Speaker's Tip: Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared | Hacker News Reader

Speaker's Tip: Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared

37signals.com

58 pointsraghus51 comments

I tend to extrapolate this tip into a more general rule: no meta-talk.

For the speaker, preparing the talk has been top of mind for the past N hours/days/weeks. Not so for the audience. If you think about the situation from their perspective, you'll realize they don't want to hear about how you prepared the talk or how you approached the talk (usually). They want to hear your thoughts on the topic -- the result of your preparation.

This rule generally eliminates phrases like "while preparing this talk, I realized...", "when Joe asked me to give this talk...", "I didn't really prepare for this talk...", "I get nervous giving talks like this...", etc.

In almost all cases, you can simply strike those phrases from the script and your talk will be more focused and concise for it.

"This slide has my favorite joke of the talk"

"Sorry this slide has a lot of text on it, I usually try to avoid it"

Reading slides is also idiotic.

Some people absorb info better when they view it, others when they hear it. Consider it pre-prepared closed captions and then perhaps it's OK?

Then why talk? Reading is faster than listening. And this alone will get your audience horribly out of sync with you.

Use slides as a support structure, don’t duplicate what you are seeing. And if you really want to make all those happy that prefer reading to listening don’t just dump your uncommented slides on them afterwards.

This is a great rule. I follow it in all my talks and in all my blog posts, as well. Meta talk is, frankly, rather boring and distracts from the primary focus of the talk/post. I find that when you intentionally attempt to steer away from being self-referential your writing becomes much more lucid and to the point. You're no longer dwelling on the process but driving home a singular point.

I do have one corollary, though: Anecdotes work great for talks and blog posts. Instead of talking about "when I was writing this post/presentation" talk about "there was this one time when this user did X" or "when I was working on this team Y happened." They're almost universally a crowd pleaser.

Great rule! "I will now discuss the implications of the foo build structure" is lethally boring.

There is however one exception: http://consc.net/misc/moser.html

I've generalized that into a sign I keep in my offices: http://sargo.com/joel/_images/NO_META.pdf

John Stewart's "Meta-President" segment demonstrates this point better than anything else I've seen:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-9-2007/loud-an...

I would exempt Paul Buchheit because this is an integral part of all his talks.

Spontaneity? Or announcing a lack of preparation at the beginning?

As Jason notes in the article, spontaneity can be a huge boon. I don't immediately see how the latter can be, though it's possible.

I suppose paul may truly be an exception, but it seems that I would get just as much out of his talks (which is to say, a ton) whether or not I knew how much time he had spent in preparation.

Announcing a lack of preparation. All PB talks begin with him saying that he hasn't prepared anything; that it doesn't matter anyway, because he doesn't have anything to say; and that in fact no one has anything to say. From which he proceeds to tell you interesting things.

What a very strange comment.

I wish I had heard one of these talks.

If you haven't seen it yet, here is a highlights video which has a brief portion of Paul's talk as well as links to the justin.tv archived stream.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910426

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E

Ah, so it is the contrast provided by lowering the expectations at the beginning which means they'll be shattered even more thoroughly by the rest of the talk. Makes sense.

>whether or not I knew

Then by the same logic it is still ok if he is exempt from the rule.

I thought someone might say that. :-)

I will get just as much out of paul's talks because I love his talks and will always pay attention to every word. Some percentage of the audience, however, will take a lack of preparation qualifier as a reason to zone out.

The issue isn't whether you prepare, but that you shouldn't tell your audience you haven't prepared.

This is especially true if you _have_ prepared. Giving a talk about your experience without working on boiling down the information should be, by definition, possible without preparation.

>that you shouldn't tell your audience you haven't prepared

Why not? A presenter transfers information and emotion to the audience. If meta-talk (such as commenting on their preparation) is a device for doing that, why shouldn't the presenter use it?

In my experience PB has a very humble and modest style, which is integral to the overall message he delivers. I suspect that part of the that style is communicated via his meta-talk.

I don't think his statement helped his talk at all. It would be best to be explicit about it: "I don't think explaining a list of lessons learned is useful for you, so I've put together a few short slides to talk about my experience without presuming to prescribe an action for you"

There is nothing in that statement that implies the speaker doesn't care about the audience.

It's not a matter of what '..would be best..' - that's impossible to judge w/o all the context, and even then it's subjective.

My point is that there are some occasions where is does make sense to 'tell your audience you haven't prepared', so I disagree with your hard-and-fast assertion that 'you shouldn't tell your audience you haven't prepared', and the blogger's assertion that 'when you say “I’m not really prepared” in front of an audience you’re showing them the ultimate disrespect'. Such black and white rules don't seem valuable to me.

It's horses for courses..

Umm... Your sample quote, is, in fact, almost exactly what he communicated during his talk. Am I missing something?

Yes, he started out saying he didn't prepare. That's the whole point of the original post and this thread.

Right, but I thought you said "it would be better if he had simply said...", when he did, in fact, say just that. Never mind; I think we're actually in violent agreement.

I see what you are saying. The comment you responded to essentially said "it would be great if PB did X" when in fact PB did do X and they were not listening. That was actually one of my favorite talks of startup school but not really because of the format. The "unprepared" format won't work for most people.

I agree. I think that's Paul's shtick.

Instead of "Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared", I'd say simply "Be Prepared".

Paul Buchheit started his talk at Startup School by telling the audience that he was just going to wing it. I'd say he had one of the best talks of the day. Even if he didn't spend a second thinking about what he was going say, it was pretty obvious that he was very well prepared to give a good talk based on previous experience.

That said, I can see where Jason is coming from. Setting expectations is an important part of public speaking (actually it applies to a lot of things). If you tell me you haven't prepared, the first thought that immediately comes to mind is that the talk isn't going to be very good and I'm certainly more likely to zone you out.

I guess that's the thing, if Paul was winging it but has a great deal of experience doing the same thing, that's totally different from Joe Random turning up at a (paid-for) conference without slides or script and saying 'Er, well, I didn't prepare...'. Unless Joe Random is a celebrity of some sort, people will get pissed off.

As a total aside, winging it can be great. I far prefer that style to people who are clearly reading from a script of sorts. My performance background's in improv so I'm biased, but I strongly recommend anyone who wants to take up public speaking spend some time in improv workshops. Once you can structure a longform narrative from nothing but a word shouted by an audience member, giving a talk is easy.

This seems aimed squarely at Paul Buchheit, considering it's less than a week after Paul did exactly that at Startup School.

Interestingly I enjoyed Paul's talk more than Jason's.

In person he claimed to have liked my talk :)

I'm not sure if anyone understood, but the "winging it" was supposed to be a metaphor for startups themselves. You can never be truly prepared.

I did love your talk - I thought it was definitely one of the best. I certainly learned a few things.

The other thing is that you clearly didn't completely wing it. You had prepared slides, as a start.

No he didn't. I saw him writing the slides as other presenters were speaking.

(Not that I'm criticizing him. Some of my best projects in school were written the day they were due.)

Your talks were my favorite parts of both SS08 and SS09. I think many other "unprepared" talks are given by other speakers simply trying to imitate your style (with both less humor and less content).

The point wasn't aimed at any one person. I've probably seen 50-75 speakers present this year, and lately I've heard the "I haven't prepared anything" declaration more than usual. Startup School was my last conference of the year so I felt now would be a good time to sum up the observation.

I thought all the talks at Startup School were excellent. I stayed for the whole conference - from pg's opener to Mark's closer. I learned a lot.

Funny, I assumed it was a thinly veiled jab at Mark Pincus.

I didn't attend SUS09, but by the video clips, it seems he committed this very "presentation sin."

People take days off of work, spend hundreds on a conference ticket, travel for thousands of miles, and pay hefty rates for flights and hotels to come hear you speak, and you tell them you didn’t have time to prepare a talk? What’s cool about that?

But of course, the speaker takes days off of work, travels thousands of miles, and pays hefty rates for flights and hotels to come talk to you for free. I am not sure why anyone would expect excellence in that situation.

I've gotten paid expenses for several conferences, and I'm not really a 'somebody'. Depending on the conference, 'somebodies' can definitely expect to be paid a little something; although of course it may pale in comparison with other revenue they may make, depending on the person/field.

And when that happens, I expect the talk to be of higher quality. That's the standard I hold myself to, anyway.

I recently spoke at Stack Overflow's Dev Days in Toronto. I started by saying that I am very shy and have difficulty going to networking events and conferences where there are large groups, but that there's something I wanted to share, and it was important enough for me to climb up on stage and stand in front of them.

A few people later thanked me for the candour, but on reflection just because that resonated emotionally with some people, that doesn't mean my talk was actually better. Perhaps the people who responded emotionally to my 'confession' were more attentive to the ideas in the talk, but it could just as easily be that they were distracted and absorbed less of the content.

This post and the commentary from HN folks is giving me something to think about. Thanks everybody.

This is a specific facet of a more general rule of public speaking: don't apologize. It has nothing to do with your presentation, and it's likely the audience wouldn't have noticed, anyway--so why point it out?

There is an exception to this rule, though: if the condition is A) painfully obvious, and B) out of your control, you can apologize. Examples: air conditioners in room broken, or jackhammers next door. But don't apologize for your own stuff; that's just tacky.

Some speakers can get away with it, whether as a form of humor or setting completely unreal expectations (ie. I am not prepared, but then blows the audience away with their knowledge).

Normal people can't do it (which most certainly includes myself!)

The besr tip I could give is to join Toastmasters.

I wonder why the "reply" after your correction comment (the one which just said "best") is in italics?

(I'm replying to this comment instead of that one so I don't destroy the thing I'm commenting about)

I put an asterisk after the corrected word, wonder if that matters.

Yup, it worked for my test comment. So that's a (terribly minor) bug in HN.

Well, let's see

best

I agree that it is ultimately disrespectful to the people attending, but on the other hand most of them have come just to look at you in person, see you talk (about anything really) and don't really care what you talk about or how well you are prepared. If they respect you they'll think anything you say is insightful.

When I used to write freelance articles sometimes I would string for the local daily and weekly newspapers. As such, they would assign me local crime stories -- usually something that sounded interesting. "Naked man in rowboat with .22 rifle floating around shooting at birds" or some such.
I used to have one source inside the police department that could make anything at all sound boring. He would start each interview off with "Well, it really isn't that interesting, but I'm happy to tell you a little about it."
After 20 or 30 minutes of taped interview, eventually I would agree that yes, it really isn't that interesting.
Since then I've made it a point never to say something bad about your presentation or story. If it's rotten they're going to figure it out anyhow, and no point in spoiling the suspense for them.

"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them. http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays/status/4811790555

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