So before we go any further, I gotta give you some top tips on what not to do. I want to save you time, not waste your time. And there's a whole bunch of ways to waste time. If it's the night before a big speech, for one thing, stop gathering more data, you already have enough data to present to your audience, you probably already have enough here. So at this point, it's not about gathering more data, you got to figure out how to shape it, how to put a spotlight on what's most important. Next thing, don't write the speech out word for word.

And don't try to memorize it. That's incredibly time consuming. It's tedious. And it's usually not very successful with audiences because if you write it all out, and you got to give the speech tomorrow morning, there's going to be this tendency to try to read it because that will seem safe. And stop a minute and think how do you feel when someone reads speech to you? You're probably thinking, wow, this guy is really boring and and so thing he's assuming I don't know how to read it.

He's just gonna read. He could have emailed it to me, we could have all stayed home. So don't write your speech out. Don't try to memorize your speech, effort, goodness sake, don't try to print it all out in text bullet points on a PowerPoint thinking, well, this will be great. I'll just read the PowerPoint and use that as mine. People hate that.

Don't even use PowerPoint, unless you have great visuals that are not based on text. And if you've waited until the night before, let's forget the PowerPoint. Let's give people a good presentation based on the ideas you care about. So let's summarize the things to not do. Don't gather more and more and more data. Don't be emailing 20 colleagues, trying to get 50 more pages in.

Don't write your speech. Don't try to memorize your speech. And don't try to use PowerPoint as the poor man's Poor woman's teleprompter, put all that stuff away. And now we can get back to what's really important in the next lesson.