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This makes the transitions between slides critically important. I have to know what’s coming next and set up what I say on the current slide to make the following pay off. If I know this, I can summon the room’s attention at the right time to make sure they are all looking at or listening to me when the next thing I’m going to say is funny, important, or powerful.
Often I throw away a great idea because I can’t figure out how to get smoothly into it from the previous story, or get from that great idea into the next story. Also, invest in software like PowerPoint or Keynote, which have presenter modes that allow you to see the next slide on your laptop only. This tool will help prepare you to make a smooth transition, just like you practiced.
All great experiences involve a dramatic rhythm of tension and release, whether it’s a masterful magic show, a rollercoaster ride, or a flirtatious first date on a blanket by the sea at sunset.
The simplest kind of tension to build and then release is the one I mentioned before: problem and solution. If your talk consists of several problems important to the audience, and you promise to release the tension created by those problems by solving each one, you’ll score big.
Patterns of tension and release can simultaneously be used to establish a rhythm. The top-10 list, popularized on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, is one system for both generating an easy rhythm and creating various levels of tension and release. As the list is read and descends closer to #1, the audience’s anticipation is building the whole time as to what the top answer will be.
At the beginning of my public-speaking career, I never involved the audience simply because I was terrified of them. I found that when I let people ask me questions midway through the talk, I’d get flustered and never regain my initial confidence level.
Twenty seconds is more than enough time for a question; after 40 seconds, it’s a monologue and everyone in the audience hates him.
Never be afraid to enforce the rules you know the room wants you to follow. When in doubt, ask the room for a show of hands: “Should we continue with this topic or move on?” If they vote to move on, that’s what you should do.
So, don’t hesitate to cut off a blowhard, silence the guy on his cell phone, and interrupt the table having a private but distracting conversation. As long as you are polite and direct, you’ll be a hero.
The study of acting is not the practice of being fake. It’s learning how to become more expressive as yourself and applying that to life on stage and off. All communicators benefit from learning about theater. See An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski (Theatre Arts Book).
If they post any of my flubs online, including the take where my fly was open, it will be more famous than anything else I ever do.
Headlining the show is Maria Bartiromo, the star anchor for CNBC (even cooler, she’s the only woman in history to have a tribute song written to her by Joey Ramone).
The producers know that many people shut down from nerves and shrink to whispers when on camera, as some of these executives did on the show. So, the producers err on the side of a caffeine-and-sugar-induced fistfight with a co-host than sedate mumbles and soft shrugs.
When you are watching TV, B-roll is what appears during the credits or between commercials, the bits of footage you never think about.
There are hundreds of deliberate choices made for specific reasons, which explains why the B-roll is filmed in the cafeteria and not the studio. They want it to look very different from the A-roll, and with $200,000 worth of lights, gear, backdrops, and effects, the cafeteria looks instead like a conference room on the Starship Enterprise.
The same is true every time you open your mouth to speak. You always have a goal, whether it’s to express a thought, ask a question, or make an observation.
And the bigger the audience, the bigger you need to be. Your voice needs to be louder, your hand gestures more dramatic, and your pace more upbeat.
And you already know how to perform. You know how to express anger, fear, passion, joy, and confusion. You know how to be dramatic, how to attract attention, and most importantly, how to convert what you’re thinking into words that you say and actions you do. It’s just a question of doing it at the right level for the environment you’re in.
The secret to speaking to an audience without one actually present is to forget the studio and ignore the cameras (Figure 7-5
All performers have a mindset they use when everything else is going wrong, and that’s what gets them through. Much like in public speaking, I learned from my experience filming at CNBC that I just had to switch off the worried part of my brain and laugh at how bizarre it all was. I bought the ticket by coming on the show — I should get as much as I can from taking the ride.
What seem like catastrophic embarrassments to me will be instantly forgotten, or possibly not even noticed, by others.
Vague, fluffy comments that mean nothing if you think about them for more than five seconds. It’s the kind of thing I make fun of other people for saying or writing in their books.
One trick is to study what the user experience is like for people on the other end of whatever medium you’re in. For example, if you’re presenting via video conference, make sure you’ve sat in as an observer on someone else’s. Then you’ll have a sense for how you’ll appear when it’s your turn. At the taping of episode 2, they showed us some of episode 1, and it was immensely helpful in calibrating my behavior.
How do you know how good you are at what you do? Probably from your boss, or maybe your coworkers. But I don’t have a boss — no performer does.
The short answer: I believe any attention at all means you did something of value. But sorting out the value is not easy to do.
anything interesting puts you in a position to regularly hear conflicting feedback. One person says speak louder, another says softer. And sometimes the feedback isn’t even about your work — you’re just an easy target for whatever venom has been building up in their lives. You are simply the first thing people have been put in a position to judge after days of being cruelly judged by others. They want to vent, and vent all over you, especially if it’s just on some feedback form where they can be anonymous.
Feedback in life and in public speaking is bewildering. There is no panel of judges like in the Olympics, no scorecards or championship rings. You’re on your own to sort out which bits of feedback matter, and more importantly, the differences between how you feel about how you did and how the audience seems to feel.
If you’re like most people, you would not be honest. I certainly wouldn’t. Being honest invites a long conversation or hurt feelings,
They’ve heard enough polite compliments to safely ignore any painful truths that slip through. They may even jab back, decreasing the odds that people will offer any future critiques. Considering how much we like to talk, we suck at both being honest with others and at listening openly and nondefensively when others are honest with us.
How could an actor so easily fool people who were professionals in the same field? The easy conclusion is that people are bad at detecting bullshit, which is probably true.
This actor likely prepared more intensely than most public speakers do. The fact that he came off as credible was no accident — he studied and practiced to appear that way. I suspect it would have taken the actor less time to prepare to deliver a proper lecture. If anything, this experiment makes the case for a speaker to put in the effort to do a good, honest job.
Learning, as a child or an adult, is often dreadfully boring, making laughter during the learning process a gift.
Having likeable and interesting teachers is also rare, and quite pleasant, even though traditionally it’s seen as indirectly related to their ability to teach you something. Either way, a speaker can satisfy many audiences without providing much substance, provided he keeps them entertained and interested.
Throw a good comedian into the middle of a boring academic conference, and despite his complete ignorance of the subject, I bet he’d sco...
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The best teachers use entertainment as a way to fuel teaching, not simply to make their students laugh.
Credibility comes from the host. If the host says, “This is an expert on X,” people will believe it. People are willing to assume credibility based on how and by whom the speaker was introduced.
The Dr. Fox experiment can be seen as a study in how we gauge credibility more than how we judge teaching.
Enthusiasm matters. At the moment you open your mouth, you control how much energy you will give to your audience. Everything else can go wrong, but I always choose to be enthusiastic so no one can ever say I wasn’t trying hard. The more I seem to care, the more likely people in the audience will care as well.
By being enthusiastic and caring deeply about what you say, you may provide more value than a low-energy, dispassionate speaker who knows 10 times more than you do. You are more likely to keep the audience’s attention, which makes everything else possible.
But being as busy as they are, the organizers don’t always communicate the gathered data back to the speakers. They ask the good speakers to come back and leave the rest to figure out life for themselves.
This is real data from a real event, and the speaker was me. Figure 8-1. My scorecard from a recent speaking engagement.
But the single most valuable data point is how my scores compare to those of other speakers. Without it, this feedback is useless.
And what about the one guy who was very dissatisfied? Was he important? Maybe he’s the VP of the division so his opinion matters more than the others. Or is he, like my former boss, always dissatisfied by everything?
Because only a minority of attendees fill out speaker surveys, the responses typically represent the top and bottom of the feedback curve. Those who passionately love or hate you are best represented because they’re the most motivated to participate. The moderate majority is least represented.
Since surveys are black holes — no one is informed who exactly will read them, and how they affect the future — there’s little reason for most people to be thoughtful about what they say.[42]
After the event, ask your host the aforementioned questions and see what data he’ll share with you. Even if he doesn’t have data from the audience, he can give his own opinions, which can be just as valuable.
Speakers can be set up to fail if they are asked to speak to people who hate them, or on a topic they do not care about.
But when I arrived, I learned my audience was made up entirely of freshmen: 18- and 19-year-olds without any real-world adult experience. It was October, so they’d been out of high school for maybe five months. I knew instantly, minutes before I was to speak, I was Mussolini in London. Unless I did something drastic, they’d ignore or heckle me as if I were a boring, out-of-touch, manager-loser type — the same way I would have if, at 19, I’d had to sit through a lecture about life in the corporate world.
Most of the time people are asked to speak, they say yes without knowing why they were asked or what they are expected to achieve.
During my talk at Cooper Union, I did my best to remember my perception of the adult world when I was 18. So, I dropped my slides, opened with a personal story of my experiences working at Microsoft, and joked about how I met Bill Gates in an elevator (I said hello and he basically ignored me), which earned some mild laughs.