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Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.
In the twenty-first century, presentation literacy should be taught in every school.
Your goal is not to be Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. It’s to be you. If you’re a scientist, be a scientist; don’t try to be an activist. If you’re an artist, be an artist; don’t try to be an academic. If you’re just an ordinary person, don’t try to fake some big intellectual style; just be you. You don’t have to raise a crowd to its feet with a thunderous oration.
Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners.
The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.
“There’s an old formula for writing essays that says a good essay answers three questions: What? So What? Now What? It’s a bit like that.”
A major finding of cognitive psychology is that long-term memory depends on coherent hierarchical organization of content—chunks within chunks within chunks.
Remember that every piece of content in our modern era is part of an attention war. It’s fighting against thousands of other claims on people’s time and energy.
Steven Johnson began his talk on where ideas come from by revealing the significance of coffeehouses in industrial Britain. They were places where intellectuals gathered to spark off each other. Toward the end he told the powerful story of how GPS was invented, illustrating all his points on how ideas emerge. And then, brilliantly, he threw in the fact that GPS was probably used by everyone in the audience that week to do things like . . . find their nearest coffeehouse.
We think presentation literacy should be a core part of every school’s curriculum, on par with reading and math. It’s going to be an important life skill to have in the decades ahead.
