Steve Jobs: Ten Secrets for Great Presentations

Holy Smokes, Bullets Kill! (And Other Presentation Tips) Before planning your presentation, according to Carmine Gallo, it is critical to know the question that matters most to your audience: "Why should I care?"1 You need to think about how to inspire your audience. Simply trying to sell them something doesn't cut it. As Carmine writes, "Your widget doesn't inspire me. Show me how your widget improves my life, and you've won me over."2 Here are Steve Jobs' ten secrets for insanely great presentations.3 Plan in analog. Brainstorm in advance of creating your presentation. You can use pen and paper, a whiteboard or, better yet, a mind map. DO NOT use PowerPoint®to create your presentation—it will be used only in the final step! (More on this later.) Create Twitter-friendly headlines. Describe your product or service in 140 characters or less. Preferably, a lot less. Steve introduced the MacBook Air® as simply, "The world's thinnest notebook." About the first-generation iPod®, he tweeted: "It's one thousand songs in your pocket." Introduce the villain. Steve saw a presentation as a three-act play that must tell a story, but what is a story without a hero and a villain? Before he introduced the famous 1984 ad to a group of Apple salespeople, he set the stage, casting "Big Blue" as Goliath. "IBM wants it all," he warned, and defiantly asserted that only Apple stoodin its way. His dramatic moment sent the crowd into frenzy. While the villain doesn't have to be a competitor, it must be a common foe that your audience will want to join with you in rallying against. Your product is then revealed as the conquering hero. Create visual slides. As Carmine writes, "Neuroscientists are finding that the best way to communicate information is through text and pictures, not text alone." As for bullet points, Steve never, ever, used them and neither should you. Carmine has a section in her book titled, "Bullets Kill" that describes why you should avoid using PowerPoint to create your presentation. "Think about what happens when you open PowerPoint. A blank-format slide appears that contains space for words—a title and subtitle. This presents a problem. There are very few words in a Steve Jobs presentation. Now think about the first thing you see in the drop-down menu under Format: Bullets & Numbering. This leads to the second problem. There are no bullet points in a Steve Jobs presentation. The software itself forces you to create a template that represents the exact opposite of what you need to speak like Steve!"4 Take a look at the following comparison of bullet-point slides compared to the same information, presented visually. Practice, a lot. Most people read their presentations off of their PowerPoint slides. This is why most presentations are boring. Steve treated every slide as piece of poetry and every presentation as a theatrical event. He wasn't a natural presenter; he worked very hard at it. Rehearse your presentation, toss the script and look at your audience. Practice at making it look effortless. Obey the ten-minute rule. It's a scientific fact that the brain gets tired after ten minutes. Steve's presentations typically lasted an hour and a half. He would break them up into short intervals of ten minutes or less by interspersing videos, demonstrations, or guest speakers. Don't let your audience get tired or you'll lose them. A great way to keep your audience's attention when presenting information is though sequencing, which builds the story within a visual one step at a time, making the information much easier to digest. Dress up your numbers. We often deal with large numbers or data that an audience can't comprehend without context. Breaking them down and presenting numbers visually can overcome this. Notice how much more effectively the chart below illustrates sales figures as opposed to a matrix of data. Reveal a 'holy smokes!' moment. Maya Angelou said, "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them fe el." Steve Jobs always produced a memorable moment in a pre sentation. When he introduced the MacBook Air, he told his a udience that while everyone had seen manila envelopes floating around the office, what they had never seen was someone pulling a notebook computer out of one—which is precisely what he did. The audience went wild and images of that moment remain emblazoned in people's minds four years later. Sell dreams, not products. When it looked at the iPod, the world saw a music player. What Steve Jobs saw was a tool to enrich people's lives. Howard Schultz of Starbucks didn't have a passion to sell coffee; his vision was to create an experience: a 'third place' between home and work where people would want to gather. The dream met the customer's need and the product sales took care of itself. Have fun! When was the last time you saw someone enjoying giving a presentation? Steve Jobs had fun in every keynote. He made jokes at his own expense. While most people give presentations to deliver information, Steve always created an experience that his audience would enjoy and remember. Most importantly, he sold them on becoming a part of his dream, not his product.

Make-or-Break Verbs By Constance Hale

Make-or-Break Verbs

By CONSTANCE HALE

This is the third in a series of writing lessons by the author.

A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting.

What makes the difference? The verb.

Verbs kick-start sentences: Without them, words would simply cluster together in suspended animation. We often call them action words, but verbs also can carry sentiments (love, fear, lust, disgust), hint at cognition (realize, know, recognize), bend ideas together (falsify, prove, hypothesize), assert possession (own, have) and conjure existence itself (is, are).

Fundamentally, verbs fall into two classes: static (to be, to seem, to become) and dynamic (to whistle, to waffle, to wonder). (These two classes are sometimes called “passive” and “active,” and the former are also known as “linking” or “copulative” verbs.) Static verbs stand back, politely allowing nouns and adjectives to take center stage. Dynamic verbs thunder in from the wings, announcing an event, producing a spark, adding drama to an assembled group.

Static Verbs

Static verbs themselves fall into several subgroups, starting with what I call existential verbs: all the forms of to be, whether the present (am, are, is), the past (was, were) or the other more vexing tenses (is being, had been, might have been). In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the Prince of Demark asks, “To be, or not to be?” when pondering life-and-death questions. An aging King Lear uses both is and am when he wonders about his very identity:

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Jumping ahead a few hundred years, Henry Miller echoes Lear when, in his autobiographical novel “Tropic of Cancer,” he wanders in Dijon, France, reflecting upon his fate:

“Yet I am up and about, a walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of this slaughter-house geometry. Who am I? What am I doing here?”

Drawing inspiration from Miller, we might think of these verbs as ghostly verbs, almost invisible. They exist to call attention not to themselves, but to other words in the sentence.

Another subgroup is what I call wimp verbs (appear, seem, become). Most often, they allow a writer to hedge (on an observation, description or opinion) rather than commit to an idea: Lear appears confused. Miller seems lost.

Finally, there are the sensing verbs (feel, look, taste, smell and sound), which have dual identities: They are dynamic in some sentences and static in others. If Miller said I feel the wind through my coat, that’s dynamic. But if he said I feel blue, that’s static.

Static verbs establish a relationship of equals between the subject of a sentence and its complement. Think of those verbs as quiet equals signs, holding the subject and the predicate in delicate equilibrium. For example, I, in the subject, equals feel blue in the predicate.

Power Verbs

Dynamic verbs are the classic action words. They turn the subject of a sentence into a doer in some sort of drama. But there are dynamic verbs — and then there are dynamos. Verbs like has, does, goes, gets and puts are all dynamic, but they don’t let us envision the action. The dynamos, by contrast, give us an instant picture of a specific movement. Why have a character go when he could gambol, shamble, lumber, lurch, sway, swagger or sashay?

Picking pointed verbs also allows us to forgo adverbs. Many of these modifiers merely prop up a limp verb anyway. Strike speaks softly and insert whispers. Erase eats hungrily in favor of devours. And whatever you do, avoid adverbs that mindlessly repeat the sense of the verb, as in circle around, merge together or mentally recall.

This sentence from “Tinkers,” by Paul Harding, shows how taking time to find the right verb pays off:

“The forest had nearly wicked from me that tiny germ of heat allotted to each person….”

Wick is an evocative word that nicely gets across the essence of a more commonplace verb like sucked or drained.

Sportswriters and announcers must be masters of dynamic verbs, because they endlessly describe the same thing while trying to keep their readers and listeners riveted. We’re not just talking about a player who singles, doubles or homers. We’re talking about, as announcers described during the 2010 World Series, a batter who “spoils the pitch” (hits a foul ball), a first baseman who “digs it out of the dirt” (catches a bad throw) and a pitcher who “scatters three singles through six innings” (keeps the hits to a minimum).

Imagine the challenge of writers who cover races. How can you write about, say, all those horses hustling around a track in a way that makes a single one of them come alive? Here’s how Laura Hillenbrand, in “Seabiscuit,” described that horse’s winning sprint:

“Carrying 130 pounds, 22 more than Wedding Call and 16 more than Whichcee, Seabiscuit delivered a tremendous surge. He slashed into the hole, disappeared between his two larger opponents, then burst into the lead… Seabiscuit shook free and hurtled into the homestretch alone as the field fell away behind him.”

Even scenes that at first blush seem quiet can bristle with life. The best descriptive writers find a way to balance nouns and verbs, inertia and action, tranquillity and turbulence. Take Jo Ann Beard, who opens the short story “Cousins” with static verbs as quiet as a lake at dawn:

“Here is a scene. Two sisters are fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake….”

When the world of the lake starts to awaken, the verbs signal not just the stirring of life but crisp tension:

“A duck stands up, shakes out its feathers and peers above the still grass at the edge of the water. The skin of the lake twitches suddenly and a fish springs loose into the air, drops back down with a flat splash. Ripples move across the surface like radio waves. The sun hoists itself up and gets busy, laying a sparkling rug across the water, burning the beads of dew off the reeds, baking the tops of our mothers’ heads.”

Want to practice finding dynamic verbs? Go to a horse race, a baseball game or even walk-a-thon. Find someone to watch intently. Describe what you see. Or, if you’re in a quiet mood, sit on a park bench, in a pew or in a boat on a lake, and then open your senses. Write what you see, hear and feel. Consider whether to let your verbs jump into the scene or stand by patiently.

Verbs can make or break your writing, so consider them carefully in every sentence you write. Do you want to sit your subject down and hold a mirror to it? Go ahead, use is. Do you want to plunge your subject into a little drama? Go dynamic. Whichever you select, give your readers language that makes them eager for the next sentence.

Next from me: Pitfalls of passive construction.

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Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of “Sin and Syntax” and the forthcoming “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.” She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.

Power tools that will pay for themselves, by Bob Tedeschi

The Guilt-Free Handyman Shopping Spree

By BOB TEDESCHI

PUT a new tool in the hands of some people, guys especially, and they become giddy at the prospect of all the jobs they can now do. For me, it means one more thing to feel stupid about, and one less excuse to blow off a project that surely could wait another week. 

Part of me would like to become that other guy, but such a conversion requires a bit of cash and a bigger measure of wisdom. 

The very basic set of tools I own is good for home repairs and maintenance, and some simple work, like installing shelves or a shower head. But are there other tools — better tools — that would inspire me to chase down ambitious projects instead of fleeing them? 

I put the question to three home improvement specialists: Gordon Bock, an author of “The Vintage House” (W. W. Norton) and former editor in chief of Old House Journal; Duo Dickinson, an architect and the author of “Staying Put” (Taunton), a manual on home remodeling; and Bob Vila, whose syndicated home improvement series jump-started a genre, and whose videos can now be seen at BobVila.com. 

What I needed, they told me, was a good set of aspirational tools. But a set like that leans heavily on the power-tools category, and could therefore make your bank account tilt. 

Though, as Mr. Bock put it, “good tools don’t cost — they pay for themselves in improved work and long service.” 

If a set of basic tools (hammer, handsaw, jigsaw, drill, screwdriver, level, tape measure, pliers, Vise-Grips, adjustable wrench and socket wrenches) costs around $150, the next step up costs roughly double that. 

Nevertheless, within hours of adding the 10 other items they recommended to my workshop, I had taken on a door-modification project that I’d ignored for a full decade, and I completed it in two hours. Had I paid a carpenter for the work, it might have cost as much as buying all of those tools.

At Mr. Bock’s recommendation, the first item on my list of new tools was an 18-volt cordless drill.

“It’s almost de rigueur,” he said, and the tools have improved in recent years. 

“It used to be that 24 volts was the sweet spot for a tool with power and durability,” Mr. Bock said. “But now you can get the same thing in a smaller package. They’re just incredible.” 

You can buy one for around $60, but my panelists strongly advised me to get one with a spare battery, so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing power midway through a project. Extra rechargeable batteries cost about $30. 

What’s the best way to shop for a drill? Mr. Vila said that most builders and carpenters choose the major brands carried at home improvement specialty stores and local hardware retailers. Bosch, DeWalt, Hitachi, Makita, Skil and Craftsman, he said, are good ones to consider. 

A battery-powered circular saw is another good thing to have, Mr. Bock said, “especially if you’re outside working on a fence or up on a roof, where you don’t want to drag a cord.” 

I built a picket fence in August a few years back, and wasted a good bit of arm strength and a few pints of sweat sawing off the tops of posts. Back then, I’d have killed for a cordless circular saw.

Like cordless drills, battery-powered circular saws start at around $60 for models with 5 ½-inch blades, which will handle most basic tasks. The least expensive 6 ½-inch models sell for about $100.

Mr. Bock’s next recommendation was slightly more controversial. He suggested buying the cordless version of a tool I’d long coveted for its destructive potential: a reciprocating saw. Also known by one of its brand names, a Sawzall, it’s good for demolition and for cutting through walls. 

Or body parts, Mr. Dickinson noted. 

“It’s the greatest tool in America, and second only to chainsaws as the most dangerous,” he said.

“I know my limits,” Mr. Dickinson continued. “If I’m doing a project at home, it’s usually before or after work, when I’m tired, or distracted, and I don’t trust myself with anything dangerous.”

Aside from severing a finger, Mr. Dickinson said, reciprocating saw users might be tempted to blindly cut through a wall containing live wires. 

Duly spooked, I sought a tiebreaker. 

Mr. Vila came down on the side of Team Sawzall. 

Envisioning my next credit-card statement, I felt a good sweat coming on. But Mr. Vila said I could buy a combination cordless kit with a drill and circular and reciprocating saws for $200. 

It was the first time someone from the construction industry gave me an estimate that was actually high. An 18-volt tool kit from Ryobi, with a flashlight, drill, 5 ½-inch circular saw and reciprocating saw costs about $150. The kit even includes a spare battery. 

I bought it, and pledged never to pick up the saws without heeding Mr. Dickinson’s warning.

Mr. Dickinson, who runs a firm in Connecticut, chose as his top tool recommendation a multipiece drilling-and-driving set, which vastly expands the utility of a cordless drill. 

“This thing has changed my life,” he said. “I can be fearless when I attack a job, because no matter what I might need, it’s all here.” 

His set is a DeWalt 80-piece drill-and-drive set, which sells for about $30 and includes nut-setters, roughly 20 drill bits and more than 50 screw-driving tips. For those with more specialized woodworking needs, Ryobi sells a 90-piece drill-and-drive set that includes tools for boring and circular cuts. 

With a multipiece kit, Mr. Dickinson said, you can choose bits of different sizes and shapes that come in handy if, for instance, you are trying to remove a screw that someone stripped as it was put in place. 

In other words, I’ll be able to deal with all of the screws I previously wrecked, for lack of the proper screwdriver. It will also help replace some of the driver bits that mysteriously disappeared the last time my teenage son used them. 

If I’m going to embark on more ambitious home improvement projects, I should resign myself to making a mess of the workspace. 

On this front, Mr. Bock made a nice recommendation: a wet-dry vacuum, more commonly known as a Shop-Vac. They’re far less expensive than I’d previously imagined (a Ridgid six-gallon model is $47), and they’ll suck up substances that would destroy a typical vacuum. 

“You don’t think of it as a tool,” he said, “but you get addicted to it.” 

Slightly less addictive is the noise it generates, which is like what you’d hear if you were strapped to the deck of an aircraft carrier. 

Grab some earmuffs, Mr. Bock suggested (ones by MSA Safety Works cost around $18), or a good set of earplugs (3M TEKK Protection, $3 for seven pairs), if you can wear them comfortably. 

Also on the list of low-tech tools were a few that can help save homeowners from writing big checks to contractors. 

Mr. Vila suggested an auger for unclogging toilets or drains. “Plumbers charge such enormous amounts that for $15 you might be able to do a serious unclogging that saves you a lot of dough,” he said. 

I found none for $15, but I did find a three-foot Ridgid toilet auger that cost about $34, and a six-foot model that was $50. Both would pay for themselves in the time it would take a plumber to walk from his truck to your front door. 

Another of Mr. Vila’s favorite money-saving gadgets is a spline ($5 for a Home Depot brand), which is a specialty tool for replacing screens. “Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy,” he said. “And if you have someone else do it for you, it triples the cost.” 

Mr. Vila suggested a set of wire strippers as well ($16 for Klein Tools wire strippers). “If you’ve ever tried to rewire an old lamp, they’re very handy,” he said. 

He also recommended a hatchet. But as I studied a shelf filled with shiny, expensive blades, I backed into a display for a Workmate portable workbench ($30) and got that instead. 

I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to fix a bike as it squirms atop a garbage can, or pushed a circular saw within centimeters of the pavement, simply for lack of a proper work surface.

I also can’t count the number of jobs I’ve avoided for the same reason. I grabbed a Workmate and the rest of my new tools, and headed home for my long-overdue door-modification project. 

The door belongs to a guest bathroom, and since it is almost an inch and a half too short for the doorway, people who use the bathroom have little aural privacy. 

I pulled the door from its hinges, steadied it on the Workmate (which took about a half-hour to assemble), drove to the lumberyard for a $2 piece of wood, drilled pilot holes in the wood, added some wood glue and secured the piece with a few screws. 

It was too big by a hair, so I trimmed the piece with the circular saw, and the deed was done. At last.

Next to that door, the most vexing characteristic of my house is the lack of light on the eastern side, which makes my office cavelike in the morning. A window would make a huge difference. All I need is a framing tutorial and something to cut a hole through wallboard, studs and aluminum siding.

I think I’ve got just the tool for the job.

 

Storage Options for Tools

 

AN ambitious set of tools can help you take on projects you once feared, but only if you keep track of your new equipment. Construction industry veterans have developed a long list of home-brewed solutions for organizing their tools and supplies. 

Duo Dickinson, author of “Staying Put,” a home renovation book, recently bought an angler’s tackle box to hold loose items. “All the respectable D.I.Y. guys have one,” he said. “In a world with Ikea, you find yourself with all sorts of hardware you have no use for whatsoever. But you don’t want to throw it away, either. Now you have a place to store all this stuff.” 

Toolboxes are usually big enough to contain the old-school arsenal, but if your arsenal includes power tools, a cheaper and more versatile alternative is a five-gallon bucket. Manufacturers like Bucket Boss and others make sleeves that slip onto buckets, and have multiple pockets for tools and supplies (the Bucket Boss 56 costs around $30). Power tools can fit into the bucket, while the supporting cast fits in elsewhere.

What are the 100 most common words in the English language?

The First Hundred
the of and a to in is you that it he was for on are as with his they I	at be this have from or one had by word but not what all were we when your can said	there use an each which she do how their if will up other about out many then them these so	some her would make like him into time has look two more write go see number no way could people	my than first water been call who oil its now find long down day did get come made may part

Taken From: The Reading Teachers Book of Lists, Third Edition; by Edward Bernard Fry, Ph.D, Jacqueline E. Kress, Ed.D & Dona Lee Fountoukidis, Ed.D.

 For the next 900 words, please see this list.

Three of the words come from Old Norse:  "they", "their", and "them"
One is derived from French:  "number"
The rest come from Old English.
This info is from   

Occupy LA Oct 9 2011

Occupy LA Oct 9 2011, a set on Flickr.

Occupy Los Angeles
Protest at City Hall in L.A! We are the 99%. This is Direct Democracy.

What college rankings really tell us.

The Order of Things

What college rankings really tell us.

by Malcolm Gladwell February 14, 2011

ABSTRACT: . Last summer, the editors of Car and Driver conducted a comparison test of three sports cars, the Lotus Evora, the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport, and the Porsche Cayman S. This was the final tally: 1. Porsche Cayman 193; 2. Chevrolet Corvette 186; 3. Lotus Evora 182. Yet when you inspect the magazine’s tabulations it is hard to figure out why Car and Driver was so sure that the Cayman is better than the Corvette and the Evora. A ranking can be heterogeneous as long as it doesn’t try to be too comprehensive. But it’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous. The U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Colleges” guide is run by Robert Morse, whose six-person team operates out of a small office building in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Over the years, Morse’s methodology has steadily evolved, and the ranking system looks a great deal like the Car and Driver methodology. It is heterogeneous. It aims to compare Penn State—a very large, public, land-grant university with a low tuition and an economically diverse student body—with Yeshiva University, a small, expensive, private Jewish university. The system is also comprehensive. Discusses suicide statistics. There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution, so the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best. Describes the reputation score and reputational biases. Mentions Michael Bastedo. Jeffrey Stake, a professor at the Indiana University law school, runs a Web site called the Ranking Game, which demonstrates just how subjective rankings are. There are schools that provide a good legal education at a decent price, and, by choosing not to include tuition as a variable, U.S. News has effectively penalized those schools for trying to provide value for the tuition dollar. The U.S. News ranking turns out to be full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. It gives twice as much weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness. At a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors. Mentions Graham Spanier and Ellsworth Huntington.

 Please click below for a link to the complete article, courtesy of Colleges That Change Lives, Inc. (CTCL).

Malcolm Gladwell, Dept. of Education, “The Order of Things,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2011, p. 68