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Properly Articulating

October 31st, 2023 (11 months ago) • 3 minutes

Over the past quarter, I worked on upgrading MoneyLion's existing spark cluster from EMR v5 to EMR v6 while incorporating best practices. Today, I had the opportunity of presenting my work to the team.

Overall, the presentation went well and it finished on time. I got feedbacks that it was insightful and concise but I could have done better in terms of delivery & confidence.

Speaking in public or presenting is something I always struggle with. It could be because I'm an introvert or I didn't had a lot of public speaking opportunity since most of my college education is via Zoom (due to covid).

I found this talk - How to Speak - by Patrick which is recommended by many and here are my notes.

  1. Success in life is largely determined b:
  • Ability to speak
  • Ability to write
  • Quality of ideas

  1. Start with a promise of telling people what they don't know which they will know at the end

  2. Focus areas

  • Cycle (repeat key points)
  • Build fence (show how your idea can be distinguished from the others)
  • Verbal punctuation (pauses, emphasis, tone, volume, pitch)
  • Questions (questions should not be too hard or too easy, about 7 seconds of thinking time)
  1. Slide design
  • Don't have too many words on the slides - this will force people to read but not listen
  • Do not read, explain!
  • Eliminate clutter
  • Use big fonts
  • Using laser pointer is bad - your back faces the audience and people lose confidence
  • Make lighter slides (reduce heavy content)
  1. Body Language
  • Big no to hands in the pocket - makes you seem closed off
  1. Slide Review
  • Get together people who don't have context on the slides to review so they don't hallucinate on materials that is not there
  1. Technical presentation
  • Show the vision (what is the problem and the novel approach you developed)
  • Show what you done (list steps you did to show results)
  1. Get famous
  • Aim to be recognized for your contributions
  • Why: Ideas are like your children, don't waste them by throwing it to the world but nobody cares about it
  • How: Slogan, Symbol, Surprise (interesting example), Salient idea (something that stood out), story
  1. Final slides
  • Big no
    • Collaborators
    • Questions?
    • References
    • The End
  • People don't care about conclusion but people want to know your contributions
  1. Final words
  • Avoid the generic "Thank you"
  • Recap the key points or provide a memorable closing statement