No one has died from giving a bad presentation. Well, at least one person did, President William Henry Harrison, but he developed pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in U.S. history. The easy lesson from his story: keep it short, or you might die.
Scott BerkunThere is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isnโt one.
Scott BerkunAll great tasks test our motivation. It's easy to court ideas over beers and change the world with napkin sketches, but like most things taken home from bars, new challenges arise the next day. It's in the morning light when work begins, and grand ideas (or barroom conquests) lose their luster. To do interesting things requires work and it's no surprise we abandon demanding passions for simpler, easier, more predictable things.
Scott BerkunWhen I'm the speaker, I know that special moment [just before speaking] is the only time I will have the entire audience's full attention. Unless an alien spaceship crash-lands on stage midway through the talk, the silence before I begin is the most powerful moment I have. What defines how well I'll do starts with how I use the power of that moment.
Scott Berkun