How To Speak by Patrick Winston
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY)
The successful formula for good presentation delivery:I = f(K,P,T)
Your Impact is a function of your Knowledge about speaking, Practice, and Talent — in decreasing order of importance. Winston’s advice focuses on your knowledge about speaking. This is the easiest way to gain the biggest increases in your impact.
"Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order."
Don’t start with a joke. What you want to do instead is start with an empowerment promise. You want to tell people what they're going to know at the end of the hour that they didn't know at the beginning of the hour. It's an empowerment promise. It's the reason for being here.
- It's a good idea to cycle on the subject. Go around it. Go round it again. Go round it again. the reason is-- well, there are many reasons, one of which is, at any given moment, about 20% of you will be fogged out no matter what the lecture is. So if you want to ensure that the probability that everybody gets it is high, you need to say it three times.
Put a fence around your idea so that people can not be confused about how it might relate to something else. This will help people understand what the important points are that define your idea.
Verbal punctuation. Provide a mechanism to help people who “fogged out” to easily rejoin the talk. For example: “We have just finished talking about the first heuristic, cycling, I am now going to talk about the second heuristic for helping to make your talks more interesting…”.
Ask Rhetorical Questions. Wait 6 seconds for an answer. It can't be too obvious because then people will be embarrassed to say it, but the answers can't be too hard because then nobody will have anything to say.
Time and Place. If it’s in your control: mid-morning is the best time. Choose a location that will look full with your expected audience size. Make sure it is well-lit. Don’t let them turn down the lights.
The BlackBoard. A blackboard lets you draw natural graphics that highlight your points. It also paces you. The speed of writing matches the speed with which people process information. Use a logo that captures the main point and that you can return to. (“I once saw a Sloan professor lecture for a whole hour about a triangle; it was amazing!”) It also provides a target. The best thing to do with your hands? The point at things on the board.
Whenever surveys are taken, students always say more chalk, less PowerPoint. And why would that be? Props are also very effective. Why would that be? It has to do with what I would call empathetic mirroring. When you're sitting up there watching me write on the board, all those little mirror neurons in your head, I believe, become actuated, and you can feel yourself writing on the blackboard.
You want the slides to be condiments to what you're saying, not the main event or the opposite way around.
Props. When possible, use a prop to illustrate an idea. The word “prop” comes from the term “theatrical property”. If you watch a play, props are objects used by actors on stage to add realism to the story and to help advance the narrative. You would bring a prop to visualize an abstract concept or idea, for example. You show something with a prop and then make a connection to the topic of your presentation.
Showing how impossibly complex it is. It's something you in the audience can't understand, and that's the point, but you can't have many of these. You can have one per work, one per presentation, one per paper, one per book. That's what hapax legomenon is.
How do you teach people how to think? you provide them with the stories they need to know, the questions they need to ask about those stories, mechanisms for analyzing those stories, ways of putting stories together, ways of evaluating how reliable a story is. And that's what I think you need to do when you teach people how to think.
In a job interview, if you haven't expressed your vision, if you haven't told people that you've done something in five minutes, you've already lost. So you have to be able to do that.
Here, the vision is in part, a problem that somebody cares about and something new in your approach. So the problem is understanding the nature of human intelligence.
How do you express the notion that you've done something? By listing the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the solution to that problem. You don't have to have done all of those steps. But you can say here's what needs to be done.
And then you conclude by-- you conclude by enumerating your contributions. It's a kind of mirror of these steps. And it helps to establish that you've done something. So that's a kind of general-purpose framework for doing a technical talk/interview.
How to be famous
Now, how do you get remembered? Well, there's something I like to call Winston's star.: Symbol, Slogan, Surprise, Salient & Story.
Symbol - If you want your presentation ideas to be remembered, one of the things you need to do is to make sure that you have some kind of symbol associated with your work.
Slogan - the thing you need is some kind of slogan, a kind of phrase that provides a handle on the work.
Surprise. You can do it with one example if you're smart enough to make use of that example appropriately. So that was the surprise.
Salient idea. Now, when I say salient idea, I don't mean important. What I mean is an idea that sticks out.
Story - finally, you need to tell the story of how you did it, how it works, why it's important. So that's a bit on how to not so much get famous, but how to ensure that your work is recognized.
How to conclude
A few recommendations:
Deliver on your promise made at the beginning. Remind them what it was and summarize it.
By the time you're done, people have adjusted themselves to your voice parameters. They're ready for a joke; finish with a joke, and that way, people think they've had fun the whole time
Don’t say thank you to the audience (for listening to your speech).
End with a salute. And by that, I mean, you can say something about how much you value your time at a place. So I could say, well, it's been great fun being here. It's been fascinating to see what you folks are doing here at MIT. I've been much stimulated and provoked by the kinds of questions you've been asking, it's been really great. And I look forward to coming back on many occasions in the future. So that salutes the audience. You can do that.
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