could never have imagined 125 years later his grandson would be sitting in a 747 writing this on a personal computer 36,000 feet (roughly 5 miles!) in the air while sipping coffee over the Atlantic Ocean. Things are accelerating. That’s how different our grandchildren’s world will be.

SPEAKING.COM: Which of your keynote speaking topics are your favorites and why?

FINK: “AR is White Hot, VR is Not…Yet” is by far my favorite keynote right now.

SPEAKING.COM: What inspired you to start doing speaking engagements?

FINK: It’s the live version of my writing. It just comes with writing a popular technology column.

SPEAKING.COM: How much do case studies, personal stories and or humor factor into your keynote speech content?

FINK: Humor is my thing. I’m fundamentally an entertainer. All educators are. We seduce so we may teach. We try to make it easy to relate, to help you let your guard down, and to free you to think without limitations.

Most of all, I am a messenger. The main insights in my book and my talks are hardly original:
(1) Technology succeeds when it makes what we are already doing better, faster, and cheaper.
(2) People are the killer app.
(3) We always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

People know the things I am saying are true. They knew these things before they read my book or stepped into an auditorium to hear me speak. But they need to hear them and read them again because every day they are bombarded with messages that are confusing, messages that tell them something else, and messages they sense are not true.

Unlike those invested in the industry, I have no dog in this fight. Rather, my audience, my clients, are my vested interest;) and this is the reason they trust me. I have nothing to sell but ideas which, when I think about it, is what I’ve done my entire career.

SPEAKING.COM: What are some of the successes you’ve helped clients make?

FINK: The client ultimately decides what to do and how to do it; I can only help stimulate their internal conversation. I help with business and product strategy, thought leadership, and marketing. I help them make connections with vendors, and even other consultants.

As a consultant, I serve not only a wide range of companies already involved in XR, but also many companies that want to understand how they can use it to improve their bottom line – to augment their business, so to speak.