In the summer of 2023, I was the subject of a full length article on the front page of the New York Times!!
Why? Because—although my favorite activity is lying on the couch with a bourbon sour and a good romance novel—I’ve been privileged to help many Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees write their acceptance speeches…and the Times thought that was a pretty good story.
(Kind of a “man bites dog” thing, except more like “this woman knows nothing about football, and guess who she gets to work with.”)
Since being featured in the Paper of Record is almost the exact definition of a capstone experience, I hope you’ll check out This Jazz Artist Makes Pro Football Hall of Fame Speeches Sing, as well as my blog post on how to craft a great acceptance speech.
And if you’re not a NY Times subscriber, here is a PDF of the article to download or read online:
But…When Do You Get Your 15 Minutes of Fame?
The shocking (and delightful) thing about this experience is that, in a million years, I couldn’t have seen it coming.
If it’s true that we each get 15 minutes of fame, I would have expected mine to be coupled with a pharmaceutical product launch…or a talk about networking at the Brooklyn Public Library…or even my work with Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn in the early 2000’s, trying to save my neighborhood from hyper-gentrification (we did not succeed).
Which just goes to show that—of the many, many things we do for work every day—it’s almost impossible to predict which ones will resonate beyond our inner circle of friends, family, and maybe colleagues and clients.
Always Doing Good Work Matters
So the moral of this story is to always do your best work, even if the task at hand seems menial or peripheral, and even if you think (like I did at first) that you don’t know enough about football, or any other topic, to represent it fairly.
Since you never know where the spotlight will shine, always doing your best is the only way to be prepared when YOUR 15 minutes of fame come calling.
And I hope they come calling for you soon!
