Thoughts When a Car Alarm Goes Off

Here’s a Monday morning funny, courtesy of GraphJam:

Laptop Battery Life

GraphJam is a humorous web site where people upload funny visual aids. For example, how long does the battery in your laptop last?

Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds

If you have an hour or so over your lunch today, you should watch this presentation from Garr Reynolds. This is what a great integration of public speaking and visual slides looks like.

Eye Contact, Eye Communication and Eye Roll

See how destructive nonverbal communication can be in the following video:

Nonverbal communication undermined the team’s leadership, dissolved the team’s cohesiveness, and ultimately got someone fired.

Hat tip to Bert Decker.

An Interesting Visual Aid

Jex Condom sales in Japan:

I’m not sure whether to be appalled by the creativity or applaud the creativity.

Tip (so to speak) to Garr Reynolds.

Four Things You Cannot Recover

Randy Alcorn posted this great set of pictures on his blog that are a great devotional and an example of great design. Look how simple the pictures are, yet communicate so much, and notice how the black-and-white half-and-half look separate each half of each quote.

Sometimes Reading Your Presentation Is OK!

Actually, that was a lie. It’s not. You can read this and see what the author thinks, but he’s wrong.

Unless you’re on the radio, a voice actor, or you’re briefly quoting someone else’s written work, you shouldn’t be reading, and no offense, but if I see you do it in class, prepare to be heckled.

UPDATE: The author has clarified that he doesn’t believe that live presentations should be read, only when reading from an article or book. That point was unclear to me, since it was near the end of the post, but the point was made.

Still, if you write your presentation on a PowerPoint slide and then read directly off the slide, be prepared for your audience to read faster than you can talk and then tune out the rest of what you have to say since they read it already.

I Hate Public Speaking

Well, actually… I don’t, but you could see after watching this video why some people hate it.

Hat tip to Andy Saks.

How Not to Answer Questions

So, to follow up from the public speaking fail from a couple of weeks ago, here is an NFL player with a “deer in the headlights” response to all questions asked.

Moral of the story: if you’re presenting, prepare some possible questions to answer ahead of time so you aren’t stuck in gear by the time you have to talk to your audience.

Public Speaking Fail

This is one of those unfortunate videos that gets posted to YouTube, gets seen by hundreds of thousands of people, and turns into one of those viral videos that get sent around in emails for a month.

Moral of the story: if you’re going to be speaking in public and you’re going to be videotaped, prepare, prepare, prepare.