The formula for communication success is a matter of how much knowledge you have, how much you practice with that knowledge, and your inherent talent.
The story about Mary Lou Retton and the speaker is that the speaker was a better skier than Mary Lou Retton, an Olympic athlete, because the speaker had more knowledge and practice, and Mary Lou Retton only had inherent talent.
The rule of engagement for the lecture is no laptops, no cell phones.
The best way to start a talk is with an empowerment promise, telling people what they will know at the end of the hour that they didn't know at the beginning of the hour.
The reason is empathetic mirroring. When you watch someone write on the board, your mirror neurons become actuated, and you can feel yourself writing on the blackboard. This cannot be achieved with a slide or a picture; you need to see it in the physical world.
The recommended number of slides is less, and the number of words per slide should be few and easy to read. The speaker should not read the slides but instead say what was written on the slides in a previous example.
The purpose of using a laser pointer is to identify something in an image. However, it can lead to losing eye contact and engagement with the audience. Instead, the speaker can use arrows or other visual cues to direct the audience's attention.
The recommended minimum font size for slides is 40 or 50. This ensures that the text is easily legible and allows the audience to pay more attention to the speaker.
A candidate has to show their vision and that they've done something in the first five minutes of a job talk.
The problem is understanding the nature of human intelligence, and the approach is asking questions about what makes us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. The answer is that humans are symbolic creatures who can build symbolic descriptions of relations and events, and string them together to make stories.
The steps needed to realize the vision are specifying behavior, enumerating constraints, implementing a system, and demonstrating it. These steps help establish that the speaker has done something.
The elements of Winston's star are a symbol, a slogan, a surprise, a salient idea, and telling the story of how it works, why it's important, and who it helps.