1 failure and 3 big lessons on giving presentations
In the summer of 2008, I had my biggest fail in a presentation.
I was talking about Drupal 5 - a powerful framework for building web applications. I tested it out for a new freelance project and got excited right away. Within just 1 month of learning and with no real production experience, I proposed to organize a presentation about Drupal in hope of promoting it and recruiting more people to join my project.
I was just a student at that time but I already got several successful technical talks before. Hence the school got full trust in me and advertised the talk publicly. It ended up attracting many people even outside of the school.
Everything went well for more than an hour. I presented a flawless presentation, the audience seems genuinely interested, and it was time for Q&A. A fine man (who looks much more experienced than me) stand up and asked:
“You talked a lot about Drupal’s strengths. What are its weaknesses or limitations, though? Why is it not being used as much as, let’s say, Joomla?”
I froze for a few seconds. I never thought of that before.
Then, I tried to think quickly and immediately give some answers. “Ah, it’s perfect in term of almost everything technical-wise, but it’s not famous because the available themes are not as beautiful, and the team were too focused on the technical aspect and didn’t do well at marketing aspects, blah blah.”
BS answers that sound kinda legit to the absolute noobs. Not to the man. He didn’t continue to press on me, however. He just smiled, seems genuinely surprised, and sat down.
Deep inside I knew I messed up. For the rest of the session, I was distracted and subpar.
That single event taught me many lessons that I embodied in all of my hundred talks since then
You should have in you at least 10x the amount of information that can fit in your talk.
Always, always, look at things from as many different angles as possible. Especially on risks and trade-offs.
When you don’t know, say you don’t know. No BS answers. Being humble is a great strength.
Keep these rules and mind while preparing your presentation. So you got all the benefits without needing to make a mistake first :)
