The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Jobs never walked on stage to deliver information. He staged an experience, and the script barely changed from launch to launch: name an enemy, build the tension, then reveal the hero. Clunky smartphones, a sluggish web, a rival’s monopoly—each keynote opened by casting a villain so the audience had a reason to care, then produced an Apple product as the rescue. Al Gore borrowed the same structure to make rising CO2 the antagonist of his climate talk. None of it was improvised. Jobs planned presentations the way a director plans a play, sketching on paper before touching a slide, then rehearsing for days until the whole thing looked spontaneous.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Winning an argument has almost nothing to do with being right. Mehdi Hasan’s core claim is that the room decides, and the room runs on values, feelings, and whether you can keep your composure while being attacked. He opens with a case from 428 BCE: after a failed revolt, the Athenian assembly voted to execute every man in Mytilene, and the orator Diodotus talked them out of it. Thousands lived because one person argued well when it counted. The rest of the book is a toolkit for doing the same.

Public-Speaking on SummaryShelf

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking