I recently attended Patrick Winston’s famous talk on how to give good talks. \u00a0I will summarize what I took away as most interesting or important.<\/p>\n
Starting<\/span>.<\/span> \u00a0Do not start with a joke. \u00a0Do provide a promise of empowerment<\/span> within the first two minutes – why the audience should listen to you.<\/p>\n During.<\/span> \u00a0Cycle back to main points. \u00a0Provide points in the talk where people can wake up and rejoin the narrative. \u00a0Use “near miss” examples – ideas that are similar but not yours. \u00a0Use logos and simple graphics. \u00a0Use the board. \u00a0Keep your hands visible, at your side or pointing\/gesturing. \u00a0Ask rhetorical questions that are at the right level of difficulty, and wait long enough for responses (it feels like an eternity).<\/p>\n Ending.<\/span> \u00a0Point out how you have delivered on your promise. \u00a0Tell a joke so that the audience remembers the whole talk as fun. \u00a0Ask for questions and always repeat the question before answering it. \u00a0Finally, “salute” the audience but do not thank them<\/span> (this is incredibly hard).<\/p>\n Winston also talked about some specific “special cases” of talks. \u00a0For job talks<\/span>, evaluators are looking to see that you have a vision and have done something about it<\/span>. \u00a0He says you have 5 minutes to prove this, and a good method is to use narrowing steps to situate your work in the vision. \u00a0And the final slide should be “contributions” (not “conclusions”), so they can keep staring at what you’ve done.<\/p>\n Finally, he talked about “getting famous” which really means making your idea sticky. \u00a0His outline of how to do so is similar to in the book Made to Stick<\/span>. \u00a0He uses 5 points:<\/p>\n For me, the most surprising advice in his talk was to not thank the audience. \u00a0I had always taken it as given that you end by saying “thanks” – but Winston made a strong argument that you should resist the urge, because you want to avoid implying that it was an imposition on the audience to come. \u00a0Instead, you can talk about how great an audience they were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently attended Patrick Winston’s famous talk on how to give good talks. \u00a0I will summarize what I took away as most interesting or important. Starting. \u00a0Do not start with a joke. \u00a0Do provide a promise of empowerment within the first two minutes – why the audience should listen to you. During. \u00a0Cycle back to … <\/p>\n\n