Winning Strategies for Power Presentations: Jerry Weissman Delivers Lessons from the World’s Best Presenters

40. The Graphics Spectrum

Lives of Quiet Desperation

In 1845, the American author, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau felt the need to get away from it all. He sequestered himself at an idyllic lake in the Berkshire Mountains for two years and wrote Walden; Or, Life in the Woods in which he famously observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”¹

Mr. Thoreau’s words are applicable to businesspeople today who lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation every time they have to make a presentation. Of all the many reasons for their desperation—time pressure, workload, and the fear of failure—perhaps the most pressing of all is the self-imposed practice of using their PowerPoint slides as not only the presentation graphics, ...