It was the summer before ninth grade and between organizing practices for the band I was the drummer in and memorizing the birthdates of every My Chemical Romance Band member, I was already overwhelmingly swamped. I had decided to take summer school in order to get an extra elective added to my schedule and as a result my summer had been criminally boring. 

So far, I felt pretty confident in my speech class. It was relatively straightforward. I was settling into comfortable familiarity as the summer droned on. Until one fateful day, when it was announced that my speech class would be taking on the horrific project of how-to speeches.  

I was vastly underprepared to give a speech on how to do something. At the time, my only skills were holding grudges and transporting a battery-powered CD player full of Twenty One Pilots CDs. I realized I didn’t have anything I could give a speech on. After brainstorming for as long as I was allowed, I settled on something overly ambitious that would cause me nothing but panic leading up to it: I was going to teach my classmates how to do magic. 

It should be noted that I had no idea how to perform magic, besides having one sleight of hand trick I could perform, so I was completely in the dark. Accompanied by poor study habits and a lack of motivation, I decided to teach myself magic so that I could then teach others how to do magic.

It wasn’t very long into this project that I deemed myself knowledgeable in the art of magic. Filled with this naivety, I decided to focus solely on my speech itself. Neither aspect of my presentation was prepared well. When I showed up to show the world what I could do with a cardboard magic kit, a few marbles, and a complete and utter lack of self confidence, everything went exactly as you would expect. 

As I struggled to keep my eye on the card a volunteer had selected from my 3 available cards, eventually just holding onto the one that was selected by the volunteer during my final volunteer activity, it occurred to me that I could have chosen any other thing to give a presentation on in speech I had any endless number of possibilities I could have chosen from. 

If there ever comes a time when you have the option between trying to learn a skill that you have no knowledge on or doing a presentation on how to walk a dog, choose the dog walking option.