The most important part

There are 3 crucial steps, without which your talk will not work:

1. The audience is paying attention to what you’re saying
2. The audience understands what you’re saying
3. You say the thing

• The order is very important
• Step 3 is the easy part, but there’s no point if you don’t have steps 1 and 2
• This page will guide you in being interesting enough for step 1, and clear enough for step 2
• i believe in u 💜💜💜💜💜

Part 1: what are we doing

Welcome to my highly opinionated guide on how to make good conference talks. This is not the only way to do it, or maybe even the best way. But it’s the only way I know and I like it :))

What to talk about

• The goal of a conference talk is to inspire!
  • Not to educate
  • Definitely not to sell something
• Make it a gift
  • Cliche, but true
  • You as the speaker are trying to give something nice to the audience, that they’ll appreciate
• Keep it short!
  • What’s the minimum viable talk you could give that communicates the idea?
  • Great now cut some of that out
  • Keep it realllll lean and crispy, all killer no filler

How to write the talk

• Close that slide editor!
  • So you have opened powerpoint or whatever to write your talk
  • This was a mistake
  • All your ideas are in your head and you want to get them down so you know what you’re talking about!
  • Don’t make slides yet though
  • Or the slides will be your braindump
  • Braindump onto dot points or whatever works for you
  • Then refine the dot points into a talk that makes sense, flows, etc.