Neil Pasricha’s “3 A’s of Awesome” from TEDxToronto.

Thanks to Tracy for sharing this with me.

It’s impossible to be a good speaker and communicator if you don’t know what a good speech looks like, which is why I try to share examples of great speeches with you when I find them. It’s also one of the reasons that I think TED is such a great resource for presenters. Short talks by some of the worlds best presenters and communicators. For free. If you’re thirsty for more, check out some of these previous posts.

A good teacher ought to be able to practice what they preach, and Nancy Duarte is an excellent teacher.

The above video, from a few weeks ago at TEDxEast, is a perfect example of Nancy’s ability to communicate. In this video, she relates many of the points from her new book, Resonate, so watch the video if you don’t have time to read it!

The best part  comes at the end when Nancy shares a very personal story of how she overcame obstacles in her own life to become the communicator she is today. She uses herself to prove that changing the world is possible. Nancy practices what she preaches, and that makes us feel that we can, too.

P.S. – Don’t Be A PowerPoint Felon is now available in Spanish. Many thanks to David Gomez for his willingness to do the translation and adaptation. Thank you, David!

No Sea Un Criminal Del PowerPoint

I just posted a new set of slides on Slideshare this morning. They’re from a humorous speech I gave at Toastmasters this week. I modified the slides so they would make sense without me being there to speak.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting everyday anymore, as I was doing up until a few weeks ago. Based on some thoughts that were inspired by a note on Facebook by Jesse Desjardins (which I couldn’t find today. Jesse, if you read this, can you post a link in the comments?) I’ve decided to spend more time on making my posts more visual by actually creating slides instead of just text. Posting text-based posts every day was making me a better writer, which is good, but I wasn’t really becoming a better presentation designer, which is one of my goals with this blog. I also hope this will make my posts more interesting and enjoyable for you, and that that will help the ideas I share here to spread farther than before.

Basically this change means higher quality posts less often. I’m still spending a similar amount of time per day on the blog, but I won’t have something new to share everyday. There will probably still be text-based posts from time to time, but I hope to make presentations like the one above the norm. As always, you can also follow me on Twitter to get your daily dose of great presentation articles and links.

I’ll give this a shot for a while and see how it goes. I’d love to have your feedback. Do you like the slides above? Did you like the old way better? Let me know!

How much can you eliminate from your presentation? Rather than adding more bullets or text or pictures or stories or illustrations, instead see how much you can get rid of.

Which points are most important?

What information is essential for your audience to make a decision/take action?

Rather than telling a story for each point, is there one story that says it all?

Do you have to show all the data or can you just present the conclusions drawn from that data? Perhaps put the data itself in a handout or online?

Does your slide need text or can it function with just pictures?

Do you need a background or can you just use full-bleed (take up the whole screen) images?

Do the animations add anything or could they be removed? Instead of multiple transitions, could you just set them all to “Appear”?

Could you get away with just using one font? Maybe just vary the size?

Do you need lots of color? What about black and white images, with one other color to highlight the important parts?

The answers to these questions run counter to our gut feelings about things. We want people see how knowledgeable we are so we try to tell them everything we know in one shot. In reality, no presentation could ever cover everything you know about a topic, particularly if you’re knowledgeable enough to have been asked to speak. Instead, take things out. How much? As much as you can.

In the words of Albert Einsten, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Including too much is actually a form of laziness. It’s easy to just dump all the information in our heads on an audience. That’s why it happens so often.

Eliminating content takes longer, but like so many things in life the extra work is worth it in the end. Your audience will thank you for giving them only the information they require. And the simplicity will make your message more like to be understood and remembered.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

In a comment to one of my posts from earlier this week, Nathan Cashion said something that reminded me of this quote. He was talking about the post I wrote on mastery, and said that it almost seems like experts have some kind of magic but that this is probably just because they know in their heads what they want it to look like before they start and we, the audience, don’t. I think Nathan’s right. Experts have to have a picture or idea in their mind before they can begin to work. Maybe that idea isn’t completely formed when they begin working on something, but as they work to refine their idea it comes into focus for them. Once it’s fully formed, their efforts then become less of a discovery and more of a labor to realize the vision they see in the mind.

The word for this kind of foresight is prescience (pre-shince), which can mean divine omniscience of future events, but can also connote “a human anticipation of the course of events.” (Merriam-Webster)

Michaelangelo is quoted as saying about his genius for sculpting, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” The finished product was fully formed in his mind at the outset and he simply worked until it was realized.

It almost seems like the sculpture is trapped inside and he's just removing the excess stone.

[Image by Akbar Simonse]

There are many ways to clarify ideas in your mind. Speak them out loud to a test audience member, draw them in a picture or diagram, or write snippets of the idea on post-its and reorganize them until you’re happy with their flow and the overall image they paint. Continue to develop your ideas until you know them inside and out and have considered them from many angles. You should be able to visualize every step of your presentation — every point, every word, every diagram, every picture you’ll draw — before you get up to speak. You should also be very comfortable with how all the elements fit together into an overall whole.

When you do get up to speak, your goal is to get the ideas and images in your mind to appear clearly in the minds of your listeners. If the ideas are not clear in your mind to begin with, how understandable do you think the messages received by your audience will be?