Presentation Secrets: Do What you Never Thought Possible With Your Presentations

THE THREE PRINCIPLES OF PRESENTING

This book is built around three principles that I follow in my work. I think having principles is important. Principles are not rules; they are much broader and less intrusive. Although you don't always have to follow these principles, you do need to think twice before going against them. On the downside, they are much less concrete. You have to figure out how to apply them in any given situation. English writer Somerset Maugham said once that there are three rules for writing novels, but unfortunately, nobody knows what they are. It's the same with presentations. I would love to give you three rules for presenting, but I don't know what they are. So I am giving you three principles with lots of examples. You have to figure out the rest yourself. The principles are thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—or, as I call them for the purposes of my work, focus, contrast, and unity (see Figure 1-7).

FIGURE 1-7: The three principles of presenting.

NOTE These principles are fairly universal and not unique to presentations in any way. I did not invent them; I had heard of them well before I started studying presentations, but I only really understood them through my work. They've been around for a couple of centuries after being brought to prominence by the German author Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in his account of the philosophy of Georg Hegel. It turns out, ...