On the Road
Things have been hectic for the past few days. Wednesday, I went to Florida to speak to a group of 100 high school students about my story and experiences with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. After I spoke, I met up with a very close friend who lives in Florida, who I first met three years ago at Operation Enterprise. We ended up watching the Matrix and staying up until 5:00am talking about life. At 7:00am, I woke up and I caught a 11:20am flight to New York.
Upon, getting to New York, I was hit with a few days of procrastination and started to frantically prepare for the CEO and Entrepreneurship Education conferences with Sheena. Later that night (Thursday), Sheena and I took a delayed flight to Chicago. We ended up staying up until 4:00am, with most of the time at Kinkos making a banner and doing other Kinkos-like stuff.
Surprisingly high on energy and spirits (the non-alcoholic kind) for having only five hours of sleep in the past two days, I attended day one of the CEO conference today. I had the honor of introducing John Hughes, a very successful entrepreneur and entrepreneurship education philanthropist, to a 1,100-person audience in the following room:
Tomorrow, my keynote will be one of the most significant ones I've ever made. The conference staff actually has her as my moderator. She better do a god introduction or I will say bad things about her in my speech :) There are 387 chairs in the room and I will be one of two speakers. One thing that worries me is that, it is late in the day so some schools may leave early. I have a feeling that it will go well though. I can just feel it. We've sold about 15 books, but the key for sales will be speaking.
Sheena brought up a good point today, while we were eating dinner in the main ballroom with 1,100 people. So far the book has reached 1,100 people so it was interesting to look at the room and visually see the number of people the book has touched.
Chicago is pretty, but I will have no time to enjoy it as I depart tomorrow evening. Ahh, the life of an entrepreneur...to be continued...