Quote of the day:
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. - Sean O'Casey
If all the world's a stage, how do you/did you rehearse for every day you've stepped up to be a Data Architect/Project Manager/Developer/DBA/Business User/whatever hat you are wearing today?
I rehearse everyday by:
- Reading about data management issues
- Reading about non-data management issues
- Listening to people who use models
- Listening to people who don't use models
- Looking for analogies that I can use in explaining about data models/schemas/XML/databases
In fact, the only thing I really do rehearse, in the true sense of the word, is my current project's Elevator Speech on why we need to do data modeling. This Elevator Speech is slightly different for each project and sometimes for each model.
I need to rehearse this one or two sentence "speech" because I want it to come across clearly and sincerely, even if I have to fake it 
. It's important no matter where I am, or what I'm doing, that I be able to articulate the real business value, the real project value, of doing what I do.
Before I share a few my my speeches, I'd love to hear what others have used in the past.