The Power of Faking It

[Via Best of the Web Today]

This is classic. Straight from The Journal:

"An Oxford engineering student was surprised but undaunted when he was approached to deliver a series of lectures in Beijing on global economics," reports London's Daily Telegraph. Twenty-three-year-old Matthew Richardson says he knew "next to nothing" about the subject, but decided to give it a try anyway. He checked a textbook out of the library and spent the flight to China studying it:

From it he prepared a two-hour presentation, believing he had to deliver the same lecture several times over to different groups of students over three days.

Mr Richardson, who has the same name as a New York University professor who is a leading authority on international financial markets, was met at the airport and taken straight to a conference centre where, over lunch, "the horrible truth became apparent."

He said: "It became clear to me that my audience was not students, but people from the world of commerce studying for a PhD in business studies having already gained an MBA.

"And instead of repeating the same lecture, I was required to deliver a series of different lectures to the same people over three days."

But he mostly pulled it off. "I ripped out the pages [of the textbook] and disguised each chapter as notes," he recounts. "Because I was speaking through an interpreter I had the time to glance at the pages and prepare myself for what I was going to say next. I ad libbed a bit and really got into the subject. I was learning as much as my audience."

"Several students told him, through the interpreter, how informative they were finding his lectures," he said. But alas, he ran out of material. "By mid-afternoon on the second day I was already on chapter 15 of 16 and I still had the rest of the day and the following morning to go." So he ran for it, checked out of the conference hotel, and moved to different lodgings before leaving the country.

Prof. Richardson, the homonymic NYU prof, was amused: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it seems as if this young man will go far." Woody Allen once observed that "90% of life is just showing up." If only the young Matthew Richardson had checked out another book from the library, he might have been able to fill the other 10%.