It's conference season.

With conferences happening again mostly as we remember them from the pre-pandemic days, a lot of the same expected “conference ughs” are showing up. I don’t here mean the fatigue of extended exertion in a strange environment, or the potential need to realign with seeing people in person that you haven’t previously, but instead the more practical matters:

• the food
• the wifi problems
• projector-laptop interface woes
• microphones falling off, batteries dying mid-sentence, and the presenting speaker unaware of it

Every single conference runs into this stuff. We know it going in, and we live with it, because every single conference runs into this stuff.

None of these problems are showstoppers. They don’t kill the conference, and so it’s not obviously crucial to fix them. And maybe that’s the right outcome.

But if you’re going to speak, an easy way to differentiate yourself is just to remove one of these issues from your own talk. You can bring your own Wifi, at least for a few folks. You can know your material so cold that you can present without your deck, and turn that into a part of the show. You can bring snacks.

Building better, more compelling content than all your co-presenters is hard, but there’s easy ways to just show up better.