My Tips For Presentations

I have a problem: I naturally give horrible presentations.

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In January, I had to give a presentation to ~600 people in Washington DC. I was scared out of my damned mind. So I came with a couple of “todos” in my preparation:

  1. Prepare like I’ve never prepared before.
  2. In general, get more comfortable giving presentations, so I wouldn’t be so scared.

I know, the last thing the world needs is a bullet-point list saying: “don’t use bullet points.” So, I’ll leave the irony to others. And, yes, I’m aware that there are literally ~55,000,000 articles on the internet about this (well, I’m aware now that I’ve looked that up). But, this doc is as much for me as it is for you.

Now that I’ve done a couple presentations in public forums of varying shapes and sizes, here are a few tips:

Recognize that all of these tips come from my repertoire of mistakes. And as an old German guy once said: “A fool learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” Be smarter than I.

And, if you’re wondering, I did pretty well in my presentation. I’d score it a 7/10. You wouldn’t watch me at TED (or even TEDx), but people weren’t boo'ing me either.

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Thanks @myronm for the proofread.

 
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