How to Speak

Preface #

This article is a collection of my notes and thoughts from the very amazing lecture by Patrick Winston

Success #

Success in life will be determined largely by your ability to

• Speak
• Write
• Quality of your Ideas $\downarrow$ In that order

Quality of Communication #

Can be determined by this mathematical formula:

$$ \Huge{Q}_{\tiny{UALITY}} = \Huge{f}(\huge{K}, \large{P}, \tiny{T}\Huge) $$

Where

• K = How much Knowledge you have(1) (1)Most significant
• P = How much you Practice with that Knowledge
• T = How much Talent you have(2) (2)Least Significant

How to Start #

Don’t start with a Joke. People are settling in, they’re not ready for a Joke.

Best way to start is with an Empowerment Promise

Heuristics #

Heuristics are techniques / ideas to always keep in mind when giving a talk to be more effective

1. Cycle on the Subject: Make your idea repeated many times in order to be completely clear for everyone. At any given moment roughly ~20% people in the audience are fogged out, so to improve the probability of getting through to most people, it’s good to keep coming back to the subject.
2. Build a Fence around your idea: To distinguish it from someone else’s idea.
3. Verbal Punctuation: Sum up information within your talk some times to make listeners get back on track.
4. Ask a Question from time to time. Question has to be carefully chosen, it can’t be too obvious because people will be too embarrassed to say what the answer is and it can’t be too hard because nobody will have anything to say.

Tools #

Time & Place #

• Best time is 11 am, not too early and not after lunch.
• Place should be well lit.(3) (3)Patrick Winston always tells the audio-visual team at the venue to turn all the lights on. They often say, it might be easier to read the slides with the lights dim. To which he replies, “It’s extremely hard to see slides through closed eyelids” Dimly lit rooms make people sleepy.
• Place should be cased, i.e. you should have seen and checked before the talk
• Reasonably populated (neither crowded nor less than half). The place must be chosen according to the amount of listeners.

Boards, Props & Slides #

For teaching / informing it’s better to use boards (black / white). For professional talks you use slides for exposing ideas.

Empathetic Mirroring:

The concept where the audience’s brains are capable of mirroring what they see and so can actually feel the effects of what they’re seeing / reading and hence it’s very effective.

Boards #

• Graphic in nature, you can draw, etc.
• Speed with which you write on the board is approximately the speed with which people can absorb
• It Don’t hold your hands behind your back or put them in your pockets can be used as a target to point at for better use of hands.

Props #

Use them to make your ideas more visual. Helps drill the point across in a much more memorable and comprehensible way. Very effective in exploiting the empathetic mirroring concept

Slides #

Basic Crimes :

• Reading your slides. People in your audience know how to read and reading out loud will just annoy them.
• Stand far away from the screen / projector. People in the audience will have to divide their attention and end up looking at your presentation as if it were a tennis match, with their heads swinging as the ball flies back and forth.
• Use goofy clip art. Try to have a picture or icon on each slide, but not goofy clip art. Use simple, easy to comprehend images that will serve as handles for your ideas.
• Incorporate a background pattern. They are distracting and make the text hard to read.
• Hands in pockets.

Important Rules :

• Do not read the slides
• Be sure that you have only a few words on each slide and that the words are easy to read(4) (4)Use large fonts . Slides should just reflect what you’re saying, not the other way around. Pictures attracts attention and people start to wait for your explanation.
• Be in the image i.e. near the screen / projector.
• Keep images simple
• Eliminate clutter. Remove unnecessary items from the slide such as:
  • Logos
  • Footers
  • Bullet Points
  • Titles: We have only one language processor, we can only use it to either read or to listen, not both you should be speaking about the title and so it’s unnecessary to put it on the slide. Allows the audience to put more attention on you, the speaker, than the slides.
• Don’t use laser pointers, put an arrow to point at something you want to highlight instead
• An hapax legomenon(5) (5)A slide / page dense with a lot of information to show inherent complexity : One per work / presentation / paper / book

Informing #

• Show to your listeners your stuff is cool and interesting.
• You have to be able to:
  • Show your vision of the problem.
  • Show that you’ve done particular things(6) (6)Step by Step . All of that should be done in no more than 5 minutes
• Persuade your listeners that you’re not a rookie.

Start with a Promise #

During the promise phase, you can also express how cool something is

Example: #

Program to put colors to bordering states of US without any two adjacent states sharing the same colors

Program 1: takes forever

Program 2: takes a few seconds because of an optimization

Inspiration #

Exhibit Passion about what you’re doing / talking about

How to Think #

We are story telling animals. We start with fairy tales as young children and we continue doing that our entire lives.

To teach how to think we:

• Tell them stories
• Questions about those stories
• Mechanisms for analyzing those stories
• Ways to putting those stories together
• Ways of evaluating how reliable those stories are

Persuading #

Professional Talks #

One should demonstrate:

• Vision
  • Problem somebody cares about
  • Something new in your approach to solving the problem
• Done Something
  • Listing steps that need to be taken in order to realize the vision(7) (7)To solve the problem
    • You may not have executed / done all the steps
• Enumerate your contributions and it helps to establish that you have done something

Getting Famous #

You need to think about how you’re going to be recognized for what you do

Why ? #

How ? #

How to ensure your work / ideas are recognized. Your ideas should have these 5 properties:

                            SYMBOL
                  Associated with your ideas
                              /\
                             /  \
    STORY          _________/____\_________      SLOGAN
How you did it?    '-.     /      \     ,-'  A phrase that describes
How it works?         '-, /        \ ,-'     your ideas
Why it's important?      /-.      ,-\
                        /   '-,.-'   \
                       /    ,-''-.    \
                      /  ,-'      '-.  \
                     /,-'            '-.\
                  SALIENT            SURPRISE
              An idea that     A Common fallacy that is no longer true,
               sticks out      for instance, just after you've told it

1. A Symbol that associates with your ideas. Visual perception is the best way to attract attention.
2. A Slogan: Something that describes your ideas
3. A Surprise: Common fallacy that is no longer true, for instance, just after you’ve told about it.
4. A Salient: An idea not necessarily important, but one that sticks out
5. A Story: How you did it, how it works, why it’s important

How to End #

Final Slide #

• Don’t put collaborators at the end, do that at the beginning.
• “Questions?” Is the worst possible way to end a talk. Squanders an opportunity to tell people who you are.
• End with Contributions, list your contributions to the topic.

Final Words #

• At the very end you could tell a joke since people then will leave the event feeling fun and thus keep a good memory of your talk.
• Thank you is not a good way to end a talk, it’s trite at the very least. You can end with a quote of a prominent person, with a solute to people. You can also end with how much you valued the time being here, the people over there.