TJ Walker says presenters should practice delivering their entire talk without PowerPoint, since projectors fail. He recommends carrying one sheet of notes so you can still fill your time and keep the audience engaged when technology dies.
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Wow. A lot of you are going to hate my advice this week. This may cause a few unsubscribes, but here's the advice. You are never, and I mean never prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation unless you are prepared to speak without the PowerPoint. What do I mean by that? What I mean is technology is a fickle friend. Sometimes laptops freeze. Sometimes bulbs burn out. Sometimes electricity goes out. If you have flown halfway across the country or across the world and you're a part of a conference, a convention, a new business pitch, this may be your only time ever to really communicate with a group of clients, prospects, people in your industry. Everyone may have a plane to catch in the next hour. This is your time. So if the bulb doesn't work or there's an incompatibility between Windows versus Apple, nobody else cares about your problems. You can't just say, oh well, my slides don't work. I can't give you a presentation. I'll email it to you next week. That is pathetic. You need to be able to stand up. If you had a half an hour allotted, you need to speak for a half an hour. And you need to present your ideas in a compelling, understandable, memorable way. So if you really want to do your due diligence, you need to be able to practice without the slides. If you prepared slides, great. Use them. I hope they work. I hope you never have this problem. But if you speak long enough, believe me, at some point you're not going to be able to deliver your slides either. No electricity bulbs burn out, projectors malfunction, laptops, all sorts of problems can happen. So how do you do it? You do it by having a single sheet of notes, a piece of paper that tells you exactly what your key points are, so that you can just occasionally look down and then talk to your audience and really fill them in on what your ideas are. Remember, nobody came to see a bunch of slides if it were just about slides. And I'm not anti slides. If we're just about slides, people could stay at home in their pajamas. You could email the slides. They came to hear you speak, so you better make the most of it with or without slideshow.
