8.1. Seek Deeply, Seek Widely

8.1.1. Seek Deeply, Seek Widely

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. If you've ever heard a great musician interviewed, you know that this is true. Inevitably, they nod their heads to the musicians they admired growing up and, most of the time, you can hear faint traces of those influences in the music they make.

Humans are expert parrots. Our brains ingest a profound amount of data during almost every moment of every day. As we walk around living our lives, we're passing influence after influence that is fair game for use in our presentations; yet we oftentimes discount these influences for any number of reasons—too easy, too edgy, "it's not me," and yes, "I'm not creative like that." Presenting is an out-of-body experience, a notion we touched upon earlier. To that end, the simple act of stepping on stage predisposes the audience to think of you as an authority figure. Embrace this fact for the freedom it awards you! You get the chance to become completely dissociated from all of your preconceived notions of yourself when you give a presentation. It's an opportunity to be different, bolder, and more enlivened than the "you" in your daily life. You can take risks for a simple reason: You're on stage, and they are not. Regardless of content, design, or delivery, the worst presentations are the safe ones. They are boring. And they stink.

So open your horizons. Seek both deeply and widely, to discover new and effective ways of reaching your audience. Every movie you watch, story you read, and billboard or advertisement you see can inform your approach for the next presentation. If something affects you, analyze it: What causes that reaction within you? Are the colors strangely appealing? Does the text pop out at you? Do you identify with the scene being presented or with the implied theme of a particular image? Whatever the case, introspection can allow you to become a homegrown expert on outstanding design. And if I haven't said it yet, I'll say it now: design is very, very important in your presentation. It's on equal ground with both content and delivery. You cannot create great presentations without paying attention to design.

8.1.2. Talk to Strangers

Let me clarify: If an El Camino pulls up next to you and the driver offers you a Snickers bar, you should still run away. But unmarked vans and candy-toting creeps aside, it's time to shelve your mother's childhood warnings. In the professional world, new experiences with different types of people can be immensely helpful, especially when attempting to reach a large group of (let's be honest) complete strangers during a presentation.

Most likely, you are not a member of your target audience. If you were, you'd know exactly what you needed to see and hear to make the decision you wanted yourself to make. I'm sure some of us could find a way to complicate it, but for the most part, convincing ourselves to do what we want is a fairly easy assignment. Similarly, your close-knit group of friends is likely to be only slightly broader than your own personality. It's human nature to prefer our comfort zones, find our circles of trust, and ride them out until we're all shuffling around nursing homes together. But it's terrible for business, especially in terms of mass communication.

If you want to be able to step out of the box and start understanding what other people like and respond to, you've got to start collecting personalities like bottle caps or baseball cards. (Note: Please don't expressly state that you are "gathering specimens" during your reconnaissance. That approach has a way of morbidly terrifying your new friends.) Presentation design is a pragmatic art. The final look and feel of the presentation exists to please the audience, not the speaker. Thus, the onus is on you to understand what your particular audience is likely to embrace. The only way to do that effectively is to establish relational resources that you can exploit from time to time for assistance. After all, you can spend all day trying to channel a mid-level mortgage broker's innermost desires, or you can call a few mid-level mortgage brokers themselves and ask them whatever you want. Start building a network of strangers-turned-acquaintances so that your presentation design can dial in a little more specifically. Just knowing that your mid-level mortgage broker's favorite brands are Rolex, BMW, and Sobe gives you a tremendous head start on the design direction of your entire presentation.

8.1.3. Fail Often and Like It

Those idiot colonial explorers thought the world was flat—literally, a sheet of world! Obviously, some of them doubted the geography of the day enough to get on a boat and head for the edge anyway, but have you ever wondered: What if it really had been flat? They would have sailed right off the edge, apparently into the mouth of a massive saltwater-drinking serpent of some sort, if we were to believe the creative mapmakers of the day.

And then, of course, there were the more reliable setbacks of scurvy, mutiny, shipwrecks, squalls, starvation, and piracy. In fact, you might reasonably conclude that the aspiration to discover new lands was tantamount to suicide.

The result? Names etched in the collective memory of human civilization. That's all.

If we want to really achieve, we have to reconcile ourselves to the likelihood of failure. We also need to understand an extremely important fact about failure: There is nothing permanent about it. Read any biography or memoir of an important human in history, and you'll discover that roughly one-third to half of the book essentially chronicles the repeated failures that led to their success. When you sail into the unknown you'll sometimes find the edge of the world. Other times, you'll strike pure gold. The only way to miss out on the positive is to never leave the harbor.

So acquire a taste for failure. Reach extremely high. Push your design to the edge of status quo, hold your nose, and jump.

You may miss or there may be a giant serpent that gobbles you up at the bottom. But who cares? Far more dangerous than failure is delivering a routine presentation; these are the ones we're all looking out for and desperately trying to avoid. Routine presentations are boring. They're depressing. They're forgotten. And you know what? They don't garner better results than your colossal failure, anyway.

Think about the YouTube videos you watch: do you lean toward monotone book reports on Robinson Crusoe, or do you watch some wild and crazy child reenacting the story with Barbie dolls? You may not be inclined to follow the crazy, delusional child, but you'll at least have had a laugh or two. You may even buy the book.

This is what we're going for with our presentations. We're getting their attention, extending our hands as far out as we can to touch the audience. Great presentation design begins with great presentation philosophy: If you set out to make an impression and put reservations and insecurities aside for the glory of what may be, you'll come away with something, even if the presentation is a total failure—a good story, a reputation for being daring, or a sort of primal respect from the audience because they could never get up on stage and try to fly the way you did. The pursuit is what makes us great, not the results, though being great almost certainly guarantees results at some point.

Sometimes your throw is a last-second Hail Mary into the end zone; other times, it is a hand grenade that blows up in your face. Don't cry when this happens. Just shovel the dirt back into the crater and start again.

8.1.4. Keep Dreaming

The more you practice creativity, the more you'll find that it is an approach to life, not a means to a great presentation. Living creatively has benefits far beyond PowerPoint and projectors: it is helpful in marriage, with children, even in understanding yourself and growing as a person. Turning it off, insofar as one is able, is like choosing black and white after seeing color. Why would you ever do that?

My own pursuit of dynamic thinking has led me to make a surprising discovery: creativity is energizing, not exhausting. In fact, I've realized over time that the routine, the status quo, and the boring are far more draining than bright and exuberant living. Settling down may sound like maturity, but in reality it's a short ride to the grave. The mind craves experience. So start overeating.