Chase the Line, Not the Applause.

I was the opening keynote for the Florida Public Relations Association’s Annual Summit yesterday morning. There were about 400 people in the room, and my keynote went really well . I got a standing ovation, which I will never, ever get tired of, no matter how many times it happens. I have a love for being on stage unmatched by anything else in my life.

But that’s not what I thought about on my flight home.

What I’ve been thinking about is the ten minutes after I walked off the stage. People lined up. Some wanted selfies. Some brought actual physical copies of my books, dog eared and highlighted, and asked me to sign them. Two people told me specific things they’d done differently in their careers, or their lives, because of something I wrote or said years ago.

That’s a different animal than applause. And if you do anything public facing for a living, speaking, writing, PR, customer service, building something people actually use, you need to know the difference, because only one of them means anything.

Applause tells you the room liked you. The line waiting for you afterward tells you it stuck.

A standing ovation is real. It feels amazing. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But it’s also gone the second the lights come up. It’s a read on that specific room, that specific moment, under those specific lights. It doesn’t even make it to the parking lot.

The line is a different thing entirely. Nobody stands around for ten minutes to tell a stranger “nice job.” They do it because something actually happened to them. Something moved, or changed, or got confirmed. That line is proof the thing didn’t just land, it stayed.

You see this everywhere once you start looking for it.

In PR, you can land a client in a massive outlet and everybody high fives and it feels like a win, and if nobody actually reads it or does anything because of it, then you got the applause and skipped the part that matters. The real win is the call three weeks later where the client says “we actually got customers out of that.”

In customer service, you can get a five star rating on a survey somebody only filled out because there was a discount attached. That’s applause. The real signal is whether that person comes back in six months without you bribing them to.

Same with writing. You can get ten thousand likes on a post and that’s applause. It’’s nice, it’s also nothing. The real signal is the one email you get six months later from a total stranger telling you they made a hard call in their life because of something you wrote.

The problem thought, is you can’t manufacture the second thing. You can absolutely manufacture the first. Better slides, tighter timing, a stronger close, you can get genuinely good at engineering a room’s reaction. But you cannot fake your way into someone standing in a line holding your book because it mattered to them. That only happens when what you gave them was actually true and actually useful, and you got out of your own way long enough to let it sink in.

So if you take one thing from this: stop chasing the applause. Chase the line. The applause usually shows up anyway when the other part is real. It’s just not the point. It’s what’s left over.

Chase the line, not the ovation.