First Time Experience Presenting at Pecha Kucha Night Cebu

Last week I talked for a very short 6 minutes for Volume 18 of Pecha Kucha Cebu. Pecha Kucha according to their site is:

a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.

The event was presented by White Brick Creative Studio and was well attended by students and Cebu creatives.

With my fellow speakers

I was a bit intimidated going into the talk because the other speakers were big time players in their respected niches in the creative industry. And here I was, feeling like dilettante with all my varied interests mashed together in talk that I hoped would form into a cohesive whole.

The title of my talk was "3 things I Learned in Jiujitsu and Business." So the way I mashed my interests together, with business, art and food was through the lessons learned in Brazilian Jiujitsu. The 3 things were Persistence, Tapping Out and Community.

Persistence was basically about how one needs persistence in business and in art. I explained how one has to be persistent in business because unexpected things will come such as a venue cancelling on you 4 days before you event. I also then talked about tapping out. How I realized that I felt at that time that doing art as a professional was no longer part of my vision, even though I persisted through it and got a bit of success. I realized I wanted to be an entrepreneur instead. So I tapped out of that and reintegrated my strategy for the future.

Lastly I talked about community and how important it is in Jiujitsu and well, in just about any endeavour. I realized my , business partner and girlfriend, Mona and I named our donut company BRGY., which is short for Barangay which is Filipino for community basically. We made a company who's lifeblood is community because we don't have a physical place so we need a community of spaces that would host us to sell our donuts.

our first ever pop-up

I was a really exciting and exhilarating experience which I would recommend that people should do at least once. Forces you to keep your thoughts to the most fundamental elements and keeps the audience entertained.