How To Speak by Patrick Winston

you, the Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies a court-martial for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon; There should be similar protection for students because students should not go out into life without the ability to communicate and that is because their success in life will be largely determined by your ability to

speak

, your ability to write and the quality of your ideas, in that order. I know I can be successful at this because the quality of your communication, your writing, is largely determined by this. formula is a question of how much knowledge you have, how much you practice with that knowledge and your inherent talent and note that the T is very small, what really matters is what you know, this point suddenly occurred to me a few decades ago when I was skiing in Sun Valley.

I had heard it was celebrity weekend and one of the celebrities was Mary Lou Retton, the famous Olympic gymnast with perfect vault tens and I heard she was a newbie to skiing, so when the opportunity came up, I looked. on a beginner slope and I saw this young woman who when she got unbalanced but like that and I said it has to be her, it must be the gymnast, but then it occurred to me that I am a much better skier than her and she is an Olympian. An athlete not just an ordinary one, an Olympic shot put athlete, an excellent one and I was a better skier because she had cavities and she had to pee and the only thing she drank was tea, so you can be a lot better than people who may have inherent talents. yes I have the right amount of knowledge, so that is my goal today.

Keep my promise. Today you will see some examples of what you can put in your arsenal of

speak

ing techniques and it will be the case that some of those examples, some heuristics, some techniques, perhaps. only one will do what will be the one to get you the job, so this is a very non-linear process, you never know when it will happen, but that's my promise by the end of the next 60 minutes, you know, they've been exposed. Many ideas, some of which you will incorporate into your own repertoire, will allow you to ensure that you have the maximum opportunity for your ideas to be valued and accepted by the people you speak to Now, in order to do that, we have to have a rule of thumb. commitment and that's not laptops or cell phones, so if you could close them, I'll start as soon as you're done.

Some people ask why it is a rule of trade and the answer is that humans only have one language processor. and if your language processor is not working properly, could you turn off the laptop? If your language processor is busy browsing the web or reading your email, you are distracted and, worse yet, distracting everyone around you. Studies have shown it and, even worse, I do see. an open laptop somewhere back there or up here drives me crazy and I do a worse job and that guarantees that all your friends who work there or who are paying attention don't get the performance they came here to get, so that's it. for preamble let's start the first thing you talk about clearly is how to start some people think that the right thing to do is to start a talk with a joke I don't recommend it and the reason is that at the beginning of a talk people are still putting away their laptops to adapt to their speech parameters, to their vocal parameters and they're not ready for a joke, so it doesn't work very well, they usually fail at what they want to do, instead of starting with empowerment, I promise you.

I want to tell people what they are going to know at the end of the hour that they didn't know at the beginning of the hour it is a promise of empowerment it is the reason for being here which would be an example oh I see at the end of these 60 minutes you will know things about speaking that you don't know now and something among those things that you know will make a difference in your life. Yes, that's an empowering promise, so that's the best way to start, now that I've spoken. a little bit about how to start, what I want to do is give you some examples of heuristics that I always have in mind when I give a talk and the first of these heuristics is that it is a good idea to go cyclically over the topic, to turn it around. around starts, goes around to start, some people say so many things you want to tell them, tell them again and then tell them a third time like people aren't smart, but the point is the reason is there are many reasons, one of the What it is at any given time, about twenty percent of you will be confused no matter what the lecture is, so if you want to make sure that the probability of everyone understanding it is high, you need to say it three times, so Riding a bike is one of the things I always do. think when I give a talk nothing I think about is explaining my idea I want to build a fence around it so it doesn't get confused with someone else's idea so if you were from Mars and I was teaching you what an arch is I could tell you well, that is an arch and that should not be confused with other things that other people might think it's not this is not an arch that's not an arch I'm building a fence around my idea so it can be distinguished. of someone else's idea, so in a more technical sense you could say that my algorithm could be similar to Josie's algorithm, except that hers is linear exponential, which puts a fence around her idea so that people Don't be confused about how it might relate. to another thing, the third thing in this list of examples is the idea of ​​verbal punctuation and the idea here is that because people occasionally get confused and need to get back on the bus, you need to provide some iconic places where you're announcing that.

It's a good time to come back, so in this talk I might say something about this being my outline. The first thing we're going to do is talk about how to get started, then we'll deal with these four samples and each other. four samples I have talked about the first idea which is cycling the construction of the second idea and now the third idea is constructed is verbal punctuation, some enumerated and providing numbers. I'm giving you the feeling that there is a seam in the talk and you can come back. Again, okay, now we're on a roll, and since we're on a roll, can you guess what the next idea might be here?

An idea to help people get back on the bus. Yes, ask a question. Yes, thanks. So ask a question. Then I will ask a question: how much dead air can there be? How long can I take a break? I count to seven seconds. It seems like an eternity to wait and not say anything for seven seconds, but that's the standard amount of time you can wait. an answer and of course the question must be chosen carefully. It can't be too obvious because then people will be embarrassed to say it. The answer can't be too difficult because then no one will have anything to say, so here are a few. sample heuristics so that you can build your armamentarium and develop your repertoire of ideas about the presentation and now, if this persuades you that there is something to know, that there is knowledge, then I have already achieved it because what I want to convince you of. is that if you look at speakers that you admire and feel are effective and ask yourself why they are successful, then you can build your own personal repertoire and develop your own personal style and that is my fundamental goal and the rest of this talk is about Some of the things that are in my arsenal that I think are effective, so next on our agenda when we start discussing these other things is a discussion about time and place, so what do you think is a good time to give a lecture at 11 a.m.?

Yes, and the reason is that most people could wait until then and hardly anyone has gone back to sleep, it's not right after a meal, people are not fatigued by this or it's a good time to give a lecture, so that brings me to the next The question of what about the place and the most important thing about the place is that it is well lit. This room is well lit. The problem with other types of rooms is that we are human every time the lights or climate go out when the room is dimly lit. indicates that we should go to sleep, so whenever I go somewhere to give a talk, even today, the first thing I do when I talk to them is the original people who told me to keep the lights on.

Oh, they might respond that people will see the slides better. if we turn off the lights and then I answer, it is extremely difficult to see slides through closed ayahs, what else can you say about the place? Well the place should be covered and I mean that in a real cloak sense like if you were robbing a bank you would go to the bank and you know a few times before to see what it is like so there are no surprises when you do your robbery so every time I'm going somewhere to talk, the first thing I asked my host to do is take me. to the place where I will be speaking so that I can resolve any oddities, sometimes it may require some intervention, sometimes it may simply require me to understand what the challenges are, so when I came here this morning I did.

What I normally do, I imagine that all the seats were filled with disinterested farm animals, that way I knew that no matter how bad it was, it wouldn't be that bad, so eventually it should be reasonably populated, it should be reasonably populated. It should be the case that I don't know if there are ten people in this room, everyone would wonder what's going on. It's much more interesting if no one is here, so it's a good idea to get a place of the right size that doesn't have to be full. It has to be more than half full, so those are some ideas about time and place.

The next thing I want to talk about is subjective. The boards, the accessories and the slides. Well, these are the tools of the trade. I think this is. to the right tool for speaking when its purpose is to inform slides are good when its purpose is to expound, but it is what I use when I am informing, teaching, lecturing and there are several reasons why I use them, on the one hand, when you use the board. have a graphical quality, it is the case that when you have a board, you can easily exploit the fact that you can use graphics in your presentation, so that is a graphical quality that I like and the next thing I like is that, as a property of speed, the speed with which you write on the whiteboard is approximately the speed at which people can absorb ideas, if you flip through a bunch of slides, no one can go that fast, finally, a great property of a whiteboard is that it can be a goal for many people who are now.

When speaking they suddenly become aware of their hands, it is as if their hands are private parts that should not be exposed in public so they immediately go into their pockets and this is considered insulting in some parts of the world or alternatively such maybe the hands go away. and back like this I was once in a convent in Serbia and my host well, as soon as we entered a nun approached us and offered us a snack and I was about to say no, thank you when he said that we should eat that thing or die is a question from a local custom and colitis, but before anything happened there, the nun took my hands off like this because it was extraordinarily insulting in that culture to have your hands behind your back, so why is it so cool?

It is generally assumed. that has to do with if you're concealing a weapon, like if your hands are in your pockets or behind your back, then it looks like you might have a weapon and that's what I mean by the virtue of one of these board virtues now you have something to do with your hands you can point out things I was once watching a scene in which Patrick gave a lecture. I thought it was fantastic, so I went a second time, the first time to absorb the content, the second time to notice the style and What I discovered was that Patrick was constantly pointing at the board and then I thought for a moment and noticed that nothing of the kind.

What I was pointing out had nothing to do with what I was saying, however, it was an effective technique, so that's just a little bit about the virtue of blackboards now I want to talk about the accessories, you know, the custodians of knowledge about the props are playwrights many decades ago I saw a play by Henrik Ibsen, he was the head of the players. I vaguely remember there was a woman in an unhappy marriage and her husband was competing for an academic job with someone else and she was going to lose partly because it was boring and partly because the competitor had just written a magnificent book by the way, this is in the days before photocopiers and computers were used anyway, when the play begins there is a potbelly stove and at the beginning of the play the potbelly stove with its door open only has a few lightly lit embers, but the public stove is always there and his tension melts in the work. and you see this manuscript, this prop that Ipsen uses so ingeniously, you know something is going to happen because as the play progresses, the fire gets bigger and hotter and eventually all the consuming images know that this manuscript is going to enter In that fire, it is memorable.

What I remember about the game is that the playwrights have it all figured out, but in their handsThey are not the only people who can use accessories. Here is an example of using an accessory. Also because she saw more pepper, she was talking about how. It's important to look at the problem the right way and here's an example that not only teaches that it allows you to embarrass your friends and Mechanical Engineering, so here's what you do: take this bicycle wheel, start spinning and then you put a little bit of torque on the shaft or equivalently you blow on the edge and the problem is that as we go in that direction or it goes in that direction now, the mechanical engineers will immediately say oh yeah, I see the screw rule. the right and they will put their fingers in this. position, but they forget exactly how to align their fingers with various aspects of a problem, so it usually happens that they get it right with about a 50 percent chance, so it's a very elegant education that gets them up to the point where they equate It's like flipping a coin, but it doesn't have to be that way because you can think about the problem a little differently, so here's what you do.

You take some duct tape and you put it around the part of the wheel like this and now you start thinking not about the whole wheel but just about a small piece that is under the duct tape, so here that piece comes rolling on the top at this point. you blow that with a puff of air forgetting about the rest of the wheel what happens to that little piece is under the adhesive tape it must want to go in that direction but you hit another one like that it is already going down like that and what happens to the next piece the same next piece the same thing so the only thing that can happen is the wheel turns like this and so now you will never wonder again because he is thinking about the problem in the right way and it is demonstrated by using a problem.

You could try this after we're done. Another example I like to remember is one from when I was taking 801. Ella Lazarus was the instructor at the time and she was talking about the conservation of kinetic and potential energy and there was a long wire on a ceiling in 26100 attached to a long steel ball. bigger, the one that is not like that, and Lazarus took the ball against a wall like this, put his head right against the wall to stabilize himself and then he released it and the pendulum takes many seconds. does it over and over again and then gently kisses Lazarus on the nose, so you have many seconds to think that this guy really believes in energy conservation, don't try this at home, the problem is that the first time you do this you may not let it go. a natural human tendency to push, so that's a little bit on the topic of props, you know, it's interesting whenever surveys are done, students always say more chalk, less PowerPoint and why would that be, props always They are also very effective, why would that be?

I'll give you, my lunatic, fringe point of view on this, it has to do with what I would call an empathetic reflex when you're sitting there watching me write on the board, all those little mirror neurons in your head that I think activate and you can feel yourself writing. the blackboard and even more so when I talk about this ball of steel even though it is not dressed in this way you can you can feel the ball as if you were me and you can't do that with a slide you can't do that with a picture, you need to see it in a physical world , so I think that, oh yes, of course, there are the speed questions involved that need to be separated, but I think the empathic reflection is the reason for the props and the use of a whiteboard.

They are so effective well let's see oh yes there is one more thing by way of tools and that has to do with the use of slides I repeat I think that therefore exposing ideas is not to teach ideas but that is what we do in a talk or conference I work to speak, to present ideas, we don't teach them, so let me tell you a little about my views on that. I remember one time I was in Terminal A at Logan Airport. I just got back from a really miserable conference and the flight was really horrible.

It was one of those things that feels like an unbalanced washing machine and for the only time in my life I decided to stop on the way to my car and have a cup of coffee and relax a little and as I was there for a few minutes someone approached me and said: Is it You Professor Winston? I think so. I told him I don't know. I guess he was trying to be funny anyway. He said I'm on my way to Europe to give a talk about work. Would you mind criticizing? my slides not at all I said you have too many and they have too many words how did you know? he said thinking maybe I had seen a talk of his before there was no my answer was because it's always true they are always too many slides always too many words so let me show you some extreme examples of how not to use intelligence well for this demonstration.

I need to be very close to here and when I get here I can start saying things like one of the What you shouldn't do is read your slides. The people in your audience know how to read, and reading will only annoy them. You should also make sure you have only a few words on each transparency and that your words are easy to read. I hope so. driving you crazy because I'm committing all kinds of crimes, the first of which is that there are too many words on the slide, the second of which is I'm way over there and the slides way over there, so you get into this tennis match feeling. of going back and forth between the slide and the speaker, you want the slides to be condiments to what you are saying, not the main event or the other way around, so how can we fix this step?

The first step is to get rid of the background fragment. That's always a distraction. Step number two is to get rid of the words. When I narrow it down to these, then I don't have license to say everything I read once before because it's not on the slide. I don't read my slides anymore, but I'm saying what was written in the segment in an example above, so what else can we do to simplify this? Well, we can get rid of the logos. We don't need them. Simplification. What else can we do to get rid of the title now?

I want to tell you about some rules for preparing slides. I'm telling you that the title doesn't have to be up there, reducing the number of words on the slide. I mean, allow you to pay more attention to me unless it's what's written. In the slide I mentioned before, we have only one language processor and we can use it to read things or to listen to the speaker, so if we have too many words on the slide, it forces people in the audience to redo things and not to study. Mine did an experiment a few years ago.

He taught some students some web-based programming ideas. Half the information was on slides. He said the other half and then for a control group, he reversed it and the question was, what did the subjects who are freshmen do? In your fraternity, what do the subjects remember best about what he said or what they read on the slide and the answer is what they read on the slide? When your slides have a lot of material, they will pay attention to the speaker, in fact, in the after action debrief, one of the subjects said: I wish you hadn't talked so much, it was distracting me.

The last element is to eliminate clutter. I hear some clutter and we don't know the reason even for those bullets, so the problem of too many words is a consequence of a crime that Microsoft has committed by allowing them to use some fonts that are too small, so everyone should have one sample slide like this that you can use to determine what the minimum font size is. This is easily readable. Shira, what do you think? Of those, what is that at least? Maybe you know it says forty or fifty. I think that's right, thirty-five if you get too small, not necessarily because you can't read it, but because you're probably using it to get. too many words on the slide, what other crimes do we have?

Well, we have the laser pointer crime for everyone who knows about the old days, when we didn't have laser pointer skis, made of wood, and people were waving these pretty things around. It soon became almost like a baton-twirling contest, so this is what his method recommended in the old days for dealing with this type of pointer. This example of using a Jim Glass accessory is there, so let's talk about twenty years ago and yes, I remembered it. Talk, that's one way you broke the pointer. It's surprising how accessories tend to be the things that are remembered well.

Now we don't have, we don't have little pointers anymore. We have, we have laser pointers, that's wonderful. people don't have epileptic seizures from this first, well this is what tends to happen, oh yeah, that's a beautiful recursive image and I could be part of it by putting that laser beam right on the back of my head, up there So what do you see? you see the back of my head and i have no eye contact or engagement anything i was sitting i was a student watching a talk one day and she said you know what we could all leave and he wouldn't know so what happens when you use the laser pointer you can't use the laser pointer without turning your head and pointing at something and when you do you lose contact with the audience, you don't want to do it, so what do you do if you need to identify yourself? something in your image and you don't want to point a laser at it, this is what you do, put a little arrow there and say now, look at that number one guy at the end of the number one arrow, you don't need to have a laser pointer to do that crime too heavy when people ask me to review a presentation I asked someone to print it out and put it on a table when they do it's easy to see if the talk is too heavy too much text not enough air space in white not enough images this is a good example of such a talk too heavy now this is the presenter who has taken advantage of the small font sizes to show as much on the slide as he wanted many other crimes here but the two heaviness the fact that it is too heavy is what I wanted to illustrate so here contrast another talk I gave a few years ago not that it wasn't a deeply technical talk but I will show it to you because there is air in They are mainly images of things, there are three or four slides that have text, but when I get to them, I give the audience time to read them and they are there because they might have some historical significance.

The first slide will have text. It's an excerpt from 1957 from the proposal for the 1957 AI conference at Dartmouth, an extraordinarily interesting event, and that historical excerpt from the proposal helps make that point. What else do we have here? Oh yes, your vocabulary word. For today, this is an application that includes Legoman. What that means is that this is the type of slide that you can get away with exactly once in your presentation. This is a slide that they got some news about a few years ago because it shows the complexity of governing in Afghanistan by showing how incredibly complex it is it's something that neither we nor the audience can understand and that's the point, but you can't have too many of these, you can have one per paper, one for presentation, one for article, one for book, that's what That's what epic slowness is and this is an example of it.

Well, I'm going to show you some crimes, so you might be wondering if these crimes really happen for them to do their thing with their hands in their pockets. Crime. There is a crime in time. Venue selection here, this is how you get to the Bartos theater. The first thing you do is go up these steps in the Media Lab, then cross this big open space, then turn right down this hallway at this point every time I go in there. I wonder if there are torture implements around the corner and then when you walk in there you walk into this dark and gloomy place, so it's aptly named, what?

When they call it Bartos Theater because it's a place where you can watch a movie, but it's not. a place where you can give a talk now subjectively it doesn't happen here there is a talk I attended a while ago in Stata I notice that the speaker is far from the slide speakers using a laser pointer and you tell me well what is happening here By right, slide number 80 of the presentation, notice it's full of words, the first of ten conclusion slides, so what's the audience's reaction, that's the meeting sponsor, he's reading his email , this is the co-sponsor of the meeting, he is examining the lunch menu, what is up with this person?

It looks like this person is paying attention, but that's because he's a still image. If you were to watch a video, what you would see is something like this, so yeah, it happens okay, now it's a quick review of the tools. I want to talk about some special cases. I could talk a little bit about reporting or otherwise saying do what I'm doing now, but I'll just say a few words about that and that in that kind of presentation that you want. Start with a promise like the one I made for this hour we're in now, but then comes the question of how to inspire people.

I've given this talk for a long time and a few years ago, our department chair. I said: could ITell me that I give this talk to new faculty and make sure to emphasize what it takes to inspire students? And interestingly, I hadn't thought about that question before, so I started a survey. I talked to some of my incoming freshman advisors and I talked to senior professors and everything else about how they were inspired. What I discovered from incoming freshmen is that they were inspired by a high school teacher who told them they could do it when I discovered that in the senior faculty they were inspired by someone who helped them see a problem in a new way and what I saw in everyone is that they were inspired when someone showed passion for what they were doing, showed passion for what they were doing, yeah, so that's not a way to be.

Inspiring is easy for me because you know I do artificial intelligence and how can you not be interested in artificial intelligence? I mean, if you're not interested in artificial intelligence, you're probably not interested in cool stuff, so when I lecture in my AI class, it's natural for me to talk about what I think is cool and how exciting it is. a new idea, so that's the kind of expression of passion that makes the difference in reporting with respect to this thing of inspiring, oh yeah, and Of course, during this promise phase you can also express how interesting things are.

Let me give you an example of a conference that begins this way. I'm talking about resource allocation. It's the same kind of thing you'd think about when your source is the same. kind of ideas you'd need if you're assigning planes to a flight schedule or trying to schedule a factory or something, but the example is putting colors on states in the United States without any bordering states having the same color, so here wow, this is what I show at the beginning of class, this is a way of coloring and you might say well, why not? we wait until it ends would you like to do that no good we are not going to wait until it ends because the Sun will have exploded and consumed the earth before this program ends but with a slight adjustment in how the program works that I tell you my students will understand in the next 50 minutes this is what you get it's not that great you know you have to be you should be surprised by things that require a calculation of more time than the lifespan of the solar system in a few seconds, that's why I mean make a promise in advance and express some passion about what you're talking about.

Well, the last element of this little block here has to do with what people think they do at MIT. Ask teachers what the most important purpose is and they'll say well the most important thing I do is teach people to think and then you say oh that's great, how do you teach people to think? Blank stare, no one can respond to that very natural part. Next question, then how do you teach people to think well? I think we are story telling animals and we started developing our understanding of history and manipulative skills with fairy tales in childhood and continued through professional schools like law, business, medicine, engineering everything and on. doing that throughout life, then if that's what thinking is about, then when you want to teach people how to think, you're going to give them the stories they need to know the questions to ask about those stories, mechanisms to analyze those stories, ways of expressing them. stories together ways to evaluate how reliable the story is and that's what I think you should do when you teach people to think, but that's all about education and many of you here not necessarily because of that but rather because of this part to persuade what breaks. divided into several categories oral exams not shown choppy talks becoming famous I won't say much about oral exams other than the fact that they used to be much scarier than they are today in the old days reading literature in a foreign language was part of it and there was a high failure rate and when you look back at those failures, the most common reason why people don't pass an oral exam is lack of situation and lack of practice.

If I position myself, I want to say that it is important to talk about it. your research in context these are the problems being pursued around the world there has been no progress before me in the last 30 years everyone is looking for a solution because it will impact many other things such as the situation in time and the place and feel and then, as far as practice goes, but yes, practice is important, but that doesn't mean showing your slides to people who share an office, the problem is that if people know what you're doing, They will host Nate.

There is material in your presentation, right? There is not much each month, seen by the way, your faculty supervisor is not a very good person to help you refine a talk because, in fact, they know what you are doing and In fact , Colusa Nate, there is no material in your presentation, so you need to gather some friends who don't know what you are doing and get them right. You start the practice session by saying if you can't make me. cry, I will no longer value him as a friend and then when you reach college in an oral exam, it will be easy, it is a difficulty or the amount of criticism you will receive from someone is proportional to your age, the older the person is.

The more they understand if they are in the world, the young people are trying to show the older people how smart they are, so it is a charming and cruel attitude, so every time you have the opportunity to have an examination committee full of people with great talent hair, that's what you want, well that's just a word or two about something I haven't heard here, let's get into the topic of job talk, so I was sitting in a bar many years ago in San Diego. I remember the Navy Science Board and me. was saying with a couple of my colleagues on the board of the painful publisher at the University of Colorado, she made me some jealousy that I could spit out because she had bitten off 21 books and I had only written 17 and then the other one was Oh bill Weldon from the At the University of Texas, he was an expert in electromagnetism and you know how to use railguns to drive steel rods through the armor of a tank.

These are interesting people, so I said, what do you do with a faculty candidate? And in a microsecond, Delores said that to show us. They have some kind of vision, quickly followed by Bill who said they have to show us that they have done something, they know what sounds good. I said and then I told them how much time the candidate has to establish these two things. You think well, he compares your response to five-minute airs, so if you haven't expressed your vision, if you haven't told people that you've done something in five minutes, you've already lost.

I have to be able to do that and let me mention a couple of things along those lines here: You know vision is partly a problem that someone cares about and something new in their approach, so the problem is understanding human nature. intelligence and the approach is to ask questions about what makes us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals: whether it's simply a question of quantity or we're just a little bit smarter in some continuous way or we have something that's fundamentally different that chimpanzees don't have. and Neanderthals don't either and the answer is yes, we have something different, we are symbolic creatures and, since we are symbolic creatures, we can construct symbolic descriptions of relationships and events, we can put them together and create stories, and because we can create stories, that is what we makes different, that's my core speech, that's how I start most of my talks about my own personal research, how do you express the notion that you've done something by hearing the steps that need to be taken to achieve the goal?

To solve that problem, you don't need to have done all those steps, but you can say: this is what needs to be done, an example, this is what needs to be done, we need to specify some behavior, we need to list the constraints that make it possible. make possible. To deal with that behavior we have to implement a system because we are engineers and we don't think we understand something unless we can build it and we built said system and we are about to prove it to you today. that would be an example of a series of numbering steps needed to realize the vision, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you conclude by listing your contributions, it is a kind of mirror of these steps and helps to establish that you've done something, so it's kind of a general purpose framework for doing a technical talk, not just a few more things to do today.

Being famous is the next item on our agenda because once you have the job you need to think a little bit about how you are going to be recognized for what you do. Oh, first of all, why should you care about becoming famous? I thought of this connection to a fundraising event I once attended, a fundraising event to raise money to save Venice from submergence. and anyway he destroyed all his art, I was sitting here and JC was sitting here who was a Julia CH like Julia Child and as the night went on more and more people came up and asked Julia to autograph something or expressed a feeling that she had changed her life and it happened again and again, so I finally turned to Julia and said miss girl, is it fun to be famous?

She thought about it for a second and said, "You get used to it, but you already know what happened." I never get used to being ignored so you know it's here there is a way to think about it your ideas are like your children you don't want them to go into the world in rags so what I wanted to do is make sure you have these techniques, these mechanisms , these thoughts on how to present the ideas you have so that they recognize the value in them, that's why it's legitimate to worry about the packaging, now, how do they remember you?

Well, there is something. I like to call Winston Starr and each of the elements that I'm about to articulate starts with an S, so if you want the ideas from your presentation to be remembered, one of the things you need to do is make sure you have some type of symbol associated with his work, so this example of Arjun is actually from my PhD thesis many, many years ago and in the course of my work at that time, this work on learning the arts became slightly famous and I didn't know why there were only so many.

Years later I realized that that work accidentally had all the elements of this star, so the first element is that there was some kind of symbol, it's the arts themselves, the next thing you need is some kind of slogan, some kind of phrase that provides an identifier. at work and in this case the phrase was one-time learning and it was one-time learning because the program I wrote learned something definite from every example that was presented to us, so going from a model based on this setup to something which is not It is not an art based on that setting, the program learned that it has to be on top of learning in one go, so that is a simple slogan and now we need a surprise, yes the surprise is that you don't need a million examples of something to learn.

You can do it with an example if you are smart enough to make use of that example properly, so that was the surprise, you can learn something definite from each example. The next item was a standout idea. Now, when I say notable idea, I don't mean important. What I mean is an idea that stands out. Some theses, interestingly enough, have too many good ideas and you don't know what it is because what it is, so you need one idea that stands out and the idea that stood out here was I realized I'm about to fail. You see, this isn't a bow, but it doesn't miss much, so it's close to failing.

Finally you need to tell the story of how you did it. How does it work. Because it is important. So, that's something. A little bit about how not to become famous but how to ensure that your work is well recognized doctor, we are almost done because now we are at this last point, which is how to stop and when we come back there is a question of Alright, what is the final slide and what are the final words? So for the cue on the final slide, let me give you some examples of possibilities. How is it?

Well, you might look at that slide and think there are a thousand professors at MIT. work, but not that much, but it's only a small job if you get invited by thousands, so when you show a gigantic list of collaborators at the end of a talk, it's like it's some kind of exit. because it suggests that no one knows, did you do anything significant? There you understood it, you have to recognize your collaborators well, so where do you do it? None of the last line on the first slide, this was all on the first slide, these are the contributors, so you don't want to put them at the end you know what slide like this how about this this is the worst possible way to end a talk because this slide can be up there for 20 minutes I've seen it happen it's real estate waste, it wastes an opportunity to tell people who you are, and what's up with this.

I see it often. I never saw anyone write it. Also waste an opportunity, oh my god,Worse yet, all these slides do nothing for you, they waste an opportunity. so you tell people to leave people with who you are and who you're good to, what's up with this? This is good, it may seem like it at first, but here's the problem, if you say these are my conclusions, they are perfectly legitimate conclusions that no one cares about. What they care about is what you've done and that's why your final slide should have this contributions tag. It's a mirror of what I said there about how Job talks about that should be like a sandwich and the final slide is the one above.

There, while people ask questions and fill in, you should be the one to have your contributions. Here is an example from my own speech. Yes, this is what I talk about a lot. Yes, here are the things I normally demonstrate and expect. have people read it and then the final element, this is what we get from it, so it's a sample contribution slide. Now what about the other part? You know, you get the final slide. There is a contribution slide. Somehow you have to pee or you're done, so let's look at some possibilities. One thing you could do in your last words is tell a joke.

It's okay when you're done. People have adjusted their voice parameters. They are ready for a joke. I was sitting at another bar this time in Austin, Texas with a colleague of mine named Doug Lynott and Doug is a fantastic speaker, so I said to Doug Doug, you're a fantastic speaker, what's your secret and he said. Oh, I always end with a joke and that way people think they were having fun the whole time, so yeah, a joke will work down there. How is it? Thank you. I don't recommend it, so we moved, you won't go to hell if you conclude your talk by saying thank you, but it's a weak move and here's why when you say thank you, even worse, thank you for listening, it suggests that everyone has stayed so long for politeness and that they had a deep desire to be somewhere else, but They are so polite that they endured and that's what you're thinking about before, so what's the wild applause that started?

You can thank yourself badly and there is nothing wrong with that. The last thing you do shouldn't be say thank you. How do you tell me? Well, doesn't everyone say thank you? Well, what everyone does is not necessarily. the right thing and I like to illustrate how some conversations can end without saying thank you. I like to draw inspiration from political speeches, but the ones I've heard recently aren't that good, so I'll have to back up a bit. A little bit, so here's Governor Christie, who gave the Republican keynote address one year, this is the end of his talk, let's see what he does and together, all together, we will once again defend American greatness for our children and grandchildren .

God bless you and God bless you. America that is in a classic and addictive end God bless you, bless America now. I don't want to be partisan about this, so I think I'd better skip to the keynote speech and the Democratic convention that Bill Clinton gave that year, who knows something. about how to talk, you think you should vote and you really should ooh, now look at this, let's back up a little and do it again. What I want you to see is that at one point he was almost pressing his lips to hers, forcing himself not to. say thank you and then there's another place where he makes a little greeting to those who this time are around Ezra's person, his lips, where's the candy?

Yeah, I think that's pretty good, what are we going to get out of this? Well, I guess I gave you an idea. this sock saying God bless you and God bless you, it's the suit of technology, but it may not work as well, but what you can't say is that you don't have to say thank you, well there are other things you can do . and you know it's interesting that over time people figure this out in their usual ways of ending things, so in the Catholic Church and they have a Latin mass, let him win, it's a test that roughly translates to "okay, "Mass is over." Now you can go home and, of course, at musical concerts you know that it's time to applaud not at the end of the song, but when the conductor comes up and shakes the hand of a concertmaster.

Those are conventions that tell you what the event is. Those are all possibilities here, but there is one more possibility and that is that you can greet the audience and by this I mean you could say something about how much you value your time in a place, so I could say that it has been a great It was a lot of fun to be here. It's been fascinating to see what you guys are doing here at MIT. I felt very stimulated and provoked by the type of questions they asked us. It was really great and I hope to return many times in the future. who greets the audience, you could do it well, there it is, you know what I'm glad you're here and the reason is that by being here I think you've shown an understanding of how you present and how you package your ideas as an important thing and I congratulate you That's why I suggest you go back and bring your friends.