Make sure you:
1. Talk at great, dutiful length about your career, starting in college, working your way through the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s—or was that actually the late 1990s? hmm, let me think …—taking us all the way to the present moment. As if you are Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
2. Talk a lot about your failures. How frustrating work can be, how stupid clients are, how so many people just don't "get it." You may have won a World Series, but you don't want to talk about that. Instead, you want our sympathy for all those injury-plagued 100-loss seasons.
3. When you talk about your company or your industry or your country, talk about how much it has changed over the last 15 years, and how much better everything was in 1997. Share your vision for "restoring" everything to the greatness you once knew. (We'll have to take your word for it.)
If you do these things the first time we meet, I can assure you: There is no chance we'll ever forget, no matter how much information you later provide to the contrary, what a loser you are.
Congratulations.
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