Tristan de Montebello: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. Let's talk about the Accordion Method. We did this in the class briefly, and it was really helpful, and I've been explaining it to people of just like a really cool way of making your talk better. So talk about how that works and how people might be able to implement it when they're trying to develop the talk. Now, I'm biased when I'm going to say this, so take this with a pinch of salt, but I think the Accordion Method, the Accordion Method might be one of the things I'm the most proud of in my entire life because it's almost revolutionizing the way I think we should prepare speaking. So up until now, we've talked about spontaneous speaking mostly, and that's going to be the vast majority of your speaking. Probably 80% of your speaking is stuff that you can't prepare for. But there are going to be situations where you know you have a deadline and you're going to have to speak. And either you have to speak because it's a job interview, or you're talking to your CEO, or maybe you're presenting to your whole team or an audience of a thousand. The old way I think is shitty. I think it's broken, and I haven't found anything out there that is innovating on this. And it drove us crazy with Michael, and that's what gave birth to the Accordion Method. What's the old way? The old way is I have a talk coming up, so I'm going to dump all of my ideas on a piece of paper or multiple pieces of paper. Then I'm going to try rearranging those ideas. And as I'm rearranging the ideas and trying to make them in a talk, I have more inspiration. And I'm thinking, oh, maybe I could say it this way, and I don't want to lose that other thing that I said in the beginning because maybe I would use it. And you start just creating this alien stack of paper with all of your ideas of what your talk might be, and then you're left with 10, 15 pieces of paper. And now as the deadline comes closer, what do you have to do? Well, you have to go through the excruciating pain of turning 10 pages into a script so that you don't forget all of those brilliant lines that you spent so many hours editing. And they're still in writing mode. They're not in your mind. So now that I've created that script that I spent a lot of time editing, now I have to memorize it. And memorization is pretty. We're not good at memorization. Robots are good at memorization, humans are not. And memorization is like a chain where you just have all of these links very linearly. And everybody knows the feeling of going through, reciting a poem as a kid, and suddenly you miss one verse and you're lost, and now you're a deer in the headlights. So what we're doing with the Accordion Method is instead of preparing our talk by writing, we're going to prepare our talk by speaking, and we're going to do so in a very specific way where we're going down the accordion to create extreme clarity, and to understand what the essence of our talk is, and then back up the accordion to bring back in intentionally just the right pieces. So I was thinking of an analogy for this, and one that I really like is imagine you're redecorating your living room. The old way, the writing 10 pages and memorizing it is I'm going to look at my living room and I'm going to rearrange things and put stuff in a corner that I might need later. rating your living room. The old way, the writing 10 pages and memorizing it is I'm going to look at my living room and I'm going to rearrange things and put stuff in a corner that I might need later. And then I'm going to bring some new things that I thought could be really nice and I'm going to struggle to make something work. The Accordion Method is saying, and imagine this were easy to do with furniture, I'm going to take everything out of my living room except the most essential pieces that make my living room. So I might be left with that one couch that I really love, a pillow, a beautiful light that I bought three years ago, and one or two other small things. And as I look at that, I'm going to have clarity on the vision I want for my living room. And then very slowly, very intentionally, I'm going to go take certain elements that were already there that I might want to bring back in, and I'm going to bring new elements that now I see make sense. And so by the time you finish with your beautiful living room, it's going to be this beautiful minimalistic room that has a very clear design choice, and every element there is there because you chose it. It's there because you did it very intentionally. So how does that work with the Accordion Method? What we do is you can go through the first step. If you want, you can write all of those ideas on paper just to get them out of your head. That's totally fine. But from this moment on, there's no more script. And I'm just going to give an example of times, but you can change these time constraints slightly. We're going down the accordion by using time constraints. So for example, you would say, "I'm going to speak for three minutes." So you're going to put a timer, and you have two rules. I have to stay in character the whole time and I have to end strong. So you must make it to the end of the three minutes, and it doesn't matter how bad it sounds, how many mistakes you make. The only point here is I'm trying to get my ideas out into spoken word. So I'm starting to populate my mind with everything and seeing where am I actually at. Then after the three minutes, you think of, okay, what did I like, what didn't I like? Then you go to two minutes. And you put a timer and you do two minutes again. And you're very strict with those two minutes, because we're just trying to learn something every time. It doesn't need to be perfect. So at the two-minute mark, you do the same thing, but now you had to shave a whole minute out of that content. And as you do that, well, that means getting rid of the noise, getting rid of anything that doesn't feel right. Then you go down to one minute. And you're going to go down all way to 30 seconds. So you started at a three-minute speech and you make your way down to 30 seconds. By the time you make it to 30 seconds, you're going to have only the essential pieces like that couch and that lamp in the living room. When you have the essential pieces, you're going to have a clear sense of what your talk is about, and it might've changed as you- Sense of what your talk is about and it might've changed as you were going down the accordion.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.