I spent longer than I should have on an opening that I was convinced was strong.
It set up the theme. It established my credibility on the topic. It gave the audience the context they’d need to appreciate what was coming. It was well-structured, clearly articulated, and built logically toward the first major moment.
It was also, I eventually realized, performing all of these functions for me rather than for the audience. It was everything I needed to feel like the show was starting correctly. The audience needed something quite different.
I figured this out because someone who was helping me develop the keynote material asked me a simple question after watching me deliver the opening: “Would someone put their phone down to watch this?”
I thought about it for about three seconds. The honest answer was: probably not.
The opening was good enough to hold people who’d already decided to be engaged. It wasn’t good enough to create engagement in people who hadn’t yet committed to it. And at the start of a show or keynote, everyone is in the second category. No one has decided yet. You’re competing, in the first thirty to sixty seconds, with everything else those people could be thinking about or doing.
The Three Questions
What came out of that conversation and several subsequent evaluations of opening material is a stress test I now apply to every opening before I commit to it.
Question one: Would a stranger stay?
Imagine someone who walked into your show entirely cold — no context, no prior relationship with you or the material, no commitment to being there. They’re in the back of the room. They have no particular reason to pay attention. They could leave without social consequence.
Would the opening of your show give them a reason to stay? Would something in the first sixty seconds create enough curiosity, surprise, or engagement that the decision to remain feels rewarding?
This is a high bar. Most openings fail it because they’re designed for committed audiences — people who’ve already bought in to being there. But the psychologically honest truth is that even committed audiences begin every show in an uncommitted state. The show hasn’t started yet. They haven’t invested in it. They’re essentially strangers to this particular experience.
The stranger question treats every audience as uncommitted until your opening gives them a reason not to be.
Question two: Would someone put their phone down?
The phone has become the perfect proxy for attention priority. When something on screen is more compelling than what’s in the room, the phone wins. A strong opening is strong enough to beat the phone.
This doesn’t mean you need spectacle or shock tactics. A genuinely compelling question, a surprising story opening, an unexpected demonstration — these can beat the phone with subtlety, because what the phone offers is distraction, not depth, and depth wins against distraction when it’s immediately available.
The phone test is useful because it forces you to think about your opening from the competition’s perspective. What is the opening competing against? What would the audience rather be doing if your opening doesn’t immediately give them a better option?
An opening that beats the phone has found something genuinely more interesting than whatever was on the screen.
Question three: What promise does it make?
Every strong opening makes an implicit promise to the audience about what the experience ahead is going to be. It establishes a contract: here is what you’re going to get, here is why it will be worth your time, here is the kind of experience you’re signing up for.
This promise doesn’t have to be explicit — in fact, it usually works better when it isn’t stated directly. But it has to be there. An opening that makes no implicit promise gives the audience nothing to be curious about. They don’t know what’s coming and they have no basis for wanting to find out.
The promise can be about entertainment (this is going to be surprising and delightful), about meaning (this is going to tell you something true and interesting), or about experience (something different is going to happen here). What it can’t be is absent.
After you’ve designed your opening, articulate the promise it makes. If you struggle to identify one, the opening doesn’t have one yet.
What Fails These Tests
The openings I’ve cut or redesigned that failed this stress test share a few common features.
They begin with orientation before engagement. “Tonight I’m going to talk about / Tonight we’re going to explore / The subject of this evening is…” Orientation is not promise. Telling the audience what’s about to happen is not the same as giving them a reason to want it to happen.
They begin with credentials before context. “I’ve been performing for X years / I’ve worked with companies like / My background in…” Credentials establish legitimacy, which is important — but it’s not the most important thing in the first thirty seconds. The audience needs to want to be there before they care why you’re qualified to be there.
They begin with the slow build when the sharp hook was available. Every piece of material has a version of itself that starts in the most interesting place. The slow build is usually a path toward that interesting place. Often you can cut the path and start there directly, and the show is better for it.
The Rewrite in Practice
When I applied the stress test to the opening I’d been defending, here’s what I found: the promise was buried in the middle of it. The first ninety seconds were orientation, and then around the two-minute mark was the moment that would actually hold a stranger and beat the phone.
The fix was simple: move that moment to the front. Start there. Cut everything that preceded it.
The opening became about a minute shorter and significantly stronger. The material I removed was genuinely good material — it just wasn’t opening material. It moved to later in the show, where it did its job correctly.
The stranger wouldn’t have stayed for two minutes of orientation. They’d have stayed from the first second of the interesting thing.
The Consistent Diagnostic
I apply this stress test to every opening now — for shows, for keynotes, for any presentation where I’m asking a room of people to give me their time. The three questions take about ninety seconds to answer honestly, and they’ve saved me from weak openings more often than I can count.
The opening is the only moment in the show where your audience is deciding whether to give you the rest of the time. Everything after it benefits from the psychological commitment they’ve made. Only the opening has to earn that commitment from scratch.
Make it worth the stranger’s time. Beat the phone. Keep your promise.
Start strong or don’t start.