This morning Seth Godin posted something on his blog that got me thinking:

Thirsty

I’ve noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.

I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?

To answer his question directly, I’d have to say that I think the curiosity comes first.

Curiosity, and in particular the drive to learn and network seem to me to be key to success.  But at the same time, curiosity on its own is not necessarily useful.   It can be so easy to get caught in endless loops of surfing and “study” that that somehow feels productive, but never seems to actually get anything done.

So to be truly successful, I think the key is more then just being curious, but directing that curiosity in a way that has you networking with people and learning things that are supportive to what you are trying to do, and balancing those activities with everything else that needs to be done….

I think that the idea of “most productive actions” is an important one – and that people who are successful are people who (at least for the most part) are consistently identifying their most productive actions and focusing on them.

One of the things that’s so hard about the Internet is the avalanche of information on virtually any topic that is available.  It’s so easy for a simple curiosity to lead to extensive surfing or research – and sometimes that leads to a breakthrough – and sometimes to wasted time……  Perhaps the real key is an ability to intuit which of those roads you’re going down.

Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and professor of Interactive Journalism at CUNY (and a really smart guy) loves to talk about the need for what he calls curation on the web.  Finding ways to consume the information YOU are looking for, without spending tons of time looking for it, by finding aggregations of relevant materials.  The aggregations may be created by humans, or by machine automatically, or a combination of the two – but I love the concept.  I’d love to open my google reader (or some other tool) and have, as if by magic, a list of news stories, blog posts and podcasts that I’m interested in and that are relevant to what I’m doing.  We have a way to go to get there.  In the mean time, I think success requires being our own curators – making sure we sift though the maze and engage with the material that is significant and interesting, and leaving the rest.

How do you do it?  Post in the comments.

Well, that’s actually not entirely true. PowerPoint itself is not the enemy of effective communication, but the way it’s used is.

Do your audiences stay awake?

Of course, PowerPoint is a tool and, like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil; effectively or ineffectively. The problem is more than just people using PowerPoint ineffectively, rather I think the problem is that PowerPoint begs to be used ineffectively. What do I mean? Well, look at virtually any PowerPoint presentation you see. The vast majority of them look basically the same, slide after slide after slide of bullet points. Essentially, an outline of the presentation projected on the screen. Sometimes it’s even worse, more often than I care to admit I see the actual (spoken) text of the presentation projected on the screen.

So what’s wrong with that? First is that it’s incredibly boring. It’s also distracting and not useful.

“But wait,” I hear you cry, “isn’t it useful and valuable to present information through multiple senses”

Yes! It absolutely is, when it’s done well. Each medium, each sense has ways in which it is best communicated with in the context of the presentation. Screen after screen of text confuses me, it doesn’t help me to know what’s important, and if all the content of the presentation is projected and why do I need you to stand there reading it to me. There is a better way. I’ll get to that shortly.

Remember, I said that PowerPoint begs to be used ineffectively. Open a new PowerPoint presentation, choose a template if you must (and most of them are mediocre at best) and what you get? The first default slide is the title page, that’s reasonable. Okay, now create another new slide, what you get? A bulleted list. An empty page asking to be filled with text.

In the earlier versions of PowerPoint it was even worse.  Trying to be helpful, Microsoft included an auto content Wizard. An automatic process for creating any type of presentation that you needed to give. The very idea that a few simple forms could create even the skeleton for most type of presentation you would give drives me crazy.

This was taken to it’s illogical, and extremely humorous extreme by Peter Norvig when he imagined (now rather famously) what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had used a PowerPoint auto content Wizard to create the Gettysburg Address.  You can see the results on his website http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ Also very worth reading are his “making of” article and his article PowerPoint: shot with its own bullets.

There is another way!

PowerPoint can be an amazing tool to support a presentation when it’s used well. The key word is SUPPORT! The PowerPoint visuals should support the presentation that you were giving verbally. How can you do that effectively? Use the visual medium for what it does best: images.

Use the PowerPoint to punctuate what you’re saying with images, brief quotes, illustrations, backdrops and other things that help you to tell the story.

The story is the key

When you go to create a presentation, don’t open PowerPoint first! Start by laying out the story you want to tell. What is its beginning, middle, and end. Look for ways to create an emotional flow, and a payoff, and emotional reason for going along with you on the journey that you were inviting your audience to take. You may find that this is useful to do in an outline, or you may like mind mapping (which is how almost all of my presentations start), or you may work in narrative, or some other way. Whatever you do, lay out the story first.

Once that’s done, now you have a framework. Look for aspects of the story that are particularly important, now search for the visuals that either punctuate, demonstrate, or otherwise support those turns of the story. Where do you find them, lots of places — stay tuned for a post on that coming soon.

Now I think that there are times when that most effective “image” may be a few words. But it’s very, very few words.   In his e-book Really Bad PowerPoint and How To Avoid It, Seth Godin says “no more than six words on a slide. EVER.”  I think he’s got the right idea, although I’m not as militant about it as he is. I think there are a few situations where more than six words on a slide may make sense. Occasionally, I think putting the text of a longer quote on the screen can be effective. If you’re teaching a hands-on class, putting a list of instructions on the screen for the class to follow can work in some situations.  And very, very, very rarely a bulleted list may even be appropriate  to show a large variety of choices or something of that sort.

In my world, effectiveness comes from emotional engagement. As you create your presentation, whatever the topic, I believe there is nothing more important then finding a way for your audience to connect emotionally with the story you are telling.

What do you think?  I look forward to your comments.