How to be insanely great in front of any audience | Hacker News Reader

How to be insanely great in front of any audience

slideshare.net

52 pointswallflower12 comments

Particularly important takeaways:

  o Practice, Practice, Practice, Practice. 
  o Form is important
  o Master the reveal

  o Me thinks you missed one :)

  o Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!

Slide 9: I sincerely hope that that's not supposed to be the first Macintosh. If that's the intention, then I just lost all of my warm fuzzies about how well the author researched relevant background.

Slide 51 has a better picture to pair with the words on slide 9. That's the first Macintosh. (At least the same body style.)

This is good advice, but in practice I find it very difficult to translate these tips if you don't have to sell a product/service.

Case in point, recently I was asked for a job interview to "prepare about 10 slides as a short training session on the use of the Ensembl Genome browser by wet bench lab scientists".

I tried to use the techniques described in this presentation and at presentationzen (http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html) (use high quality graphics, limit bullet points, choose your fonts with care,...). My result is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/138632/EnsembleGenomeBrowser.odp (OpenOffice Presentation file, since it is a very visual presentation see the notes for the accompanied text).

The problem I ran into is that I had to use lots of screenshots of the Ensembl Genome browser to tell how it worked. I tried to make those screenshots as pretty as possible (maybe even too cliché with the fading mirror effect) but I din't find much room to show my passion for bioinformatics. Any advice on what I could have changed?

I'm no expert on presenting. (Far far far far.... from it.) I also can't view your slides without downloading Open Office (which I'm too lazy to do). So... take this with a huge grain of salt. :)

My first thought is that, you're right, these techniques are most obviously applicable when selling something. But even in the case of training, I think it might be possible to "sell" what you are trying to train if you focus on the "what I'm doing" aspect.

What I mean is that I've sat through a few lame corporate training presentations in my time and they always consist of loads of processes. Things like, "do this, then this, then this, and poof - you're done!" But what they utterly fail to actually tell you is WHAT you are doing and WHAT was accomplished! Perhaps a lame example might help...

Imagine being taught how to cook a burger like this: First you are told how and where to find the meat (perhaps in the freezer in the kitchen on the 3rd shelf). Then you are told or shown that you must place the meat into a special tray. Then this tray is inserted into the microwave oven and a very specific numerical sequence is entered. Wait for exactly 3 minutes. Now you remove the container from the microwave.... etc..

What's lost here is the end goal and the WHY. What are you really trying to make and why do these steps even exist in this order? Is there really only one single right sequence of steps?

So.. how does this help? Well, I imagine Steve would first give you the motivation for wanted to make your burger. Perhaps he lets you taste one. Touch it. Smell it. Study it. Compare with the "the competition." Now you know what your goal is. Then the process is to not follow steps, but to understand what needs to be done. You must understand that the meat must be thawed and why you can't just cook it first, then form it into a burger shape. This kind of thing.

So in your case, I imagine the presentation would first include real examples and problems that need to be solved and that you will learn how to solve with the program. Maybe work through one of them. Or study it so that it becomes clear as to what variables are involved and why. The second act, then, is where you connect the dots of the first part with the software. X is represented in the software here... (do a demo) Etc. The 3rd act is to tie ti all together. A complete example of a single event or something that you'd use the software for and how to get the results and what they mean and how to translate those results into real world meaning. (If it just spits out some pretty graphs - why do I even care? What does it MEAN?)

That sort of thing.

Maybe. :P

Now I'm hungry.

I also note that although, as pointed out, Steve is a much better presenter than Bill, MS won the war.

Having a good presenter as CEO is great, but other attributes are more important when it comes to a successful business.

Yes, he won the 1990s war. ...and was able to retire and turn over the 2000s war to Steve B.

That said, true: the CEO doesn't have to be the skilled presenter. But IMHO Jobs' central asset is his ability to judge how people are affected by design - and that applies to product design (UX, etc) and to presentation design. He understands how to use the powerful emotional/subjective components of the consumer response (usually; better than perhaps 99.5% of CEOs).

Words are bad, pictures are good. Children's books have got it right.

Anything that cites Outliers instantly loses credibility for me. Maybe his presentations became more visual throughout the decades because of the technology available.

Steve Jobs presentation skills, ironically, leverage little in the way of technology, and everything in the way of presence.

What's your issue with the Outliers 10K hours expert thesis? Do you have any sources that indicate a significant number of individuals with a baseline skill of ability in a particular ability, who also put in 10,000 hours of _focused_ practice _haven't_ established "expertise?"

That particular thesis of Outliers very, very strongly resonated with me.

I haven't read the book, but it just doesn't seem very plausible that one needs about the same number of practice hours to become an expert at any of several hard but unrelated skills.

This presentation goes a bit beyond that and suggests that giving presentations is like brain surgery.

The actual research articles on the subject (Ericsson and others) are really interesting, though. It's not about a magic number, but the fact that deliberate practice has a marked effect on the level of expertise.

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