Your speech hinges on this 1 key factor

What makes for a successful speech?

The truth is that it’s a complex mixture of art and science, intellect and emotion, journey and destination. You work fiendishly hard to get the content right, and then just as hard to nail the delivery.

Then you find that, at a certain point, the success or failure of a speech is not even up to you. It’s in the hands of the audience. If there’s a mismatch between expectations and the actual event, or if somewhere along the line you get misinformation about the event or the audience or both, then your speech can fall flat despite your best efforts.

I once watched a speaker open with a joke (usually a mistake, by the way, because it’s the wrong time for it, not because jokes are not great things) and knew it would fall flat. Sure enough, it did, and the speaker panicked, thinking that his material was no good, and was uneven for the rest of the talk. How did I know the joke wouldn’t work? I had used it myself a few minutes before.

Such are the perils of not listening to the previous speaker. I felt bad, but what could I do? I had no idea the other speaker would go for the same bit of hilarity. We hadn’t coordinated our talks in advance. We didn’t even know each other.

The point is that there are many variables involved, and you can’t possibly control them all.