Learning to speak
without scripting myself.

I did not want to arrive with six neat stories, wait for the right opening and then pretend I had just remembered them. The attraction of a long conversation was that it could be a conversation. I wanted the thinking to happen in the room.

It did. Quite a lot of it happened halfway through my own sentences.

That is partly why I am glad I did it. The conversation is not a perfectly arranged version of what I think. It is a record of me trying to explain the work while somebody else is there to ask the next question.

I rush. I begin an answer before I know its shape. Sometimes I reach the point quickly. Sometimes the point has to survive three beginnings, a detour into something I have only just remembered and enough uses of “sort of” to make it a form of punctuation.

The fashion-pyramid section is a good example. There is an observation underneath it that I still find interesting: different online groups can be looking at completely different versions of fashion, and an idea can feel exhausted in one circle before another group has seen it at all.

That was the thought. The explanation arrived as a pyramid, several invisible hand gestures and more certainty than the idea deserved.

I could solve that by asking for every question in advance and writing an answer. I do not think that is the right lesson.

The unscripted parts are also what I like about the conversation. At one point I am talking about how much I miss sewing now that more of my time goes into running the company. At another, I am trying to explain why the fit of a 1990s football shirt matters as much as the print.

Those answers are imperfect, but they are alive. I would rather improve the way I express the thought than replace the thought with a prepared performance.

The lesson is simpler: I need to get comfortable with a pause.

1. 01Pause.
2. 02Work out the actual answer.
3. 03Say it in one sentence.
4. 04Then explain it.

That structure should not make the answer less genuine. It should give the genuine answer a chance of reaching somebody before I introduce it to four of its distant relatives.

Podcasting exposed something I normally get to hide in the rest of my work. A garment can be sampled again. A film can be cut. A paragraph can sit on my laptop until I understand what I meant. In a recorded conversation, the first version of the thought is the material.

There is something healthy in that. The episode shows where my thinking is clear and where enthusiasm is doing the work that structure should have done.

I am glad I did not know the questions. I am also glad I watched it back instead of deciding that “authentic” meant every habit had to be defended.

The next conversation can still be genuine. I would just like the sentences to arrive in roughly the same order as the ideas.