Step #1
Give them a reason to care
âYou can take a horse to water, but âŠâ?
If youâre like pretty much anyone I talk to, you have just finished the sentence in your head, â... you canât make it drink.â Have you ever in your life heard anything so ludicrous?
To quote my mate Mark Keating, do you know what you actually need?
THIRSTY HORSES!
Seriously, if the horse doesnât want to drink, why are you taking it to the water in the first place? Just make the horse thirsty.
And yet thatâs what 99% of presentations set out to do. They take perfectly unparched people to a lake and expect them to drink. Well, my friends, that is something we shall have to remedy.
I was on a New York City hop-on hop-off bus with my business partner Don Packett and our head of training at the time, Neil Smit. The bus went past the famous Katzâs Deli and the guide explained to us that it was the diner that was featured in the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally where Sally really enjoyed her lunch. Iâd momentarily forgotten the name of the actress so I asked the guys. There was some debate as we all drew a blank. âWas it Melanie Griffith?â one of the lads said. âOr maybe Kim Cattrall?â
I knew she was blonde, I could see her face even, but I just couldnât get her name. It was right there.
Marg ...
Molly ...
Aaarrrg.
It was like an itch I couldnât scratch and because we were travelling and had data turned off I couldnât even Google it.
Just then the guide, who was sitting a row or two ahead, turned to us and said what yâall have been thinking since you started reading this ...
âGuys, I think the name youâre looking for there is Meg Ryan.â
Meg Ryan! Yes!
My brain rejoiced. The itch was scratched.
Now, while you may not all understand how I could have forgotten Meg Ryanâs name, youâll all be able to associate with that feeling, right? That âholy crap, itâs on the tip of my tongueâ feeling.
Well, that feeling is the Holy Grail for presenters.
If I can create that feeling at all in my audience, I win. Iâve bought their attention. Iâve given them a reason to care. Letâs explore this.
So Iâm sitting at TED and this guy walks on stage. His name is Garik Israelian, he is a charming Bulgarian spectroscopist (yup, thatâs a thing), he kicks off his talk:
I have a very difficult task. Iâm a spectroscopist. I have to talk about astronomy without showing you any single image of nebulae or galaxies, etc. because my job is spectroscopy. I never deal with images. But Iâll try to convince you that spectroscopy is actually something which can change this world. Spectroscopy can probably answer the question, âIs there anybody out there?â Are we alone? SETI. Itâs not very fun to do spectroscopy.
One of my colleagues in Bulgaria, Nevena Markova, spent about 20 years studying these profiles. And she published 42 articles just dedicated to the subject. Can you imagine? Day and night, thinking, observing, the same star for 20 years is incredible. But we are crazy. We do these things.
And Iâm not that far. I spent about eight months working on these profiles. Because Iâve noticed a very small symmetry in the profile of one of the planet host stars. And I thought, well maybe there is Lithium-6 in this star, which is an indication that this star has swallowed a planet. Because apparently you canât have this fragile isotope of Lithium-6 in the atmosÂpheres of sun-like stars. But you have it in planets and asteroids. So if you engulf a planet or large number of asteroids, you will have this Lithium-6 isotope in the spectrum of the star. So I invested more than eight months just studying the profile of this star.
How are you doing so far? You still with the guy? I thought not. And hereâs the problem, youâre under two minutes into a 15-minute talk.
My mind was fried, this was heavy stuff, it took real cognitive jiu-jitsu to follow. I looked around me and I could see that people were struggling. A few rows over from me was Jeff Bezos, and even he seemed to be in submarine mode. I figured if the founder of one of the largest and most influential companies on the planet is struggling to follow, I probably donât have to feel so bad.
So I tapped out. And he kept going.
There are two problems here, the most obvious one being the Curse of Knowledge, a concept introduced in the must-read book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, and while I was going to address this later in the book, letâs just take a detour and tackle it now.
Do me a favour quick. Clap the tune of the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner (really, do it). See how easy it is, and how well youâre able to do it?
Now, go find someone else, anyone really, and clap it for them, then ask them what song youâre clapping. If they are like 97.5% of the people tested by Elizabeth Newton in her 1990 Tappers and Listeners experiment, they will have got it wrong.
It seems crazy to you because you played it so perfectly.
Thatâs the Curse of Knowledge (capitalised for dramatic effe...