Properly Articulating
October 31st, 2023 (12 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.
- Success in life is largely determined b:
- Ability to speak
- Ability to write
- Quality of ideas
-
Start with a promise of telling people what they don't know which they will know at the end
-
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)
- 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)
- Body Language
- Big no to hands in the pocket - makes you seem closed off
- 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
- 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)
- 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
- Final slides
- Big no
- Collaborators
- Questions?
- References
- The End
- People don't care about conclusion but people want to know your contributions
- Final words
- Avoid the generic "Thank you"
- Recap the key points or provide a memorable closing statement