Tristan de Montebello: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That is really helpful. I'm preparing my talk for the summit, and so I'm going to use both of these exercises and what I take away from this last piece is as much as you may want to say a lot of things, really all someone's going to remember, as you said is one thing, if anything, but hopefully they remember that one thing. So it's essentially what's the one thing you want people to remember and then what are the pieces of support that will convince them that that's right and that's something that'll stick with them? Exactly. And again, similar to the accordion method, this works in the macro and the micro. So if you have a talk where you're using slides, use it for the whole talk. But then for every single slide, ask yourself what is my one thing? And you might have some support there as well, but if you don't have a one thing for each slide, either the slide shouldn't exist or it should be multiple slides. The symptom of not having a one thing is usually having a slide that says way too many things. I don't know what data point I want you to remember, so I'm going to put all of it on that slide. I'm not sure which piece of information is more important. So I'm going to write down all of my thoughts and I'm going to go through all of them or hope that you go through all of them and extract what you think is interesting. But the reality is people are just going to zone out if you do that. So if you do that slide by slide, you're going to gain incredible clarity and again, you're going to need less preparation and less memorization. And to build on that, a pro-tip is to make that title of that slide exactly that one thing you want them to take away. Just put it there and tell them exactly what you want them to learn.…

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