The font is too small and your eyes are starting to hurt.
You're staring blankly at a messy, wishy-washy, text-heavy, bullet-ridden slide number thirty-two.
Thirty-two, FFS.
Your ass is sore as hell, you can't tell where your flesh leaves off and the chair begins.
You feel like the presenter wants to bore you to sleep with her piece.
You are questioning your own sanity.
Slurping coffee, you glance at your phone.
Nothing makes time drag quite as much as watching the clock.
You look around, try to locate the nearest exit and the only thing you can think of is RUN.
I think you get the picture.
Well, as a communication coach, I have listened to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitching their companies, products and ideas.
Most of these presentations are crap. (Of course, yours is different.)
"First, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true, not just accurate. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken." –Seth Godin
The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things and I am as sick of boring presentations as you are.
To prevent this from happening I am going to teach you here a simple, fool-proof technique called 10/20/30 advocated by Guy Kawasaki.
It goes like this.
Your next presentation should have 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points. (Learn how to deliver epic presentations here)
By following this principle, you can avoid basic design mistakes and ultimately stand out from the vast sea of lousy speakers.
Let me break it down for you.
Make around 10 slides.
Why 10?
Looks like a normal human being cannot handle more than ten thoughts in a single presentation.
Chances are if you must use more than ten slides to explain the idea, well, you probably don’t have an idea at all and you need to go back to the drawing board.
There are many ways how to present your idea.
You can tell a story.
No, hang on, scratch that.
You HAVE TO tell a story.
Sort of, a character has a problem and meets a guide - you - who gives her a plan and calls her to action that helps her avoid failure and ends in success.
Boom.
Now you've got 7 slides already.
Recall how E.M. Forster explained what a story is: "If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events.
If you are told that the king died and that the queen then died of grief, that is a story."
"A story communicates 2 + 2, the path to 4. It doesn’t just communicate 4."
As a Korean Otaku and lover of Chinese calligraphy, I appreciate simplicity.
The Japanese Zen arts teach us that it is possible to express great beauty AND convey powerful messages through simplification.
Simplicity leads to clarity.
Use as little text as possible and plenty of empty space.
Think of it as the art of subtraction.
Less is more.
Oh, just in case you have missed it, pictures are remembered better than words.
Use them frequently.
Ditch charts & tables.
Google Garr Reynolds and follow his advice on presentation.
BTW, this is not a slide.
PowerPoint slides are like children. No matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours.
Now, speak for 20 minutes, give or take.
Microsoft found that since the year 2000 - about when the mobile revolution began - the average attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds.
Now, I want you to hold the hands with the person next to you.
Because this one matters that much.
Hold on to something, seriously.
Remember Erick Smidt, a former Google CEO?
I’ve heard him saying something along the line: The amount of data we are creating now in every 48 hours is equal to the amount of information we created from the beginning of mankind until 2003.
I'm going to repeat it.
The amount of information we created from the beginning of mankind, when we were hunting fucking dinosaurs until 2003, that collective amount, we are now replicating in every 48 hours.
So what do you think is going to break through this noise?
Your outdated landing page?
Your boring slide deck?
Your billboard ad?
Think again.
We’re in the age of social media, where the best content is short and fast, and people appreciate things that don’t take much of their time.
'But I have something important to say', I can hear you crying.
Well, that doesn’t give you any reason to go beyond the suggested time frame.
Look at the world-famous TED talks.
Given the fact that TED talks are streamed more than 2 million times per day, I would argue that, like it or not, your next presentation is being compared to TED.
The length of a TED talk - 18 minutes - is one of the key reasons behind the format’s success.
It doesn't take a scientist to know that you cannot inspire people if you put them to sleep.
John Kennedy inspired a nation to look to the stars in 15 minutes.
In a 15-minute TED talk, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg inspired millions of women to “lean in.”
Steve Jobs gave one of the most popular commencement addresses of our time at Stanford University and he did it in 15 minutes.
It took Dr. Martin Luther King a bit longer to share his dream of racial equality - he did it in 17 minutes.
If these leaders can inspire their audiences in 18 minutes or less, it’s plenty of time for you to pitch your idea.
"Yes, ideas are the currency of the 21st century. Yes you can have brilliant ideas - truly revolutionary ideas - but if you cannot persuade others to act, those ideas don’t matter. Companies do not struggle to create products. Rather, they struggle to communicate the products."
Finally, no font smaller than thirty points.
The last thing you want is to see your audience squint.
I think, the bigger the font, the better the slide.
The better the slide, the better the speaker.
Many people use much too small font and they try to put complete sentences on the slide.
Then they read the complete sentences and that's when you start to lose your audience.
Sorry, people read faster than you speak, accept that.
Another reason why the 30 point font rule should be reinforced is that it encourages you to limit the number of words you put in a slide.
A little FYI for you.
The slides of Steve Jobs had a 190 point font.
Let’s just say that you and I are not Steve Jobs, so we can’t use a 190 point font.
But he certainly didn’t use 8,10 or 12 point font and read things to the audience.
Hence the bigger the font, the better the speaker.
Making a presentation is an opportunity to make a small difference in the world, whether it’s in your community, company, or school.
Understanding who you are selling your idea to matters more than ever.
Form a relationship.
Care.
Humans like to buy from humans.
They don’t buy your product or service, they buy a better life or a better version of themselves.
How does your presentation make them feel better?
I hope to put pressure on everybody here to get really self-aware very fast.
If you have any business ambitions, any ambitions to raise money, build your tribe and, eventually, change the world, understand the following.
If you can't figure out how to storytell with words, pictures & videos on your slides, you are missing the boat.
Period.
End of story.
PS 1. Just one more thing.
You may want to focus on entertaining as opposed to educating your audience.
If you entertain your audience, you will also probably educate them.
If you set off just to educate them, you will probably bore them, you won’t educate them, and, you will come across as a crapy speaker.
PS 2. Like what you’re reading here? Well, you have three choices really.
1. Get more stories straight to your inbox. Subscribe in the page footer below.
3. When you are ready to level up, hire me.
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