Speaking - The Evil's of Slides...

I'm on a mission recently to make better presentations. Probably entirely self serving cause I'm in the midst of tons of prep work for upcoming speaking engagements.

• Software Summit
• Cocoa Studio
• iPhoneLive
• iPhone Studio
• And a couple in Europe that are not public yet

That is a lot of slides...

A long time ago (about the time of Virtuas) I found a little gem on the net called Attention Spam which I found amazingly wonderful at helping me put into practice what I had been thinking about but was not quite able to do or articulate.

Then today I ran into this post over on Seth Godin's blog. And it got me thinking about it again so I figured I'd post on my blog about it since I was running on in twitter.

All public speaking is about selling something, if you are speaking you are selling. So if you are going to speak make sure to tell people up front what you are selling (not to repeat too much of what Seth Godin wrote). Even in the case of training. When I am teaching iPhone or Cocoa development I'm selling you on how cool the topic is. Why in the world do you care about Core Data or Tab Bar Controllers anyway. If I don't sell you on why they are cool and worth learning then you will be struggling to stay awake during my incessant babbling. If on the other hand I convince you that knowing Tab Bar Controllers will make your life 10 times easier then you are going to be paying attention. All public speaking is selling.

I work hard to make my preso's hard to sleep through (of course some times I fail, but I almost never throw things at the snorers :). I hope to see you at one of my talks in the not too distant future.