The best speaker gifts I ever got.

I have received enough wine to start a delivery service, enough flowers to become a florist and enough books to open a bookshop.

Candy, art, toothpaste, local delicacies, toys and everything in between.

I have been speaking at conferences, universities and in-house events since around 2006. In those years, I have learned that the best speaker gifts are rarely the biggest or most expensive ones.

Every gift is a bonus.

I do not expect a gift.

Most of the time I am paid to speak, and the speaking is already a gift in itself. I meet amazing people, get to distil my thinking into a talk and get to travel.

So every gift is a bonus. But some are easier to appreciate than others.

Wine piles up. At one point, I had 12 different reds and seven bottles of champagne. It became a running joke with Tom Palmaerts and Pedro De Bruyckere.

Anything bigger than a bottle or heavier than two kilos also has to travel home with me. Once, I received a wonderful picnic basket full of local delicacies just before leaving on a three-week trip to China.

It was generous. It was also luggage.

The gifts I remember.

The best gifts are small acts of kindness.

One of my favourite memories is a media event in New Zealand, where the team from Māori TV taught me the haka. It was not something I had to carry home. It became part of the trip and a story I could keep telling.

And then there was the cap.

In October 2019, I was speaking at a gathering of LEGO’s CEEMEA team in Prague, covering Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I received a lovely box with a LEGO set and other gifts.

Later, we were having a drink in a bar. One of the LEGO colleagues made his own merchandise. He attached LEGO plates to shirts so he could build things onto them. He did the same with caps.

This was well before LEGO itself started making that kind of merchandise.

I told him how cool I thought it was. He worked at LEGO and developed his own things.

“If you like it that much, you can have my cap,” he said.

His own cap. The one he had made.

That was one of the coolest gifts I have ever received.

A very different gift.

Another came after I interviewed Oleksandr Shevchenko on stage at the World Passenger Festival in Amsterdam on 17 November 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was deputy director of the Passenger Company at Ukrainian Railways at the time.

He spoke about evacuating millions of people. About repairing shelled bridges in hours rather than months. About the first months of the war being a blur, sleeping two hours a night.

He was humble, kind, positive and funny. He told us how he and his team used humour to stay positive. The audience was deeply touched.

I was chairing the event. He was a guest I was interviewing, not the organiser. He had absolutely no reason to bring me anything. No obligation. No expectation.

And with all of that going on, he had thought to bring me a gift.

He gave me a small artwork in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. A Czech hedgehog.

The full-size version is an anti-tank obstacle made of intersecting steel beams. Mine was small enough to give as a gift.

It was made from rails.

Very different from the LEGO cap. But also one of the best gifts I have received.

Not just because of the object. Because of the kindness and clarity of mind to think of bringing it.

Mind. Blown.

For event organisers.

1. Make it specific. A small gift connected to the event, place or conversation will usually mean more than a generic expensive one.
2. Think about the journey home. If a speaker travelled by plane, size, weight and liquids matter.
3. Give a story, not only an object. An experience, introduction or personal act can be easier to remember than another bottle.
4. Write down why you chose it. The explanation often creates most of the meaning.

Source: my unfinished drafts of 17 March 2015 and 29 April 2020, supplemented with my recollection of the LEGO CEEMEA gathering in Prague in October 2019 and the gift following my interview with Oleksandr Shevchenko of Ukrainian Railways (World Passenger Festival, Amsterdam, 17 November 2022). Photos: my own.