In 2003, he gave a talk in which he used many, many slides. But where were the charts? And the graphs? And the statistics? How could this possibly have been effective?
If you have twenty minutes, I encourage you judge for yourself whether you might be able to take anything away from such a presentation. Even if you only have a few minutes, click on the link to see what a presentation might look like without the use of PowerPoint templates and facts and figures and bullet points.
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Whatever he was thinking, I appreciate his presentation style. He makes his point (if you want your idea to spread, you don’t have to be first, but you do have to be creative, be different and stand out) very effectively through his passionate 20-minute monologue, and his points are supplemented through simple imagery and very little text on his slides. His point about, and the image of, the purple cow will stick with me for quite some time. And I didn’t need charts or graphs or bullet points to help me digest it.
In his book How to be a Presentation God, Scott Schwertly calls this The Godin Method. “The slide images, as used in the Godin method, are your trusty sidekicks. They allow you to focus on deep, meaningful content without scorching your audience’s cerebellums.”
The fact is, if you have 20 minutes to present, then you need to accept the fact that your audience will not have the time to master your content. At best, they’ll have the time to be intrigued by your content. If you can ignite their interest and curiosity and passion, then maybe your audience will want to do something with your content. I have a feeling that this is what Seth Godin thinks about every time he presents.
The next time you have a presentation to give, what in the world will you be thinking about?
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