Peter Winick compares overstuffed keynotes to Ginsu knife commercials: speakers cram decades of experience and multiple books into 40 minutes, leaving audiences overwhelmed. The fix is brutal simplification. Distill your talk to two or three concrete actions people can actually remember and use.
Hi, this is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. Do any of you remember the Ginsu knife commercials back from the '80s? I do. The promise of the Ginsu knife is it did everything. It sliced, it diced, you could cut a steak, you could cut a can of soda, you can fillet a cat. I don't know why you'd want to fillet a cat, but but it was one of the promises that it made. Why do I bring up the Ginsu knife other than I've been thinking about the '80s lately? That's not why. The reason I bring it up is I see all too often too many speakers try to Ginsu knife their content. They try to pack so much into that 40 minutes that they've got with the audience, so much thoughtfulness, so much of their 20 years' experience, so much of their 10 books, that they overwhelm the audience, that the audience comes out of there flooded and just not knowing what to do. It may feel counterintuitive to you, but the best speakers, the best authors, the best thought leaders that I know bring their work down to a level where it's really, really simple. There might only be 2 or 3 takeaways from a keynote, but they're 2 things that are actionable. They're 2 things that I will remember as an audience member 3 weeks, 6 months, a year later. So don't Ginsu knife your content. Take it down to the 2 or 3 things that I, as a busy participant, as a busy audience member can actually do something with, and it will create more value for you, your brand, and them.
