This is not the best talk ever, it is a talk about what things to remember to do on the way to giving the best talk ever.
(slides designed for live presentation, check the slide notes for details on what the slides mean)
2. The first thing I thought of
And another thing too
You know that I could say this sentence with
much fewer words, but walls of text are
impressive!
Diagrams that
make you squint
are also impressive!
6. This is the story of…
• How Draw Something Absorbed 50 Million New Users, in 50
Days, With Zero Downtime
• MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter’s fight for
environmental justice in the South Bronx
• A typical day of a myMCS Portal user
• How you will give the best talk ever
This is not the best talk ever, but it is a talk about the best talk ever. You will give that talk, and you already know everything you need to know in order to go do it. This talk is just going to remind you how.
You start making the best talk ever. The first thing you do is obviously to open up powerpoint and start typing…
The first reminder is about an affliction. One that affects mostly young people without a lot of experience giving presentations. It is called …
Don’t open up powerpoint until you’re ready to open up powerpoint. Powerpoint comes near the end of your process, let’s actually rewind and figure out what the first thing you need.
But before I do that, let me tell you a story.
To learn how to make the best thing ever, we should take lessons from the worst thing ever.
“Manos The Hands of Fate” (1966) is arguably the worst movie ever made. It has a shockingly low score of 1.9 on IMDB.
It was written, directed and produced by Harold P. Warren, an insurance and fertilizer salesman from El Paso, Texas. One day over coffee with Stirling Silliphant, the screenwriter who would go on to write the Poseidon Adventure, he got into a debate on whether or not it was easy to make a horror movie. He bet Silliphant that it was so easy he could do it entirely alone, actors excepted. He was the scriptwriter, and in fact wrote down the script on a napkin immediately after the bet, producing a truly bizarre story that at one point involves such illustrious scenes as an attempt to massage a satyr to death. He was the producer, and got just enough money to do the cheapest thing possible, like renting the cheapest camera he could get, which could record only 32 seconds at a time. He was the cameraman, despite never having done that before, and made no attempt to design scenes to be short, causing jarring shifts throughout the movie. He also rented the camera for the briefest time possible, so that he had to use nearly every first take. He was the sound engineer, and avoided the complexity of recording audio live by dubbing all dialogue in post-production, causing the characters to seem like ventriloquist’s dolls. Speaking about the actors, he only worked with actors that would work for free. And so he was the final person responsible for making the worst movie ever made. The film was so bad that one of the lead actors killed himself a month before the premiere. It was briefly shown in a single theatre in Texas, and then forgotten for decades, until Mystery Science Theater found it and did an infamous riff of it in the early 90’s. Since then it is a cult classic.
Reminder 2
What really makes manos such a terrible movie is not the acting, the directing, the camera work or the audio track, but the fact that it lacks a good story. Stories define the human experience. We love a good story so much that we engage in stories that aren’t even true every day for fun (books and television). 65% of all conversation is gossip (Dunbar, Duncan and Marriott 1997), and gossip is nothing but telling a juicy story. Stories are the way humanity has most effectively transferred knowledge from generation to generation. So the key thing to do in any talk is to tell a story, or a group of stories (narrative).
I just told you a story, and you listened.
That’s all nice and dandy, but how do you turn your presentation into a story? The trick is to start with the story, and build the presentation around it. The very first thing I do is start with a single sentence: This is the story of…
This talk is the story of how you, the audience, will make and deliver a fantastic presentation.
Story is a broad term. A narrative sequence of scenes can work as well. E.g. “I have a dream”. It paints three scenes, past, present and future and binds them in a narrative structure.
The next step is to detail ideas that will flesh out our story. Think freely on what sort of segments your story could have, what sort of ideas you want to touch on. The trick is to be non-judgmental. Just throw everything onto a big pile. Let it grow for a while. Your mind does its best work when you are doing something else. Once you feel like you’ve gotten to 80% of the stuff you want to cover, start reorganizing it and judging. Anything that doesn’t fit the story gets tossed out (or the story has to be changed to accommodate). Restructure the ideas into logically cohesive segments of a larger narrative.
The tools you can use range from notepad, to outliners like OneNote, to mind mappers like MindMapper. Use whatever you feel comfortable with that makes it easy to make big sweeping changes while keeping an overview. We don’t do this in PowerPoint because it is too hard to keep an overview and too much work to change the slides.
This step always takes me the longest. I revisit this regularly over a period of weeks or months to see whether it still feels right, and how it should be restructured to flow better. Shown here is (the start of) the final draft of my outline for this talk, which was gestating for around a little more than a year.
But wait (blank the screen)…
Do you need slides?
Why do we have slides? To guide the story, not to tell it.
Can you tell your story without slides?
No slides means people only pay attention to you.
No slides makes people listen more carefully.
Slides are good as a visual aid, because a picture tells more than a thousand words.
Slides are also good to structure your talk.
Reminder 3
Don’t be afraid to do all or part of your presentation without slides. Do live demo’s. Do a single slide with just an image and tell a 10 minute story in front of it. Or just leave out the slides entirely, and just make it between you and the audience, which is much more personal.
PowerPoint is old … maybe older than you, and it was not made by Microsoft originally. They bought it as a consolation prize while trying to acquire FileMaker. Should you use PowerPoint to do your slides? Some people swear by Prezi, or Keynote, or some other presenting tool. PowerPoint is good enough, and when you need to use something else you will know it. When in doubt, use PowerPoint.
Templates and slide layouts for quick design
View -> Slide Master to change layout design
Slide notes to add speaker notes or extra content
Print in notes layout to have handouts with more details
Hide slides for extra content
Presentation mode can put slides on projector and presenter view (with notes) on laptop
This screencast was recorded with OBS:
https://obsproject.com/download
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODPpbntGvlQ
No more than 2 fonts, one for the title, one for the text. Pick good ones.
These limits are not set in stone, but they are meant to give you pause. If you exceed them, you’re making it hard for your audience to grasp what you are saying, so do it only when you’ve considered your options and deem it necessary.
Remember that slides are meant to structure your story, not tell it. Make use of slide notes when you want to give people the slides afterwards and have it be useful to them.
Show it, don’t say it. Screenshots instead of bullet points. Demo’s instead of screenshots. Screencasts instead of demo’s (to reduce risk).
Keep it simple! Cut, cut, cut.
A presentation should follow a three-stage arc: first the beginning, where you tell your audience what your story is about, then the middle, where you tell the actual story, and finally the end, were you wrap it all together with a cherry on top.
Reminder 4
PowerPoint is not Word, it is not Visio, it is best used sparingly. To paraphrase Albert Einstein: keep your slides as simple as possible, but no simpler.
To make presentation day go off without a hitch, you have to practice your entire talk, in front of an audience (use a mirror if you have none). Practice it several times, each time you will learn a lot.
Read up on the maniacal attention to detail of Steve Jobs
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jan/05/newmedia.media1
Prepare your tools: presenter, batteries for the presenter, adapter cables, laptop, batteries for the laptop, …
Logitech R400 presenter: https://www.laptopshop.be/product/78180/logitech-r400-draadloze-presenter.html
Using a presenter allows you to move more freely, which makes it worth investing in one.
Before you start do power moves, see https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are
Bad poses: the prisoner, the dictator, the flasher (closed/tense/aggressive poses)
Where to put your hands if you don’t know where to put them: the Buddha (hands above buckle), the fonz (hand in pocket)
No: handouts (people will ignore you)
Reminders: slides last, tell story, props optional, simple slides, practice, be human
inspiration:
Steve jobs Stanford commencement address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
macsparky’s field guide to presentations: https://www.macsparky.com/presentations/
Be gracious to your host and to your audience.
Ask for feedback. Share your slides.
