When you're trying to simplify things in your professional life and personal life, always ask yourself if you are adding complexity. How does this benefit you and anyone else? So, for example, if you are a consultant for one of the top major consulting firms in the world, and you're paid hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars a year to do consulting projects for major corporations, yes, it makes sense to have wildly complex PowerPoint slides where you can stand up and give five hour presentations to clients because you're billing by the hour quite often, the clients seem to want and expect it, and they're willing to pay for that. So you get paid immensely for having wildly complex PowerPoint slides. But for everyone else in life, when you're giving a presentation, your goal primarily is to communicate your ideas. It's not to run up the clock and dazzle people with complexity.

That's why I find the most productive people in the world, the most successful people in the world either don't use PowerPoint at all because they want to simplify their message in their presentations or when they do use PowerPoint. They use one image per slide. They don't put a lot of text, a lot of bullet points and a lot of complex charts. There will be more on how to communicate effectively, like productive successful people do in public speaking later in the course. But for right now just focus on this one concept, simplify, simplify, simplify. And yes, that definitely applies to how you're giving a PowerPoint presentation.