When I was 10, I volunteered to recite stories in front of the entire school. Its easy, you memorize a whole bunch of text, and you stand in front of a thousand of your peers, and you tell a story.
Of course back then it sounded easy.
Now I wonder how on earth did I get the guts when I was 10 to do that.
So that brings me to the story of today, are you are storyteller?
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So anyway, I went to a presentation course last week, and although I found some nice pointers, I found some not so nice pointers as well in the presentations. To me, there are two kinds of presentations, one which are technical and so you need every single technical detail to hang from the sheets, which include stuff like “scan”, “diagnosis”, “sensitive”, “upstream”, “1/0s” which only possibly 40 people in the world understand, and most of them have PhDs or PDEngs or some advanced degrees. The other is to make a point to the working team, a pitch to a VC or Richard Branson, and you make only five to ten points that at the end of the day people actually remember what you have talked about.
Work / Technical presentations can stay wordy and bullet-pointed, but otherwise, for the rest of us, it would be the latter.
Thus in searching for a nice presentation book to read before hand, I decided to read some books which I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Slide:ology is one of them, and it is excellent. I would ask all my brothers to read the book, because traditionally in school we are taught to put alot of things as in bullets in our slides and it has always irritated me. I guess it was because people’s attention was always reading the slides when I wanted the eyes on me! Another thing is about colors and number of slides. Guy Kawasaki advocates the 30/20/10 rule, which is an equally great suggestion as well.
As I primer you can also listen to this WebCast and the book is called: slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
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Another book which was highly recommended but I didn’t have a chance to check out was: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)
When reading these books you can’t help but think along the lines of an Apple presentation vs. a Microsoft presentation. There’s a small handout you can also read here as well: Presentation Zen
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Both books / sites highly recommend TED lectures. And unlike YouTube, which has blonde buxomy beauties and viral videos. TED has a whole range of great ideas and equally great presenters. Or would you say, storytellers.
