Let me ask you if you've had a long, hard week it worked. You come home, pour yourself a beverage of choice, put your feet up. Turn your large flat screen TV on in your dad or your living room 10 1520 feet away. And then pull up a news website and start reading the sports page about your favorite team on a large TV screen 15 2030 feet away. Is that how you like to read? Chances are no, you already have a system of reading that's worked well for you your whole life.
It's called holding a book, a newspaper, or a laptop, or an iPad or a computer screen about 12 to 18 inches away. That's how you like to read. It's worked well for you your whole life. You could read on a screen 15 2030 feet away. But that's not how you like to read. So that's the problem.
With so many PowerPoint presentations, we're trying to artificially force people into doing something that isn't how they like to do it. People like to read the way they like to read. And that's why I get a kick out of people telling me all the time we'll teach you in our corporate culture. We have a system where our logo is here and we have five bullet points. We have the central thesis written on every slide. And I always have to politely tell people, I don't care about your corporate culture.
I care about the culture of every individual in your audience of how they've experienced life and reading and learning information. They're intolerant their entire life, their entire life and they want to read something. It's a textbook. It's a book, it's a computer screen, where they get to control it. me ask you, if you really want to read something that's important to you. You interesting to you, it's important.
Do you ask family members or friends or colleagues to come in stand next to you talk to you while you're reading and turn the pages while you're reading? Is that how you like to read? Chances are No, that would be incredibly annoying. That's not how you like to read when you want to read something. You're like most people, you try to make it quiet or you at least put earplugs in so you can tune out other people talking. You have that page or that screen in front of you.
You read at the speed you want to read. You're not arbitrarily reading at a speed someone else wants you to read. You turn the page or scroll down. Only when you've finished and you want that's how you like to read. Well guess what? If you're standing up delivering a PowerPoint presentation and you're putting up a slide with a bunch of text and talking to people and changing the slide You're going completely contrary to how everyone in your audience has tried to read their entire life.
So what's the result? The result for most people is, you know what, they're gonna hand out the deck later. This person's just going through the mud. Let me just check my email, there's got to be more interesting news alerts on my RSS feed. That's the reasoning that's going on in your audience's mind. So that's why you gotta respect the medium and not asked people to do a lot of reading.
When you're presenting. Now there is an exception, especially if it's a relatively small group. If you are doing some kind of a training or you really want to re emphasize certain points, you can do what I did. So if I'm giving a public speaking workshop, and I've just finished a segment on PowerPoint, for example, I will then give a handout covers the key concepts on PowerPoint. I stop talking, I take everything off the screen. And I look at everyone reading the piece of paper.
I don't stop talking again, until people do this. That tells me they finished reading. That's how people like to read. So we all wish we could force people to do all sorts of things our way and not their way but effective speakers. Take people as they are. Don't try to force them to read in ways they don't want to read.