SpeakHQ Blog
Many good people write bad bios for themselves. Anyone asking you for a bio, or reading it, wants you to sound awesome, but what they need and what your ego wants to say are often different things. With these five simple rules you can write a good bio for yourself in less time, with less…
Read MoreA feature of some of my books is a ranked bibliography. I rank books that I read while doing research in the order of their usefulness. Below is the ranked bibliography from Confessions of a Public Speaker, which suggests which books are the most valuable to read. Warning: trying to learn a skill by reading about…
Read MoreOne reason I rarely get excited about TED talks, although I do enjoy many of them, is I’m drawn towards the personal. For years I’ve been a bigger fan of the MOTH podcast, which is an evening of stories told without notes in from of live audiences. Although these talks are generally well presented, the…
Read MoreA running joke in the world of presentations is: how short can they be? They used to be an hour. Then TED went to 20 minutes, Pecha Kucha to 6, and Ignite to 5. The trend of short presentations has been on the rise for years and one wonders where it will stop. But then…
Read MoreEveryone has fears about regular public speaking, but what if you have to present someone else’s slides? And see them for the first time as the audience does? And only have 5 minutes? And the slides auto-advance? I believe in the theory of trying something insanely hard to make normal work feel easier. As a public speaking…
Read MoreIgnite Seattle , an evening of fast presentations, runs like clockwork. We think of the evening as a show, and each of the 16 speakers we have at each events are the stars. We do all that we can to set the stage, the audience and the format to make it as easy as possible for…
Read MoreI recently wrote a harsh review of Prezi, focusing on how that tool makes it easy to make distracting, annoying presentations. On the other end of the spectrum is a new iPad app called Haiku Deck. Haiku Deck takes a radically simple approach. The tool has very few features. It lets you pick background images…
Read MoreOne of the many jokes about Powerpoint is how much time people who use it spend picking transitions between slides. They spend more time picking out animations and fonts than what their audience needs to learn and how best to convey those lessons. It’s like wanting to make a movie and spending all your budget just…
Read MoreI’m often baffled by which things online are popular, as it has little to do with what’s good. The most popular ignite talk seems to be How to Buy a Used Car, which is a good topic, but the talk itself disappoints. It’s not delivered well enough, nor the content good enough, to be worthy of its…
Read MoreYesterday I was interviewed on NPR about great commencement speeches, and presentations in general. They had me on for the hour and we talked about Steve Job’s Stanford speech, a diferent speech commonly called the worst of all time, as well as lots of general advice on all kinds of speaking. Thanks to the Regina…
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