I wasn’t sincere for ten minutes yesterday. Someone else was sincere at me for a few seconds, but that was the extent of my dabbling in that human mode. So, I’m back for another ten minutes of sincerity.

This time, though, it’s about something that completely isn’t corporate.

It’s a personal thingy.

It has to do with the comments I’m constantly getting from people. To sum it all up, here’s what I usually wake up to in my inbox:

Oh my god, Rory. You’re so good looking and you’re a hundredaire. How did you do it? What’s your secret sauce?

Where looks are concerned, I can only think I got lucky with the strange placement of my eyes due to the copious amounts of beer my mom drank while she was pregnant with me (according to some weird ancient French country lore, beer is really good for the developing fetus (hey – that kind of explains a whole country, doesn’t it?)).

Where the tens, and often hundreds of dollars in my bank account are concerned, my secret sauce is really special.

I just try not to fail most of the time. The key is to keep failure in a comfortable ratio with success. I shoot for about four successes to every failure, and I’m pretty happy in that range. Your mileage/kilometerage may vary.

Looking back, I’ve actually failed quite a bit in front of people, and with roughly the stated frequency. Whether it’s been a .NET Rocks show, a blog entry, or a live event, I’ve seriously screwed up at least several dozen times (in very public ways, no less).

Just for kicks, here’s an example from each…

.NET Rocks

During one of my first .NET Rocks shows (I think that link goes to the right show), Carl and I interviewed Ted Neward and Bruce Tate.

I had recently dabbled with what would become Java 5.0 (or 1.5, depending on what marketing you were following), when I gave a short little speech about how much I disliked the attribute syntax in the New Java.

Then Ted, very calmly, mentioned that he had been part of the committee that designed that specific syntax.

Woo-hoo! Way to go, Rory. Good one… not doing your homework and then insulting your guests is a great way to conduct an interview.

A Blog Entry

I don’t even know what to pick. There are so many.

I guess there’s the one from yesterday about eating cigarettes. I thought it was wildly hilarious, but then my co-writer read it, looked at me, briefly faked a smile, and then wept out of fear for the future.

In my world, a post is successful if it gets about ten or more comments. That’s much more important to me than incoming links, or hits, or whatever. My goal here, believe it or not, is to try to communicate with my fellow human beings. I’m so god-awful at it in “real life” that I almost rely on the interactions I have here to validate my existence.

Jesus. How’s that for some vulnerability? Word.

A Live Event

This one isn’t too hard. I think the time I went blind while speaking pretty much wins here hands-down.

Having to tell a theater full of people that they’re all going to have to leave because you can’t see the screen is not success.

What brought these thoughts on today was watching U2 – Vertigo 2005 – Live From Chicago. I grew up on U2, and I’ve watched them screw up left and right through the years, but often while totally overshadowing those screw-ups with great success.

Today, though, I had the singularly uncomfortable experience of watching as Bono, for nearly two hours, struggled against his failing voice. The guy can barely sing anymore. He missed a lot of notes, didn’t have the rich tone he had in his youth, forgot the words to his own songs, said some silly things… the list goes on.

While I don’t actually think he (or the band) failed, it certainly was the kind of thing that prompts you to think about what it must be like to be up there, in front of tens of thousands of people, knowing that the recording will be sold to hundreds of thousands more, and just flat-out biffing the one thing you do in life (Bono’s political hobbies aside).

They still pulled off the show, and it was, somehow, still really good, but… wow.

All that said, it’s comforting to know that you can trip and fall all over yourself in front of people – as long as you make the effort to brush yourself off and get back up again.

(And it is with all of this in mind that I’ll be launching the new site on May 1st.)

Word.