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Category: Public Speaking and Communication Skills
Tags: Audience EngagementEffective CommunicationPresentation SkillsPublic Speaking TipsTeaching Techniques
Entities: Alan LazarusBarack ObamaBill ClintonChris ChristieHedda GablerHeinrich IbsenJulia ChildMary Lou RettonMITSeymour PapertSun ValleyUniform Code of Military Justice
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[Music]
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the uh uniform code of military Justice specifies Court marshal for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon there ought to be a similar protection for students because students shouldn't go out into life without an ability to
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communicate and that's because your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak your ability to write and the quality of your ideas in that order I know that I can be successful in
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this because the quality of communication your speaking your writing is largely determined by this formula it's a matter of how much knowledge you have how much you practice with that knowledge and you're inherent
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talent and notice that the tea is very small what really matters is what you know this point came to me U suddenly a few decades ago when I was skiing at Sun Valley I had heard that it was celebrity
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weekend and one of the celebrities was a was Mary L Reon famous Olympic gymnast perfect tens in the vault and I heard that she was an novice at skiing so when the opportune moment arrived I looked
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over on a novice slope and saw this young woman who when she became unbalanced went like that and I said that's got to be her that must be the gymnast but then it occurred to me I'm a much better skier than she is and she's
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an Olympic Athlete not only an ordinary Olympic Athlete an outstanding one and I was a better skier because I had the K and I had the p and all she had was the tea so you can get a lot better than people who may have inherent
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talents if you have the right amount of knowledge so that's what my objective is today and here's my promise today you will see some examples of what you can put in your armorium of speaking techniques
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and it will be the casee that someone of those examples some urtic some technique maybe only one will make will be the one that gets you the job and so this is a very nonlinear process you never know when it's going
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to happen but that is my promise by the end of the next 60 Minutes you'll been exposed to a lot of ideas some of which you'll incorporate into your own repertoire and they will ensure that you get the maximum
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opportunity to uh have your ideas uh valued and accepted by the people you speak with now in order to do that we have to have a rule of Engagement and that
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is no laptops no cell phones so if you could close those I'll start up as soon as you're done some people ask why that uh is a is a rule engagement and the answer is we humans
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only have one language processor and if your language processor is engage could you shut the laptop please if your language processor is engaged browsing the web or reading your email you're distracted and worse yet you distract
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all the people around you Studies have shown that and worse yet if I see a open laptop somewhere back there or up here it drives me nuts and I do a worse job and so that ensures that all of your friends who were who are paying
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attention uh don't get the performance that they came to have so that's it for Preamble let's get started first thing to talk about of course is how to
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start some people think the right thing to do is to start a talk a joke I don't recommend
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it and the reason is that in the beginning of a talk people are still putting their laptops away they're becoming adjusted to your speaking parameters to your vocal parameters and they're not ready for a joke so it doesn't work very well they
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usually fall flat what you want to do instead is start with empowerment promise you want to tell people what they're going to know at the end of the hour that they didn't know at the
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beginning of the hour it's an empowerment promise it's the reason for being here uh what would be an example oh I see at the end of this 60 Minutes you will know things about speaking you don't know now and something among those
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things you know will be make a difference in your life yeah that's an empowerment promise so that's the best way to start so now that I've talked a little bit about how to start what I want to do is give you some samples of tics that are always on my mind when I give a
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talk and first of these tics is that it's a good idea to cycle on the subject go around it go around it again go around again some people say tell them what you
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want to tell them tell them again and then tell them a third time as if people weren't intelligent but the point is the reason is well there are many reasons one of which is at any given moment about 20% of you will be fogged
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out no matter what the lecture is so if you want to ensure that the probability that everybody gets it is high you need to say it three times so cycling is one of the things that I always think about when I give a talk another thing I think about is in
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explaining my idea I want to build a fence around it so that it's not confused with somebody else's idea so if you were from Mars and I was teaching you about what
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an arch is I might say to you well that's an arch and that's not to be confused with some other things that other people might think is an AR this is not an AR Arch that's not an arch I'm building a fence around my idea so that it can be
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distinguished from somebody else's idea so in a more technical sense I might say well my algorithm might similar might seem similar to Jones's algorithm except his is exponential and mine's linear that's putting a fence around your idea so that people can not be confused about
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how it might relate to something else the third thing on this list of samples is the idea of verbal
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punctuation and the idea here is that because people will uh occasionally fog out and need to get back on the bus you need to provide some Landmark places where you're announcing that it's a good time to get back on
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so I might in this talk say something about this being my outline the first thing we're going to do is talk about how to start then we're going to deal with these four samples and among these four samples I've talked about the first idea that's cycling the
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second idea building a and now the third idea is build is verbal punctuation so I'm enumerating I'm providing numbers I'm giving you a sense that there's a seam in the talk and you can get back back on
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okay so now we're on a roll uh and since we're on a roll can you uh guess what fourth idea might be here an idea that helps people get back on the
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bus yes ask question ask a question yes thank you so ask a question and so I will ask a question how how
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much dead air can there be how long can I pause uh I counted 7 Seconds it seems like an eternity to me to wait and not say anything for 10 for 7 seconds but that's the the standard amount of time you can wait for an answer and of course the question has to be carefully chosen
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it can't be too obvious because then people will be embarrassed to say what the answer is can't be too hard because nobody will have anything to say so here are some sample eristics you can put in your armorium and build up your your repertoire of uh ideas about
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presentation and now if this persuades you that there is something to know that there there is knowledge then I've already succeeded because what I want to convince you of is if you watch the speakers you admire and feel are
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effective and ask yourselves why they're successful then you can build up your own personal repertoire and develop your own personal style and that's that's my fundamental objective and the rest of this talk is about some of the things that are in my arm inventorium that I think are
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effective so next thing on our agenda as we start to discuss these other things is a discussion of time and place so what do you think is a good time to have a lecture 11:00 a.m.
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yeah and the reason is most people at MIT are awake by then and hardly anyone is going back to sleep it's not right after a meal people aren't fatigued from this or that it's a
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great time to have a lecture so that brings me next to the question of what about the place and the most important thing about the place is that it be well
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lit this room is well lit problem with the other kinds of rooms is that we humans uh whenever the lights go down or whe whenever the room is dimly lighted it signals that we should go to sleep so
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whenever I go somewhere to give a talk even today the first thing I do when I speak to the audiovisual people is say keep the lights full up oh they might reply people will see the slides better
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if we turn the lights off and then I reply it's extremely hard to see slides through closed eyelids what else can you say about the place well the place should be
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cased and I mean that in the clal sense of like uh if you're robbing a bank you would go to the bank you know some some occasions before to see what it's like so there are no surprises when you uh when you do your
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robbery so uh whenever I go somewhere to speak the first thing I ask my host to do is to take me to the place where I'll be speaking so that there any weirdnesses I'll be able to um to deal with it uh sometimes it might
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require some intervention some time it just might require me to understand what the challenges are so when I came here this morning I did what I typically do I imagined that all the seats were filled with disinterested farm
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animals that way I knew that no matter how bad it was it wouldn't be as bad as that so uh finally it should be reasonably it should be reasonably populated
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it should be it should be the case that you know if there are 10 people in this Hall everyone would be wondering what's going on that's so much more interesting that nobody's here so you want to get a right siiz place that's doesn't have to be packed but it has to be more than half
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full so those are some thoughts about uh time and place next thing I want to talk about is uh subject of uh bo boards and props and
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slides well these are the tools of the trade uh I uh believe that this is the uh this is the the right tool for uh speaking when your purpose is uh informing uh the slides are good when
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your purpose is uh exposing but this is what I use when I'm informing teaching lecturing and there are several reasons why I use it for one thing when you use the board you have a Graphic
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quality it's the case that when you have a board then you can easily exploit the fact that you can use Graphics in your presentation so that's the graphic quality that I like and next thing I
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like is like a speed property the speed with which you write on the Blackboard is approximately the speed at which people can absorb ideas if you go flipping through a bunch of slides nobody can go that
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fast finally one great property of a board is that it's can be a Target many people who are novices at speaking find
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themselves uh suddenly aware of their hands it's as if their hands were private parts that shouldn't be exposed in public so right away they go into the pockets and this is considered insulting in some parts of the world or
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alternatively maybe the hands will go in in back like this I was once in a Convent in Serbia and uh my uh host U well we were as soon as we entered a nun came up to
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us and offered us a refreshment and I was about to say no thank you when he said eat that stuff or die it's a question of local custom and and politeness but then uh before anything happened there uh the nun
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pulled my hands off like this because it was extraordinarily insulting in that culture to have your hands behind your back so uh why is that well it's it's usually supposed that that's what that has to do with whether you're concealing a weapon so if your hands are in your
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pockets behind your back then um it looks like you might have a weapon and that's what I mean by The Virtue one of these virtues of the board now you have something to do with your hands you can point out the
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stuff I was once watching Seymour paper give a lecture I thought it was terrific so I went a second time first time to absorb the content second time to note the style and what I discovered is that papet was constantly pointing at the board and
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then I thought about a little while and I noted that none of the stuff he was pointing to had anything to do with what he was saying nevertheless it was a effective technique so that's a just a little bit
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about the the virtue of of of black boards and now I want to talk about props you know the custodians of knowledge about props s are the playwrights many decades ago I saw a play by Hinrich Ipson it was head of
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gabbler I remember vaguely there was about a woman in an unhappy marriage and her husband was in competition for an academic job with somebody else and he was going to lose partly because he was boring and partly because the competitor
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had just written a magnificent book by the way this is back in the days before they were copying machines and comp computers any anyhow as the play opens there's a pot bellied
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stove and in the beginning of the play uh the putt belly stove with its open door just has some uh slightly glowing Embers but the P stove is always there and it tension mounts in the play
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uh and you see this manuscript this prop that Ipson so artfully used you just know that something's going to happen because as the play goes on the Fire gets bigger and hotter and finally all
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consuming and you just know that that manuscript is going to go into that fire it's memorable thing it's what I remember about play so the play rights have got this all figured out uh but on the other hand they're not the
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only people who can use props here's an example of the use of a prop also due to sear paper he was talking about how it's important to look at the problem in the right way and here's an example that uh
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not only teaches that but makes it possible for you to embarrass your friends in mechanical engineering so here's here's what you do take this bicycle wheel you start it spinning and then you put some torque on the axle or
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equivalently you blow on the edge and the issue is does it go that way or does it go that way now the mechanical engineers will immediately say oh yes I see right hand screw and they'll put
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their fingers in this position but forget exactly how to align their fingers with various aspects of the problem and so it's you usually the case that they get it right with about a 50% probability so they um very fancy
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education gets them up to the point where they're equivalent to flipping a coin but it doesn't have to be that way because you can think about the problem a little differently so here's what you do you take some duct tape and you uh
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put it around part of the wheel like that and now you start to think about not the whole wheel but just the little piece that's underneath the duct tape so here that piece comes rolling over the top and at this point you blow on it with a puff of air forgetting about the
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rest of the wheel what happens to that little piece that's under the duct tape it must want to go that way cuz you bang on it like that it's already going down like that and what about the next piece same thing next piece same thing so the only thing that can happen is the wheel
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goes over like that and so now you'll never Wonder again because you're thinking about the problem in the right way and it's demonstrated by the use of a problem you can try this after we're
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done another example I like to remember is one from when I was taking 801 Alan Lazarus was the instructor at the time and he was talking about the conservation of energy kinetic and potential
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and there was a long wire in the ceiling in 26 100 attached to a much bigger steel Ball but one not un like this and Lazarus uh took the ball up against the wall like this he
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put his head flat against the wall to steady himself and then uh he let go and the Pendulum takes many seconds ago over and back and then uh gently uh kisses lazarus's nose and so you have many seconds to
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think this guy really believes in the conservation of energy um do not try this at home the problem is that uh first time
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you do this you may not just let go there's a natural human tendency to push so uh that's a little bit on a subject of
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props you know it's interesting whenever surveys are taken students always say more chalk less PowerPoint and uh why would that be uh props are always also very effective why would that be uh I'll give
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you my Lunatic Fringe view on this it um has to do with uh what I would call
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empathetic mirroring when you're sitting up there watching me right on the board all those little mirror neurons in your head I believe become actuated and you can feel yourself writing on the Blackboard and even more so uh when I uh talk about
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this steel ball going that way and this way you can you can you can feel the ball as if you were me and you can't do that with a slide you can't do it with a picture you need to see see it uh in in the physical world that's why I think
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that oh yes of course it's it's there there speed questions involved too that have to be separated out but I think the empathetic mirroring is why props and the use of a Blackboard are so effective
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well let's see oh yes there is one more thing by way of uh the tools and that has to do with the uh use of slides I repeat I think they're for
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exposing ideas not for teaching ideas but that's what we do in a job talk or conference talk we expose ideas we don't teach them so let me tell you a little bit about my views on that
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um I remember once I was um in um Terminal A had Logan airport I just come back from a really miserable conference and the flight was really horrible it was
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one of those that feels like an unbalanced washing machine and for the only time in my life I decided to uh stop on my way to my car and have a cup of coffee and relax a little bit and I as I was there for a few minutes uh someone came up to me and said uh are
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you Professor Winston I think so I said I don't know I guess I was trying to be funny in any event uh he said I'm on my way to Europe to give a job talk would you mind critiquing my slides not at all I said you have too
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many and they have too many words how did you know he said thinking perhaps I'd seen a talk of his before I hadn't uh my reply was because it's always true there are always too many slides always too many words so let me
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show you some extreme examples of how not to use slides well for this demonstration I need to be uh way over here um and uh when I get over here then
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I can start to say things like U one of the things you shouldn't do is read your transparencies people in your audience know how to read and reading will just annoy them also you should be sure that you have only a few words on each transparency and that the words are easy
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to read and I hope it driving you crazy because I'm committing uh all kinds of crimes the first of which is that there are too many words on this slide second of which is I'm way over there and it slides away over there so
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you get into this uh tennis match feeling of uh shifting back and forth between the slide and the speaker you want the slides to be uh condiments to what you're saying not the main event or the opposite way around so how can we
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fix this step number one is to get rid of the background junk that's always distraction uh step number two is to get rid of the words when I reduceed the the words to these then everything I
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read a previous time I'm not licensed to say because it's not on the slide I'm not reading my slides anymore but I'm saying what was written on the slides in a previous example so what else can we do to
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simplify this well we can get rid of the logos we don't need them simplification what else can we do get rid of the title now I want to talk to you about
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some rules for slide preparation I'm telling you the title doesn't have to be up there by reducing the number of words on the slide I'm allowing you pay more attention to me unless to what's written on the slide I mentioned it before we have only
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one language processor and we can either use it to read stuff or to listen to the speaker and so if we have too many words on the slide forces people in the audience to read this stuff and not listen student of mine did an experiment
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a few years ago uh he taught some students some um web based programming ideas half the information was on slides he said the other half and then for a control group he reversed it and the
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question was what did the subjects that is to say freshman in his fraternity what did the subjects remember best what he said or what they read on the slide and the answer is what they read on the
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slide when their slides have a lot of material on it they don't pay attention to the speaker in fact in the after Action Report one of the subjects said I wish you hadn't talked so much it was distracting well that last item is
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eliminate clutter I hear some clutter no no no reason even for those bullets so the too many words problem is a consequence of h a crime Microsoft has committed by allowing you to use funds
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that are too small so you should all have a sample slide like this that you can use to determine what the minimum Fun Size is that's that's easily leisurable shiv what do you think of
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those which size is right what's that size is right yeah minimum maybe 40 or 50 yeah he says 40 or 50 I think it's about right 35 is get too small not
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necessarily because you can't read it but because it because you're probably using it to get too many words on the slide what other crimes do we have well we have the laser pointer crime not for that I you know in the old
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days when we didn't have laser pointers we used wooden ones and people would go waving these things around and pretty soon it became almost like a the CH swirling contest so here's what
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here's what I recommended in the old days for dealing with this kind of pointer this example of used of a prop Jim glass up there saw this talk
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about 20 years ago and uh so oh yeah I remembered that talk that's the one where you broke the pointer it's amazing how props uh tend to be the things that are remembered well now oh we don't have uh we don't have physical pointers anymore
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we've got uh we got laser pointers that's a Wonder more people aren't driven into epileptic fits over this sort of stuff but here's what tends to happen look at that it's a lovely recursive picture and I can become part
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of it by putting that laser beam right on the back of my head up there and what do you see you see the back of my head I'm have no eye contact no engagement nothing I was sitting with a
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student watching a talk one day and she said you know what we could all leave and he wouldn't know so what happens when you use a laser pointer you can't use a laser pointer without turning your head and
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pointing it at something and when you do that you lose uh you lose contact with the audience you don't want to do it so what do you do if you need to need to identify something in your image and you don't want to point at it with a laser this is what you do put a little arrow
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on there and say now look at that guy number one at the end of Arrow number one you don't need to have laser pointer to do that the to heavy crime when people ask me to review a
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presentation I ask them to print it out and lay it out on a table when they do that it's easy to see whether the talk is too heavy too much text not enough air not enough white
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space not enough imagery this is a good example of uh such a talk way too heavy uh the uh presenter has taken advantage of uh small font sizes to get as much on the slide as he
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wanted lots of crimes here but uh the too heaviness the fact that it's too heavy is what I wanted to illustrate so here by contrast another talk one I gave a few years ago it's not it wasn't a deeply technical talk but I show it to
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you because there's air in it it's mostly pictures of things there are three or four slides that have text on them but when I come to those I give the audience time to read them and they're there because they might have
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have some historical significance the first slide with a lot of text on it is a extraction from the 1957 from the for the from the proposal for the 1957 AI conference at Dartmouth extraordinarily interesting event and
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that historical extraction from The Proposal helps drive that point home what else have we got here oh yeah your vocabulary word for the day this is an NAX Lon
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what that means is this is the kind of slide you can get away with exactly once in your presentation this is a slide that got some currency some years ago because it shows the complexity of um governing in
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Afghanistan by showing how impossibly complex it is it's something we you in the audience can't understand and and that's the point but you can't have many of these you can have one per work one per presentation one per paper one per
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book that's what it that's what epex Lan is and this is an example of it well I've shown you some crimes and so you might be asking do these crimes actually occur so
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um they do there's the hands in the pockets crime there's a um crime and time and place selection
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here this is how you get to the BTO theater first thing you do is you get down these steps over at the media lab then you cross this large open space then you turn right down this
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Corridor this point whenever I go in there I wonder if if there are torture implements around the corner and then when you get in there you get into this dark gloomy place so it's well- named what when they call it the baros theater because it's a place where you can watch
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a movie but it's not a place where you can give a talk now on a subject that doesn't happen here's a talk I attended a while back in stada notice that the speaker is H far
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away from the slides speaker is using a laser pointer and you say to me well what's happening here it's by the way the 80th 80th slide in the presentation notice that it stent with
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words this is the first of 10 conclusion slides so uh what's the audience reaction that's the sponsor of the meeting he's reading his email this is the co-sponsor of the
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meeting he's examining the lunch [Music] menu what about this person this person looks like he's paying attention but this because it's a still picture if you were to see a video what
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you would see is something like this so yeah it it it does happen well now uh that's a a quick review of of tools now I want to talk
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about some special cases we could talk a little bit about uh informing or to say it another way doing what I'm doing now but I'll just say a few words about that uh in that kind of in that kind of
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presentation you want to start with a promise like I did for this for this uh for this hour that we're going through now but then it comes to the question of how do you inspire people I've given this talk for a long time and a few years ago um uh our
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department chairman said would you please give this talk to uh a new faculty and be sure to emphasize what it takes to inspire students and strangely I hadn't thought about that question before so I started a survey I talked to some of my incoming freshman advises and
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I talked to senior faculty and everything in between about how they've been inspired what I found from the uh incoming freshman is that they were inspired by some high school teacher who told them they could do it what I found in the senior
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faculty they um were inspired by someone who helped them to see a problem in a new way and what I saw from everyone is that they were inspired when someone exhibited passion
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about what they were doing exhibited passion about what they were doing yeah so that's uh that's one one way to be inspiring it's easy for me because you know I do artificial
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intelligence um and uh how how can you not be interested in artificial intelligence right I mean if you're not interested in artificial intelligence you're probably not interested in interesting things so uh when I'm lecturing uh in my
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AI class it's natural for me to talk about what I think is cool and how exciting some new idea is uh so that's the kind of that's the kind of expression of passion that makes a difference uh while informing with
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respect to this question of of of inspiring oh yeah and of course during this promise phase you can also Express how cool stuff is let me give you an example of a lecture that starts this
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way I'm talking about resource allocation it's the same sort of stuff you would think of when you're s it's the same sort of ideas you would need if you're allocating a aircraft to a flight schedule or trying to schedule a factory or something like that but the example is putting colors on the states in the
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United States without any bordering states having the same color so here it goes this is what I show in the beginning of the class this is a way of doing that coloring and you might say well why don't we wait till it
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finishes would you like to do that no well we're not going to wait till it finishes because the sun will have exploded and consumed the Earth before this program finishes but with a slight adjustment to how the program works which I tell my
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students you will understand in the next 50 minutes this is what you get Isn't that cool you know you got you got to be you got to be amazed by stuff that takes a computation from longer
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than the lifetime of the solar system into a few seconds so that's what I mean by providing a promise up front and expressing some passion about what you're talking about well the last item in this little block here is uh uh it has to do with
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what people think that they do at MIT you ask a faculty what the most important purpose is and they'll say well uh the most important thing I do is teach people how to think and then uh you say oh that's great how do you teach people how to
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think Blank Stare no one can quite respond to that part that natural next question so how do you teach people how to think well I believe that we are storytelling
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animals and that uh we start to developing our story understanding and manipulating skills with fairy tales in childhood and continue on through professional schools like law business medicine engineer everything and we
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continue doing that throughout life so if uh that is what thinking is all about then when you want to teach people how to think you provide them with the stories they need to know the questions they need to ask about those stories mechanisms for analyzing those stories
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ways of putting stories together ways of evaluating how reliable the story is and that's what I think you need to do when you teach people how to think but that's all about education and uh many of you here not necessarily for
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that but rather for uh for this part for persuading which breaks down into several categories oral exams not shown job talks getting famous I won't say much about oral exams other than the
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fact that they used to be a lot scarier than they are today in the old days um reading the literature in a foreign language was a part of that and there was a a high failure rate and when you look at when you look back on those uh
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on those failures the most uh usual reason for people failing an oral exam is failure to situate and a failure to practice by situate I mean it's important to talk about your research and context uh this is a problem that's
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being pursued all over the world there hasn't been any progress before me in past 30 years um everyone is looking for a solution because it will have impact on so many other things so that's situating in time and place and field and then as
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far as practice is concerned yes practice is important but that doesn't mean uh showing your slides to the people who share an office with the problem with that is that um if people know what you're doing they will
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hallucinate that there's material in your presentation that isn't there it it isn't there a variation on the scene by the way is your faculty supervisor is not a very good person to help you debug a talk because they in fact know what you're doing and they will in fact
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hallucinate there's material in your presentation that isn't there so you need to get together some friends who don't know what you're doing and have them well you start the practice session by saying if you can't make me cry I
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won't value you as a friend friend anymore and then when you get to the faculty uh on a uh oral exam it will be easy you see um difficulty the amount of flack you get from somebody is proportional to age
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the older somebody is the more uh the more they understand where they are in the world but but the young people are trying to show the old people how smart they are so so sobly vicious so whenever you have an opportunity to have an examining committee that's full of people with gray hair that's what you
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want well that's just a word or two about something I haven't listed here let's get into the subject of job talks so I was um sitting in a bar uh many years ago uh in uh San Diego I was a member of the
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Navy science board and I was saying with a couple of uh my colleagues on the board uh Dolores Eder from the University of Colorado uh she made me so jealous I could spit because she written 21 books and I'd only written 177 and then the other one was
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uh bill welon from the University of Texas he was a electrom magnetism guy and he know knew how to use rail guns to to drive steel rods through tank armor these are interesting people so I said um what do you look for uh in a uh
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faculty candidate and uh within a one microc Dolores said they have to show us they've got some kind of vision quickly followed by Bill who said they have to show us that they've done
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something oh that sounds good I said and then I said to them how long does the candidate have to establish these two things what do you think compare your answer to
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theirs 5 minutes so if you haven't expressed your vision if you haven't told people that you've done something in five minutes you're you you've already lost so you you have to be able to do that and let me just mention a couple of things in
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that connection here which is you know the vision is in part a problem that somebody cares about and something new in your
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approach so the problem is understanding the nature of human intelligence and the approach is asking questions about what makes us different from chimpanzees and neandertals is it merely a matter of quantity or we just a little bit smarter
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in some continuous way or do we have something that's fundamentally different the chimpan Tendencies don't have and the Andals either and the answer is yes we do have something different we are symbolic creatures and because we're symbolic
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creatures we can um we can uh build symbolic descriptions of relations and events we can string them together and make stories and because we can make stories that's what makes us different so that's that's that's my stump speech that's how I
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start most of my talks on my my own personal research how do you express the notion that you've done something by listing the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the
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solution to that problem you don't have to have done all of those steps but you can say here's here's what needs to be done an example here's what needs to be done we need to specify some Behavior we need to enumerate the constraints that
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make it possible to deal with that behavior we have to implement a system because we're engineers and we don't think that we've understood something unless we can build it and we've built such a system and we're about to demonstrate it to you today that would be an example of enumerating series of
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steps needed to realize the vision so then blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and then you conclude by you conclude by enumerating your contributions
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it's kind of mirror of of these steps and helps to establish that you've done something so that's a kind of general purpose framework for doing a technical talk now only a few more things left to do today uh getting famous is the next item
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on our agenda because once you've got the job you need to think a little bit about how you're going to be recognized for what you do so [Music] well first of all why should you care
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about getting famous I thought about this um in connection with a fundraising event I attended once fundraising event for raising money to save Venice from going underwater and
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having all of its art destroyed anyway I was sitting here and JC was sitting here that was uh Julia the late Julia
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Child and as the evening wore on more and more people would come up and ask Julia to autograph something or Express a a feeling that she had changed their life and it just happened over and over
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again So eventually I turned to Julia and I said Miss child is it fun to be famous and she thought about it for a second and she said you get used to it but you know what occurred to me you
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never get used to being ignored so it's you know it's it's here's a way to think about it your ideas are like your children and you don't want them to go into the world in rags so what you want to do is to be sure that you have these techniques these mechanisms these
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thoughts about how to present the ideas that you have so that they're recognized for the value that that is in them so that's why it's a legitimate thing to concern yourself with the with packaging now how do you get uh remembered well there's something I like
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to call Winston star and every one of the items I'm about to articulate has a starts with an S so if you want your presentation ideas to be remembered one of the things you need to do is to make sure that you have
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some kind of symbol associated with your work so this Arch example is actually from my PhD thesis many many years ago and in the course of uh my work uh at that time uh this work on Arch learning
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became mildly famous and I didn't know why it was only many years later that I realized that that work accidentally had all of the elements on this star so the first element is that there was a kind of symbol it's the arch
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itself next thing you need is some kind of slogan a kind of phrase that provides a handle on the work and in this case the phrase was one shot learning and it was one shot because the
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program I wrote learned something definite from every example that was presented to us so in going from a model based on this configuration to something that isn't an arch based on that configuration the program learned that it has to be on top one shot
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learning so that's a simple slogan now we need a surprise yeah the surprise is you don't need a million examples of something to learn you can do it with one example if
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you're smart enough to make use of that example appropriately so that was the surprise you can learn something definite from each example next item was a Salient idea now when I say Salient idea I don't
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mean important what I mean is an idea that sticks out uh some some thesis funnily enough have too many good ideas and you don't know what it's all about because which one is it it so you need an idea that sticks out and the idea that stuck out
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here was a notion of a near miss you see this is not an arch but it doesn't miss by much so it's a near Miss finally you need to tell the
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story of how you did it how it works why it's important so that's um a bit on uh how to not so much get famous but how to ensure that your work is recognized well that that we're almost
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finished because now we're we're down to this last item which is U how to stop and when we come to that there's a question of all right well what is the final slide and what are the final words
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so for the final slide let me give you some examples of possibilities how about this one well you might see that slide and
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uh think to yourself there are thousand faculty at MIT nice piece of work but not so much but it's only a tiny any piece of work if you divide by a thousand so when you show a whole gigantic list of collaborators at the
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end of a talk it's a kind of it's a it's it's it's a kind of let down because it suggests that nobody knows well did you do anything significant now you got to you got to recognize your collaborators right so where do you do that not on the last slide on the first slide all this was on
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the first slide these are the collaborators so you don't want to put them at the end you don't want a slide like this how about this one this is the worst possible way to end a talk because this slide can be up there
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for 20 minutes I've seen it happen it squanders real estate it squanders an opportunity to tell people who you are it's it's just what about this one
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I often see it I've never seen anybody write it down also it wastes opportunity oh my [Music] God even
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worse all of these slides do nothing for you they waste an opportunity for you to tell people to leave people with what you with who you are well well what about this this a good
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one it might seem so at first but here's the problem if you say these are my conclusions these are perfectly legitimate conclusions that nobody cares about what they care about is what you
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have done and that's why your final slide should have this label contributions it's a mirror of what I said over there about how job talks on to ought to be like a sandwich and the final Slide the one that's up there while people are asking questions and
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filing out it ought to be the one that has your contributions on it here's an example from my own stump speech yeah this is what uh I talk about a lot yes here are the things that I typically
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demonstrate and I wait for people to read it and then the final element there is this is what we get out of it so that's a example of a contribution line all right now what about the other part you know
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you got your final slide slide up there it's a contribution slide somehow you have to tell people you're finished so uh let's check out a few possibilities one thing you could do in the final words is you could uh
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tell a joke it's okay by the time you're done people have adjusted themselves to your voice parameters they're ready for a joke I was sitting in another bar this
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time in Austin Texas with a colleague of mine named Doug lenat and Doug's a fantastic speaker and so I said uh to Doug Doug you're a fantastic speaker what's your secret and he said oh
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I always uh finish with a joke and that way people think they've had fun the whole time so yeah a joke will work down there how about uh this
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one thank you I don't recommend it it's a weak move you will not go to hell if you conclude your talk by saying thank you but it's a weak move and here's why when you say thank you even worse
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thank you for listening it suggests that everybody has stayed that long out of politeness and that they had a profound desire to be somewhere else but they're so polite they stuck it out and that's what you're thanking them for so once wild Applause has started you can mouth a thank you and it's not
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there's nothing wrong with that but the last thing you do do should not be saying thank you now do you say to me well doesn't everybody say thank you well what everybody does is not necessarily the right thing and I'd like to illustrate how
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some talks can end without saying thank you I like to draw from political speeches but the ones that I've heard recently aren't so good so so I'm going to have to go go back a little bit so here's a Governor Christie
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he uh gave the U Republican keynote address one year uh this is the end of his talk let's see what he does and together everybody together we
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will stand up once again for American greatness for our children and grandchildren God bless you and God bless America that's some a classic benediction ending God bless you God
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Bless America now I I don't want to be partisan about this so I think I better switch to the keynote address in the Dem Democratic Convention I was delivered that year by by Bill Clinton who knows something about how to
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speak if that is what you want if that is what you believe you must vote and you must reelect President Barack Obama God bless you and God bless
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America now watch this let's go back a little bit and redo it what I want you to see is that at one point he seems to be almost pressing his lips together forcing himself not to say thank you and then there's another place where he does a little salute so watch for those this time
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around if that that is what you want if that is what you believe you must vote and you must reelect President Barack Obama God bless you and God bless America everybody's pursing his
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lips there's a [Applause] SL yeah I think that's pretty good now what are we going to take away from this well um I suppose I can conclude this talked by saying uh God bless you and
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God bless Institute of Technology but uh it might not work so well but what what you can't get out of this is you don't have to say thank you there are other things you can do and you know it's interesting that uh over time people figure this out and there's some stock ways of ending
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things so uh in the Catholic church in a good old Latin Mass it landed with it Miss EST which translates approximately to okay
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the mass is over you can go home now and of course uh at the musical concerts uh you know that uh it's time to clap not at the end of the song but rather when the uh conductor goes over and shakes hands with the concert Master
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those are conventions that tell you that the that the event is over so uh those are all possibilities for here but one more possibility and that is that you
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can salute the audience and by that I mean you can say something about how how much you value your time and a place so I could say well it's been a a great fun being here uh it's been uh fascinating
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to see what you folks are doing here at MIT I've been uh what stimulated uh and and provoked by the kinds of questions you been ask has been really great and and and I look forward to coming back on many occasions in the future so that salutes the audience you can do
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that well there it is um you know what uh I'm glad you're here and and the reason is by being here I think you have demonstrated an understanding that how you present and how you package your ideas is an important thing
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and I salute you for that and uh I uh suggest that you uh come back again and bring your friends [Applause]