Friday Links 08-02-08

Entry added on Fri, February 8, 2008

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From the Web

What is Happiness? Dozens of notable bloggers weigh in. Blogging friend Alex Shalman is posting interviews with dozens of bloggers about the topic. Great questions and great answers. Check out Leo Babauta’s great entry. My response to Alex’s questions is scheduled be up sometime later in the week.

Best. Speaking Advice. Ever. - Honestly, even if your next presentation is three months away to a crowd of fifteen people, read this list. Here are a few gems:

  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. Don’t read the slides! “There is a special circle in hell for those who use laser pointers.”
  3. 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…”

From the Archives

14 Tips for a Less Materialistic Lifestyle - There is a lot more to life than stuff. Here are some of my thoughts on how to shift your life to focus on the less tangible, but more important aspects of life.

From the Shelf

Infinite Jest - I finally finished this 1200 page literary marathon last week. Time Magazine recently put this 90’s novel by David Foster Wallace in its Top 100 novels of the last century. The best part about reading the book was discovering the new words in Wallace’s verbose writing. ‘Fantods’, ‘post-prandial’ and ‘fricative’ being a few of the hundreds of new words I had never seen before.


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6 Comments »

  1. Alex Shalman said,

    February 8, 2008 at 10:42 am

    Thank you for spreading the word buddy. Your up today at 6pm sharp!

  2. Lernen said,

    February 8, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Those 14 Tips against materialistic live are realy helpfull.
    Some people realize quite late, that the best things in live you can’t buy for money, because they are free.
    Greate Tipps,

  3. carla said,

    February 9, 2008 at 6:48 am

    oh
    GREAT POINT about the starting with a joke/and GETTING MY HUMOR YET.

    duly noted and hadnt thought of that.

    C.

  4. Scott Young said,

    February 9, 2008 at 8:09 am

    Alex,

    These are posted on a time-stamp. I’m almost never writing them when they actually go live.

    And I was up at 5:30 am sharp on Friday! ;)

    -Scott

  5. PassionBasedLearning said,

    February 10, 2008 at 10:13 am

    Hi Scott, thanks for those links. Great stuff. Although I must say I disagree with the point about avoiding jokes at the start of a speech.

    I guess it depends on the kind of humor the speaker has and the audience being addressed, but I find that a good and easily understandable joke in the beginning is a pretty good strategy (and I say this as a public speaking champion). :)

    Regards,
    Amir Ahmad

  6. Shamelle @ Enhance Life said,

    February 10, 2008 at 11:30 pm

    I need to make a presentation tomorrow at work and “Best. Speaking Advice. Ever” couldn’t have come at a better time. I have read several book and even articles about public speaking but this one tops the list!

    Thanks for the links

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