The Mobile Presenter

It's not really a statistically relevant sample, but over the years, I've seen quite a few lawyers speak. And I have to say that pretty much all of them are still using text-heavy slides and not a lot of visuals. Yet at the same time, these talks are often pretty good; they're informative and even entertaining. Why is that so?

The very first slide of your presentation is what is called the welcome slide; the one with the topic of your talk and your name on it. I've written a bit about it in Presenting for Geeks, but presenters are doing it right most of the time automatically. Except, maybe, for one little detail ...

We're in the process of looking for speakers for our next TEDxStuttgart; and, as always, it's a mixture of frustration and delight. Frustration because of the huge amount of very weak proposals we get. Which only increases the delight when we find someone who actually has something to say.

The motto of TED, as you surely know, is "ideas worth spreading". The idea - revolutionary, evolutionary, novel, or just a new take on something long established - is at the heart of every TED talk. All else must stand back.

There's a nice park near the place where I live, so I occasionally (though not often enough, I guess), I go there for a walk. Due to the park's location and layout, I always end up going around it in the same direction. It has enough variation in terms of smaller sideways and alternative routes, but I've always been going on my round counter-clockwise without thinking much about it.

The other day, on a whim, I decided to walk my usual route the other way around. Which resulted in me coming up to corners and pathways and wondering where I was - until I recognised that I was in a familiar spot that only looked unfamiliar since I was looking at it from a different direction.