Michael Boyle's Strengthcoach.com Blog

First off, I need to thank my good friend Valerie Waters for having the courage to say. “Mike, you are a great presenter, but you could be better”. Real friends do this. Really good friends then buy you a book and ship it to you to help with their suggestion. Val sent me Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and I thank her. In the tradition of paying it forward, here are some of the best tidbits from this great book:

“ if you have a tangible product, find other ways outside of the slide deck to show it off”

“ Ask yourself why should my listener care about this idea/information/product / service”

“ You’ve got to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to do what you love to do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

“Find something that you love to do so much, you can’t wait for the sun to rise to do it all over again.”

“ I never did it for the money. This phrase holds the secret between becoming and extraordinary presenter and one mired in mediocrity for the rest of your life”

On himself and Bill Gates “I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys on the planet because we found what we loved to do, we were at the right place at the right time, and we’ve gotten to go to work every day with superbright people for thirty years and do what we love doing”

From Marcus Buckingham ( The One Thing You Need to Know, First Break All the Rules)

“ Leaders are fascinated by the future. You are a leader if and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. As a leader you are never satisfied with the present…”

“ Publicly thank employees, partners and customers and do it often.”

From Malcolm Gladwell “ practice isn’t the thing you do once your good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

“Always dress a little better than everyone else but, appropriate for the culture”

“ Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected”

“Treat presentations as “infotainment”. Your audience wants to be educated and entertained. Have fun. It’ll show.”

“Never apologize. You have little to gain from calling attention to a problem. If your presentation hits a glitch, acknowledge it, smile, and move on. If it was not obvious to anyone but you, do not call attention to it.”

“follow your heart and your intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become… stay hungry, stay foolish.”

If you present, or aspire to present, get Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

PS- Unless otherwise attributed the quotes above are from either Steve Jobs himself or, the author Carmine Gallo paraphrasing Jobs.

This entry was posted on March 8, 2011 at 7:55 am and is filed under Media, Random Thoughts, Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.