Study Hacks

How to Speak

Every January, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period, Computer Science Professor Patrick Henry Winston gives a famed lecture titled: How to Speak. During this perennially popular event, Professor Winston walks his audience through a series of tips and strategies, developed and honed over decades, for mastering the art of speaking. I attended his lecture for the first time this year, and was not disappointed.

The crowd was literally at capacity. Every seat filled. Every step filled. The ground surrounding the podium filled. And a crowd spilling out into the hallway straining to hear. Having arrived early, I was able to snag a desk an thus take copious notes. In this post, I draw from these notes to present to you, in detail, the secrets behind the Patrick Winston Method.

The Formula

I = f(K,P,T)

Your Impact is a function of your Knowledge about speaking, Practice, and Talent — in decreasing order of importance. Winston’s advice focuses on your knowledge about speaking. This is the easiest way to gain the biggest increases in your impact.

How to Start

Some advice for starting your talk.

1. Don’t start with a joke. The audience is not accustomed to you or your speaking style yet. Humor will be difficult at this point.
2. Do start with a menu. Tell them exactly what you’ll be speaking about and in what order.
3. Do provide an empowerment promise. Explain why your audience will come away from the talk better than when they entered.

The Big Four

A collection of four heuristics that make a talk work.

1. Cycling. Deliver ideas first in brief, then in detail, then in summary. To use the lingo of artificial intelligence: let your audience load the schema, then fill in the details, then let them know what’s worth indexing for future reference.
   
2. Verbal Punctuation. Provide a mechanism to help people who “fogged out” to easily rejoin the talk. For example: “We have just finished talking about the first heuristic, cycling, I am now going to talk about the second heuristic for helping to make your talks more interesting…”
3. Near Miss. When explaining an idea, also describe other ideas that are close but not quite the same. This will help people understand what the important points are that define your idea.
4. Ask Rhetorical Questions. Don’t make them too easy. Don’t make them too hard. Wait 6 seconds for an answer.

The Tools

Four tools that can make or break your presentation.

1. Time and Place. If it’s in your control: mid-morning is the best time. Choose a location that will look full with your expected audience size. Make sure it is well-lit. Don’t let them turn down the lights. (“It’s easier to see slides in a light room then to seem them through closed eyelids.”)
2. The Board. A blackboard lets you draw natural graphics that highlight your points. It also paces you. The speed of writing matches the speed with which people process information. Use a logo that captures the main point and that you can return to. (“I once saw a Sloan professor lecture for a whole hour about a triangle; it was amazing!”) It also provides a target. The best thing to do with your hands? Point at things on the board.
3. Slides. Don’t use anything less than 24-point type. If you can’t fit the information at this font size then you have too much. Follow these four rules:
   1. Don’t read the slides! “A special circle in hell for those who…”
      
   2. Don’t stand far away from the screen. This requires divided attention from your audience.
   3. Have one meaningful picture per slide. If it’s found in Microsoft’s clip art gallery, it’s not meaningful.
   4. No pointers. Laser or otherwise. These are distractions. You’ll play with them. They’re annoying. Stand by the screen and point with your hand or refer to visual anchors on the slide.
4. Props. When possible, use a prop to illustrate an idea.

Special Cases

Three specific types of talks. (Notice, the first two are specific to academia, but the advice is none-the-less generalizable to other arenas).

1. Oral Exams. Some strategies:
   1. Show your hand early on. Within five minutes have explained what you did and why it’s important.
   2. Situate your results in time, space, and field. That is, explain the trajectory over time of your area of concentration, where else people are working on the same problem, and the consequence of your result for the field.
   3. Practice. Ask your friends to listen to your talk. Tell them to try to make you cry.
2. Job Talk. Here is what they want to see in a candidate:
   1. Has a vision.
   2. Has done something about that vision.
   3. Don’t finish with a conclusion slide. Instead have a contributions slides. Something that spells out clearly what you did.
3. Getting Famous. If you want to become a world class speaker, try to deploy Winston’s Star. A five-point checklist of things to make your talk extra memorable:
   1. Symbol. Some icon that makes your ideas easy to hold on to.
   2. Slogan. A simple linguistic handle for your ideas.
   3. Surprise. Make people say: “did you see that talk…”
   4. Salient. Have an idea that really sticks out.
   5. Story. Tell stories that engage the audience.

How to Stop

Some things to keep in mind about concluding a talk:

1. Deliver on your promise made at the beginning. Remind them what it was and summarize how you satisfied it.
2. Tell a joke. They know you now. And if they leave happy they will assume the entire talk made them happy.
3. Call for questions.
4. Don’t thank the audience. It makes it seem like they did you a favor by listening to your boring babble.
5. End with a salute. Compliment without thanking. (i.e., “You’ve been a great audience, I hope you learned a lot about how to give a great talk.”)

Disruptive Thinkers is a semi-regular series that features interesting young people with interesting ideas about college, studying, or life in general.

The Randomness Factor

In early May, 2007, Ben Casnocha, a college student, entrepreneur, author, and all-around big thinker, posted a blog article titled: Expose yourself to bulk, positive randomness. The idea, which was later developed in more detail in his book, My Start-up Life, proposed a simple change: If you want interesting, grand things to happen in your life, stop trying to plan out every last detail. Instead, go out of your way to expose yourself to randomness. Lots of it. And then put in an effort to follow-up.

This pro-randomness philosophy runs counter to the cult of systematization that pervades much of the productivity blogosphere — which is why it intrigues me. So I asked Ben to walk us through the concept…

What is your randomness philosophy?

The philosophy is based on the difficulty of predicting which projects will ultimately be most successful. Sometimes it’s the random projects that turn out to be most important. To wit, we ought to “expose ourselves to randomness.” We should proactively generate opportunities that might seem random…but who knows?

“Randomness” includes, among other examples, conferences no one else is going to, obscure books, and the odd person you met who you’re not quite sure is interesting.

What are some examples from your own life where randomness paid off?

Some of the most interesting things that have happened to me — experiencing exotic situations abroad or getting my book published — have in part resulted from seeking out randomness. Without an overarching career goal in life, I can follow these various threads of randomness to their end. Once I was at a funeral, and met someone, and followed up, stayed in touch, and the person became one of my most important business mentors. This counts as randomness because I didn’t meet him at a business networking function. It was at a funeral.

What can a fellow college student do to live this philosophy?<

Take classes you might not otherwise take; go on that trip you’ve been putting off; make unusual choices; go to as many visiting speakers as possible. Try to build the most rich and diverse “input stream” as possible.

What are the pitfalls?

If you take a meeting with some random e-mailer, there’s a chance he turns out to be uninteresting and a dud [ed: or a serial killer]. There’s also a chance he could go on and be your future co-founder. So you need to apply some filter. The key is to use a different filter than everyone else to pick up on people and ideas that others might miss.

Of course every day can’t be an experiment in randomness. Every day shouldn’t be random meetings, random web surfing, and random walks through the park. Allocate certain time to pursuing unusual paths — but it shouldn’t be your whole day.

Let’s do the Michael Pollan thing: summarize your philosophy in seven words or less.

Be open to random opportunities. Who knows?

The Fitness Guru Speaks

In January of this year, Adam Gilbert, a recent college graduate, left his high-prestige job at Ernst & Young to start My Body Tutor, a web-based company that has Adam, and his team of trainers, work daily with clients, through e-mail and phone, to help them lose weight and get into exceptional shape. The company has exploded in growth recently on the strength of its results. In addition, Adam recently signed on with Conde Naste to become one of their new fitness columnists.

A couple weeks back I asked you to send me your questions about health and fitness at college. I sent the best to Adam, who was kind of enough to provide us some of his expert wisdom…

I’m often tired in class and have a hard time concentrating while studying. What can I do to maximize my energy in the day? Specific food? Exercise? Powerful, powerful Drugs?

Exercise will make a huge difference. It helps you sleep better at night and feel better during the day. Also, make sure you are eating properly. If you don’t eat properly, it can make you feel tired. It’s very important to eat healthy, balanced meals so that your body gets the nutrition and energy it needs. Are you getting enough sleep? One of the most common reasons for feeling tired is not getting enough sleep.

I’m in a frat, so I drink a fair amount. And that probably won’t change. How do I avoid the dreaded beer gut?

To avoid the dreaded beer gut you simply have to burn as many calories as you consume. If you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb: If you’re going to drink 2-3 nights per week you want to be exercising at least 2-3 times per week for 30 minutes or more. Ideally, you would push this to 3-4 times per week. Remember: Something is always better than nothing!

Another tip: Do you eat late at night? (Something that seems to go along with drinking.) Don’t! You can easily consume an extra 500-2000 calories by eating those beloved cheese fries, wings and pizza.

Do you have any top-secret, dark magic get ripped fast type of gym tricks that I should know about?

I’ll let you in on a secret.

Do you want to lose 20 pounds fast? The easiest, surest, most effective way I know: saw off your leg!

In all seriousness, you have to make eating healthy and exercising a part of your lifestyle. There is no doubt that you feel better, perform better and live better when you do this. No excuses.

This post is the first in a new, semi-regular series I’m calling Disruptive Thinkers. Each entry in this series will feature an interesting person with a provocative idea about college, studying, or the educational process in general.

Scott Young Doesn’t Study

Scott Young just started his second year of college. He is no stranger, however, to big ideas that get big notice. As captured in a recent Flak Magazine profile, Scott Young has transformed his eponymous blog into one of the top 50 productivity blogs on the Internet.

Earlier this year, Scott turned his keen how-to eye onto his own student life, and published a controversy-generating post titled: How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying. In this week’s Disruptive Thinkers interview, Scott explains the ideas behind this bold claim.

You famously claimed that you don’t study before exams. Is this still true? Are you still scoring all A’s?

All through high school I never studied, except possibly out of peer-pressure. In University, I still need to read the textbook or do practice work (if the class is skill-based). But if you mean pulling all-nighters before a test, then no, I don’t study. I advocate a quick skim before the test just to make sure I haven’t missed anything, but that’s like comparing a brief jog to a marathon with the kind of cramming most students do.

My last year’s GPA was a 4.2 out of a 4.5 which hovers between an A and A+.

Before we get to your strategy — Holistic Learning — let’s talk about what it replaces. How do you observe most of your classmates study?

The opposite of holistic learning is rote memorization. Pounding information into your skull with the hopes some of it might shake loose during a test. This is a shallow approach to studying that focuses only on what you immediately need to know.

What is Holistic Learning?

Holistic learning is learning through relationships. Ideas don’t sit independently, but instead are linked back together to form a web. On a narrow level this means that your physics formula relates to other formulas in physics. You understand the relationships and can move between concepts. On a broad level this means all subjects are parts of a whole. Chemistry relates to physics which relates to history which relates to literature.

What are the practical steps a student would have to take to put this in practice?

Go deeper. Don’t try to learn information through repetition, but delve into how that information relates to things you already know. This means using metaphors, visualizations, connecting ideas together and burying deeper into why, not just what.

Holistic learning is less about techniques and more about what your end result should be. Everyone will be different in there exact approach, but the end should be the same.

Let’s still try to get more specific. I’m in, say, my Ancient Asian History class. What am I writing in my notebook? When else between now and my test do look at this information? What do I do with it?

You cheat! You know I actually took an Ancient Asian History class…

First, let me point out that you’re going to use anything you can to each your result of an interconnected web. It would probably start by simply writing down the relevant information and notes. It would probably end with a quick refresher before the test.

What’s different with holistic learning is the mental activities you do in between. Where most students would record information and try to understand that information for the test a holistic learner doesn’t stop there. That person will ask themselves a few questions and the answers should result in a far better understanding:

1. Do I “get” this information? (If you don’t feel in your gut that you understand something, you won’t remember it later)
2. What does this information relate to in my life or other subjects? (If you can’t draw examples, applications, comparisons or links, the information won’t be remembered)
3. What am I missing to understand this further? Go beyond the surface and look in-depth. Whenever I get a formula to use in a class, I break down and write the formula until I understand what each component means in words, not just symbols. I break it down until I can answer an affirmative yes to question one and two.

So if your professor starts talking about Confucius my first steps would be to simply write down the information. First I’d ask if I get this information. After that, I’d try to draw comparisons between Confucius and other world philosopher I already know of. How does his teachings compare to Socrates? Jesus? The Buddha? How does his life compare? If I met him what kind of personality would he have? I would also think back to the time period he lived in and connect him to other historical events. Finally I would ask myself whether I have enough depth to really understand him. If the answer is no, I would do a quick google/wikipedia search to pick out a fuller complement of facts.

That description was overkill. If you feel you really get the information being taught, you can probably make do with just a few of those steps. The point is to get a handle on information you haven’t completely internalized yet.

[Ed: Notice how well this type of thinking fits with a quiz-and-recall style review, in which you can lecture on big ideas however your want...]

From your perspective, what’s the biggest myth students must overcome before they can embrace this approach.

Repetition. This idea that learning involves going over a fact repeatedly. Sometimes brute force is necessary for information that has no deeper layers. But usually this isn’t the case.

I like the “Learn It Once” rule. Basically this rule states that if you only had a chance to look, read or study the material once, what would you do differently. Constant “studying” or trying to relearn information you didn’t get the first time is putting duct tape over a leaky faucet.

Related Resources:

• Scott’s Blog
• Scott’s Posts on Holistic Learning
• Scott’s Free eBook on Holistic Learning

Jessica Crowell resides in two very different worlds. After graduating from the University of North Carolina last spring, she continued her role as the Chief Financial Officer for Size Me Up, the online business she helped invent with her friend Melissa Adelman (who was profiled recently in this same series).

At the same time, however, Jessica keeps a foot solidly in the world of big business finance with her “day job” as an Interest Rate Derivate Analyst for Wachovia Securities.

We asked this multi-focused wonder to reflect on the lessons of her college experience.

What did you get right during your time at college?

I recognized early on that learning was more important than trying to get a 4.0. My opinion is that taking slacker classes that don’t interest you just to boost your GPA or pick up a credit is a waste of time. While many of my friends were taking geography 101, I decided to enroll in an upper level class on Emerging Market Economies…I worked really hard, but in the end, it completely paid off. I learned tons and networked with people that I never would have met otherwise. Since then, I made it a point to consistently pick classes that both interested and challenged me even if I would have to work harder to get the grades I wanted.

What would you do differently if you could do it again?

I would have gotten more involved in the international programs on campus. After being an exchange student myself during the 2nd semester of my junior year, I realized what an awesome experience it is to form connections with other students from around the world.

What is the single most important piece of advice you would give a current undergraduate?

Understand that as a ‘college student’ you have many unique opportunities that aren’t necessarily available to so-called normal adults—the two that come to mind are studying abroad and using your ‘student’ status as an excuse to get to know key people both on and off campus. A great example of this is Size Me Up, an online clothing sizing tool that my roommate and I designed during our senior year. By using our University contacts, we were able to network with everyone from former apparel industry execs to Venture Capitalists. We have been able to keep the momentum we generated, however, I think that it would be much harder to gather the type of support we received now that we are no longer in a college environment.

Describe one simple hack you found made your student life easier.

Whenever possible pick your classes based on professors and recommendations from peers that you respect (even if they aren’t in your major or area of expertise). It’s amazing how a great professor can make any subject relevant and memorable. Also don’t forget good professors represent a wealth of knowledge and experiences—take every opportunity to get to know the professors you like personally.

When Melissa Adelman graduated from UNC last May, she faced a hard choice. One month earlier, she had entered a major business plan competition with her idea for Size Me Up, an online company that would provide a tool “that allows users to easily and instantly obtain size recommendations for new clothing purchases based on well-fitting items they already own.” It won the competition and earned Melissa $15,000. Around the same time, however, she also received a lucrative job offer from Deloitte Consulting. What to do? Risk and thrill or security and routine?

Melissa decided to take the plunge: turning down the job offer, she invested her winnings into making her business plan a reality (If you want to help, enter some sizing information at the Size Me Up web site, and potentially win an iPod).

Here are Melissa’s reflections on her college experience:

What did you get right during your time at college?

I got really involved in activities outside of my classes that enhanced my overall business education and college experience. For example, I participated in the Carolina Challenge [ed: business plan competition] during my junior and senior year, which taught me how to apply what I learned in my business classes to real-world situations. The reverse was true as well: the real-world experience I got from the Carolina Challenge helped me succeed in my classes. Although I ultimately won the prize money, I’d say that the experience and network I gained from the Carolina Challenge was even more valuable to me as a young entrepreneur.

What would you do differently if you could do it again?

I would have launched my business earlier so that I could have had even more of a head start before I entered the real world. However, I’m really happy with my college experience and I would have had to sacrifice other areas, such as my grades, to launch the business.

What is the single most important piece of advice you would give a current undergraduate?

Follow your passion! College is the time for you to explore your strengths and interests. While it is great to have direction, don’t come into college with a 100% preconceived notion of what career path you’ll take. Your parents and other advisers may put pressure on you to follow a certain career, but ultimately, you have to be happy. For example, I knew I wanted to do something in business and I am strong in math, so everyone’s advice to me was to become an accountant or investment banker. It’s easy to take the safer route and do what “makes sense,” but at the end of the day, you have to be passionate about what you do because it becomes a big part of your life when you graduate.

Describe one simple hack you found made your student life easier.

Surround yourself with positive, bright, and supportive people! They will support you as you follow your passion and encourage you to push yourself to a new level of greatness.

I’m inaugurating a new regular feature for the blog: If I could do it again. The idea is to interview recent college graduates doing interesting things and ask them to reflect on what they did right during college and what they would do different.

Our first victim is Michael Simmons, a graduate of NYU, who is the co-founder of the Extreme Entrepreneurship Education Corporation, a company which publishes books, operates a successful college road tour, and owns the goal-oriented social networking site Journey Page. Michael’s been featured on CBS, ABC, NBC, and USA Today, and was named one of Business Week’s top 25 entrepreneurs under 25. (He’s best known, however, for co-founding a high school dot-com with a dashing and brilliant classmate who went on to write a pair of book about doing well at college.)

SH: What did you get right during your time at college?

Michael: I spent a lot of time building relationships with the administrators
(professors / deans / advisers / president / marketing / etc). These
relationships helped me become aware of and receive great opportunities.

SH: What would you do differently if you could do it again?

Michael: I would have studied abroad in a third world country.

SH: What is the single most important piece of advice you would give a current undergraduate?

Michael: Contemplate your goals for life and college and then make them happen no
matter what. Otherwise, you’ll end up following somebody else’s goal for
you.

SH: Describe one simple hack you found made your student life easier.

Michael: During the first week of every semester, sit in on as many classes as
you can and then drop the classes you don’t like. I found that professors have more of an impact on my enjoyment of a class rather than the topic. Beyond a professor’s reputation and curriculum vitae, it is really difficult to know whether or not you’ll like the professor until you seem him/her in action.

[Originally sent to Study Hacks Newsletter on 6/4/07]

My friend Ben Casnocha recently published his first book, My Start-up
Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon
Valley. Ben has an interesting story to tell. He first got involved in
the tech boom when he was 12, and by high school he was heading a
multi-million dollar company. What makes his book interesting,
however, is that it bypasses the rah-rah, self-congratulation common
among the young entrepreneur set, instead capturing, with remarkable
lucidity, the complexities of trying to balance being a teenager and
running a business. It also replaces the generic advice endemic to the
genre (“follow your dreams and it will all work out”) with practical
mediations on issues such as the role of luck in big successes and the
proper care and feeding of mentors. The overarching theme of My
Start-up Life is that many of the skills related to entrepreneurship
can be applied to any endeavor.

What makes Ben relevant to Study Hacks is that he is heading off to
college in the fall. I thought it would be interesting to interview
Ben regarding how his experiences will shape his path through higher
education. Our conversation is reproduced below. For more information
on Ben, his book, or his popular blog, check out
http://www.mystartuplife.com.

STUDY HACKS: Your book promotes the idea of being “CEO of your own
life.” What does that mean?

BEN: It means adopting the entrepreneurial world view in all that you do — not
just starting a business. It means thinking different, challenging the
status quo, striving for impact, and generally maintaining a commitment to
carve your own life path and not outsource that vital task to anyone else
like a parent or professor.

SH: You’re heading off to college in the fall. How do these ideas
apply to this new environment?

BEN: To be CEO of your college life means you will think about what you really
want to get out of it. You won’t just accept the default. You won’t just
sign up for random classes. You will talk to people, cold call professors,
sample widely, ask for exceptions, explore nooks and crannies; in short, you
will be entrepreneurial in how you create a four year experience.

SH: How does the social aspect of college integrate into this
framework? Or, in other, cruder words: is it possible to be CEO of
your own life and still get chicks?

BEN: Absolutely.

SH: But are you worried about not conforming to the typical behavior
of your fellow undergraduates? That is, downplaying work, and trying
to act uncaring. How do you think they will react to someone who is
following the beat of his own drummer?

BEN: I will conform a little. To be part of a group, we all need to give up a
little of our individuality. However, in general, I think college is the
time when most of us begin to extend ourselves in new directions, so I’m
expecting that “beating on your own drum” will be embraced more than in high
school.

SH: Let’s get specific: name three things you plan to do in your first
year of college to help you get more out of the experience than the
average undergraduate.

BEN: 1. Reach out to 5-6 professors who won’t be teaching me but who sound
interesting anyways. Take them to lunch. 2. Engage in the ecosystem
AROUND the college. For me, this is Los Angeles and all that it
offers. 3. Talk to the Registrar and Dean about flexibility in my
schedule so I can ursue various extracurricular activities. In high school, I had great
success at persuading them to loosen the normal academic requirements and
schedules.

SH: Give an example of an extracurricular activity that would require
a special course load.

BEN: Anything that’s both extensive and intensive. Extensive means it involves a
wide range of activities (starting a business certainly is extensive) and
you probably have to be in various locations. Intensive means it has to
consume a lot of energy to be done right.

SH: Another specific question: how does your experience as an
entrepreneur affect how you will tackle schoolwork?

BEN: I will strive to pass my classes but not over optimize. The reason most A+
students don’t make good entrepreneurs is because they don’t settle for good
enough. I pay close attention to diminishing returns. I want to get as much
as possible out of each class I take, and once I’ve reached that optimal
point, devote the rest of my time and energy to other activities. This may
mean that for some classes I spend little time if they don’t seem
stimulating.

[Ed: We'll have to introduce Ben to STRAIGHT-A -- with the right
strategies, there is little difference, in terms of effort, between
learning the material and scoring top grades.]

SH: Let’s do a sample scenario. I’m an undergraduate. I’m not quite
sure what I want to do with my life, but I’m ambitious, and would like
to do something big and important before I graduate; I just don’t know
how. One thing I’m really interested in is clever technologies for
helping to reduce global warming. Give me a battle-plan for
jump-starting my life.

BEN: First, figure out if you’re really interested in clever technologies to
reduce global warming. Many people think they are interested in something,
but turn out not to be. This is because we tend to absorb the interests of
others as our own.

The best way to figure out what you’re interested in is to expose yourself
to as much random stuff as possible. Sure, go to a few green tech
conferences and do some research online, but also do other things. Explore
some secondary interests. Talk to a priest and then a workaholic tech
entrepreneur. Get varying perspectives. You’d be surprised how many people
respond graciously to a stranger who reaches out and asks for their
perspective.

Then get going. If you do indeed decide to try to fight global warming,
start taking action, start doing things, and build your plan as you go.

SH: What’s the most frustrating misperception people tend to generate about you?

BEN: Hmm. Perhaps that I’ve figured out all the answers. I still have
much to learn. A little youthful success is far from total
understanding.

SH: Do you feel like people expect you to do something amazing at
college? Do you expect this of yourself?

BEN: I think there is always pressure to one-up yourself at each new stage. I
feel that pressure, yes. But it’s not crippling. As for expectations, I
consider the expectations of others, but it’s subordinate to my own
expectations and desires. This is a key distinction. Fundamentally, the more
intrinsically motivated you are the better.