Speaking is the least scalable but most effective way to get your point across. Everyone’s busy, so getting and keeping someone’s attention is a superpower. But books gather dust; blog posts can be read later; TVs can be muted. Sitting in a quiet audience in a dark room staring at one person with a microphone focuses attention in a way no other medium can match.
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(highlight:: The audience wants you to win.
Most audiences are not judges. They’re just people who want to hear something that will make them think or laugh. A speaker struggling on stage is painful for the audience to watch. They grimace when you grimace. Reminding yourself that everyone in the room wants the same outcome makes public speaking feel less like fighting a competitor and more like leading a team.)
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the strategy that works best for me when writing a new talk is to deeply memorize key story points while giving myself a little freedom to speak naturally while on stage.
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Dump a bunch of numbers on someone and they’ll forget them before they walk out of a room; tell them a story with those numbers and they may remember it years later. Steve Martin said: “I believed it was important to be funny now, while the audience was watching, but it was also important to be funny later, when the audience was home and thinking about it.”
- View Highlight
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Speaking is the least scalable but most effective way to get your point across. Everyone’s busy, so getting and keeping someone’s attention is a superpower. But books gather dust; blog posts can be read later; TVs can be muted. Sitting in a quiet audience in a dark room staring at one person with a microphone focuses attention in a way no other medium can match.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: The audience wants you to win.
Most audiences are not judges. They’re just people who want to hear something that will make them think or laugh. A speaker struggling on stage is painful for the audience to watch. They grimace when you grimace. Reminding yourself that everyone in the room wants the same outcome makes public speaking feel less like fighting a competitor and more like leading a team.)
- View Highlight
-

the strategy that works best for me when writing a new talk is to deeply memorize key story points while giving myself a little freedom to speak naturally while on stage.
- View Highlight
-

Dump a bunch of numbers on someone and they’ll forget them before they walk out of a room; tell them a story with those numbers and they may remember it years later. Steve Martin said: “I believed it was important to be funny now, while the audience was watching, but it was also important to be funny later, when the audience was home and thinking about it.”
- View Highlight
-