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‘Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak," cover: image: "" alt: “Data & Analytics News” hidden: true
Based on Patrick Winston’s MIT lecture on effective speaking and presentation techniques.
The Communication Formula
“Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order.”
The Formula
Key Insight: The T (Talent) is very small. What really matters is what you know (K) and how much you practice (P).
The Mary Lou Retton Lesson
At Sun Valley, the speaker observed Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton (perfect tens in vault) skiing as a novice. Despite her exceptional athletic talent, he was a better skier because he had the K and P, while she only had T.
Application: You can surpass people with inherent talent if you have the right amount of knowledge and practice.
How to Start a Presentation
Don’t Start with a Joke
- People are still settling in (putting laptops away)
- Audience adjusting to your vocal parameters
- Jokes usually fall flat at the beginning
Start with an Empowerment Promise
“Tell people what they’re going to know at the end of the hour that they didn’t know at the beginning.”
Example: “At the end of this 60 minutes, you will know things about speaking you don’t know now, and something among those things will make a difference in your life.”
Why it works:
- Gives audience a reason to be there
- Creates expectation of value
- Frames the presentation purpose
Four Key Heuristics
1. Cycle on the Subject
“Go around it, go around it again, go around it again.”
Why:
- At any given moment, ~20% of audience is “fogged out”
- To ensure everyone gets it, say it three times
- “Tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them”
2. Build a Fence Around Your Idea
“Make sure your idea is not confused with somebody else’s idea.”
Technique: Distinguish your work from similar work
Example - Teaching “Arch”:
- “This is an arch”
- “This is NOT an arch” (show counterexample)
- “This is NOT an arch either” (another counterexample)
Technical Example: “My algorithm might seem similar to Jones’s algorithm, except his is exponential and mine is linear.”
3. Verbal Punctuation
“Because people occasionally fog out and need to get back on the bus, provide landmark places where you announce it’s a good time to get back on.”
Techniques:
- Provide an outline
- Enumerate points (“The first idea is…”, “The second idea is…”)
- Give numbers and structure
- Create “seams” in the talk where people can re-engage
4. Ask a Question
The Seven-Second Rule: You can pause for up to 7 seconds waiting for an answer. It feels like eternity, but that’s the standard.
Question Selection Criteria:
- Not too obvious (people embarrassed to answer)
- Not too hard (nobody has anything to say)
- Carefully chosen to engage
Time and Place
Best Time for a Lecture
11:00 AM is ideal because:
- Most people at MIT are awake by then
- Hardly anyone has gone back to sleep
- Not right after a meal
- People aren’t fatigued
Place Considerations
| Factor | Guideline | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Lighting | Keep lights full up | Dim rooms signal sleep; can’t see slides through closed eyelids |
| Casing | Visit beforehand | Avoid surprises; understand challenges |
| Population | More than half full | Empty rooms make audience wonder what’s more interesting elsewhere |
Mental Preparation
“I imagined that all the seats were filled with disinterested farm animals. That way I knew that no matter how bad it was, it wouldn’t be as bad as that.”
Tools of the Trade
Blackboards (for Informing/Teaching)
Advantages:
- Graphic Quality: Easy to exploit graphics in presentations
- Speed Property: Writing speed matches idea absorption speed
- Target: Gives hands something to do (avoid pockets/behind back)
The Seymour Papert Technique: Papert constantly pointed at the board even when pointing at things unrelated to what he was saying. It was effective.
Cultural Note: Hands in pockets or behind back can be insulting in some cultures (suggests concealing a weapon).
Props (for Memorable Demonstrations)
“The custodians of knowledge about props are the playwrights.”
Example 1 - Bicycle Wheel (Gyroscopic Precession):
- Spin wheel, apply torque to axle
- Question: Which way does it go?
- Engineers often get it wrong (50% = coin flip)
- Solution: Put duct tape on one section, think about just that piece
- Teaches: Looking at problem the right way
Example 2 - Pendulum Ball (Conservation of Energy):
- Large steel ball on wire from ceiling
- Place against wall, head against wall, let go
- Ball returns and gently kisses nose
- Demonstrates: “This guy really believes in conservation of energy”
- Warning: Don’t push! Natural tendency is to give a little push.
Why Props and Boards Work
Theory: Empathetic Mirroring
“When you watch me write on the board, mirror neurons become actuated and you can feel yourself writing. You can feel the ball as if you were me. You can’t do that with a slide.”
Slides (for Exposing, Not Teaching)
“Slides are good when your purpose is exposing ideas. Blackboards are for informing/teaching.”
Slide Crimes to Avoid
| Crime | Problem | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Too many words | Audience reads instead of listens | Reduce to key words; minimum font 40-50 |
| Reading slides | Annoys audience who can read | Say what’s not on the slide |
| Standing far from slide | Tennis match feeling | Stay near your slides |
| Laser pointer | Lose eye contact; turn back to audience | Put arrows on slides instead |
| Too heavy | No air, no white space | Print out and lay on table to check |
| Background junk | Distraction | Remove logos, unnecessary graphics |
| Small fonts | Enables too many words | Use minimum 40pt font |
The Reading Experiment
A student tested: What do people remember better - what the speaker says or what’s on the slide?
Result: People remember what they READ on the slide.
After-action comment: “I wish you hadn’t talked so much. It was distracting.”
Lesson: When slides have lots of material, people don’t pay attention to the speaker.
The Apax Legomenon
“This is the kind of slide you can get away with exactly once in your presentation.”
A slide that shows impossible complexity (e.g., Afghanistan governance diagram). The audience can’t understand it - that’s the point. But you can only have one per presentation/book/career.
Special Cases
Oral Exams
Historical Context: Used to be scarier - foreign language reading, high failure rate.
Main Failure Reasons:
- Failure to situate - Not placing research in context
- Failure to practice - With the right people
Situating: “This is a problem pursued worldwide. No progress in 30 years. Everyone seeks a solution because of broad impact.”
Practice Partners:
- NOT office mates (they know your work, hallucinate missing content)
- NOT your advisor (same problem)
- Friends who DON’T know your work
- Tell them: “If you can’t make me cry, I won’t value you as a friend”
Exam Strategy: Older examiners = less flack. Young people try to show how smart they are. Gray hair = more understanding.
Job Talks
The Five-Minute Rule:
“Within five minutes, you must establish: (1) You have a vision, (2) You’ve done something.”
If you haven’t expressed both in five minutes, you’ve already lost.
Vision Components:
- A problem someone cares about
- Something new in your approach
Example Vision Statement:
- Problem: Understanding human intelligence
- Approach: What makes us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals?
- Answer: We are symbolic creatures who can build stories
“Done Something” Components:
- List steps needed to achieve the solution
- You don’t need to have done all steps
- Show progress through the steps
Example Steps:
- Specify behavior
- Enumerate constraints
- Implement a system
- Demonstrate it
Talk Structure (Sandwich):
- Opening: Vision + Steps
- Middle: Technical content
- Closing: Contributions (mirror of steps)
Getting Famous: The Winston Star
“Your ideas are like your children, and you don’t want them to go into the world in rags.”
Julia Child on Fame: “You get used to it. But you never get used to being ignored.”
The Five S’s for Being Remembered
| Element | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Symbol | Visual representation of work | The arch diagram |
| Slogan | Memorable phrase | “One-shot learning” |
| Surprise | Counterintuitive finding | You don’t need a million examples; one can be enough |
| Salient Idea | Idea that sticks out (not just important) | “Near miss” concept |
| Story | How you did it, how it works, why important | The narrative of the research |
Note on “Salient”: Doesn’t mean important - means “sticks out.” Some theses have too many good ideas; you don’t know what it’s about. Need one idea that sticks out.
How to Stop
The Final Slide
| Option | Verdict | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| List of collaborators | AVOID | Dilutes your contribution; put on FIRST slide |
| “Questions?” | WORST | Can sit for 20 minutes; wastes real estate |
| “Thank You” | WEAK | Suggests audience stayed out of politeness |
| “The End” | AVOID | Wastes opportunity |
| Contributions | BEST | Shows what you’ve done; mirrors job talk structure |
The Contribution Slide: Should be up during Q&A. Lists what you actually accomplished.
The Final Words
Option 1: A Joke
“I always finish with a joke, and that way people think they’ve had fun the whole time.” - Doug Lenat
By the end, people have adjusted to your voice. They’re ready for a joke. Works well.
Option 2: “Thank You” - NOT RECOMMENDED
“It suggests that everybody stayed out of politeness, and they had a profound desire to be somewhere else.”
Once wild applause has started, you can mouth “thank you.” But don’t end with it.
Option 3: Political Style (God Bless)
Christie: “God bless you and God bless America.” Clinton: “God bless you and God bless America.”
They don’t say thank you. They use a conventional ending.
Option 4: Salute the Audience
Express how much you value your time there:
“It’s been great fun being here. Fascinating to see what new folks are doing. I’ve been much stimulated by the questions. I look forward to coming back.”
Teaching People How to Think
The Question: “How do you teach people how to think?”
The Answer: We are storytelling animals.
- Develop story understanding with fairy tales in childhood
- Continue through professional schools (law, business, medicine, engineering)
- Continue throughout life
To teach thinking, provide:
- Stories they need to know
- Questions to ask about those stories
- Mechanisms for analyzing stories
- Ways to put stories together
- Ways to evaluate story reliability
Inspiring Others
Survey Results on Inspiration:
| Group | What Inspired Them |
|---|---|
| Incoming freshmen | High school teacher who told them they could do it |
| Senior faculty | Someone who helped them see a problem in a new way |
| Everyone | Someone who exhibited passion about what they were doing |
Application: Express passion. Talk about what’s cool. Show excitement about ideas.
Example - Resource Allocation Lecture:
- Show map coloring algorithm that takes longer than lifetime of solar system
- Then show slight adjustment that solves it in seconds
- “Isn’t that cool?” - express amazement
Rules of Engagement
No laptops, no cell phones
Reasons:
- Humans have only one language processor
- If engaged with device, you’re distracted
- You distract people around you
- Speaker sees it and does a worse job
- Everyone suffers from degraded performance
Summary Checklist
Before the Talk
- Case the venue beforehand
- Ensure lights will stay up
- Check room is appropriately sized
- Prepare empowerment promise
- Practice with people who DON’T know your work
Starting
- Begin with empowerment promise, not joke
- Express passion for subject
During
- Cycle on key points (say it 3x)
- Build fences around your ideas
- Use verbal punctuation
- Ask questions (7-second pause OK)
- Stay near your slides
- Don’t use laser pointer
Slides
- Minimum font 40pt
- Few words per slide
- No background clutter
- Use arrows, not laser pointers
- Print out and check for “air”
Ending
- Final slide: Contributions
- Final words: Joke, salute, or conventional ending
- NOT “Thank you” as last words
- Collaborators on first slide, not last
Key Quotes
“Students shouldn’t go out into life without an ability to communicate.”
“What really matters is what you know.”
“One can make the cliché either way.” - On specialization vs. “It’s extremely hard to see slides through closed eyelids.”
“Your ideas are like your children, and you don’t want them to go into the world in rags.”
“You never get used to being ignored.”
“The amount of flack you’ll get from somebody is proportional to age.”
Based on Patrick Winston’s MIT lecture “How to Speak.” Winston was a professor of Artificial Intelligence at MIT, known for his work in AI and his legendary communication skills.
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