Reading: #83: Turning Intellectual Curiosity and Research Into $$ (Dana Rubin)

Journalist Dana Rubin had been writing speeches and op-eds and coaching executives on how to present themselves at conferences and commencements. One client was struggling with how her voice sounded on stage and Rubin “wanted to give her speeches as inspiration.” She climbed out of bed and grabbed one of the 102 speech anthologies on her bookshelf and noticed that every speech in there was from a man: from Cicero to Lord Asquith to Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King. “My head exploded,” Rubin says because she realized that women’s voices are “not valued.” That’s also when her new job as “advocate for women’s speech and voice” was born and her web bank, SpeakingWhileFemale.co, with 1800 speeches was created to support it. “I reinvented myself and this is what I do,” she says, noting that she funds the bank with speech writing and speaking fees.