Why Presentations Suck - The Acceptance of Mediocrity
There are things in our everyday life that we learn to accept. Things like: Your work doesn’t inspire you anymore, yet you keep going; your partner is busy all the time, so now you make plans without them; you become tired of the dating scene, so now being lonely doesn’t seem so bad. These are major things in our lives that we could change if we really wanted to, but we’ve become tired, and just find it easier to accept them than to try to change them.
Of course, there are big things we’ve learned to accept (like the ones mentioned above), and then, there are small things. Although we can’t really help you with the big things, we’re here to talk about one of the small things: presentations.
We’ve all experienced bad presentations. We sit there, bored out of our minds, just waiting for it to be over. Then, when it’s our turn to present, we do the same thing to our audience. And it’s not out of vengeance. It’s out of habit. We’ve become used to bad presentations. We’ve learned to accept them.
There are two prevailing thoughts that push us towards the level of acceptance we’re talking about:
1) “That’s just the way it is”
2) “It doesn’t matter”
“That’s just the way it is”
If you see bad presentation after bad presentation, what would make you think that presentations can be electrifying or inspiring? And even if you’ve been exposed to great presentations (let’s say you were fortunate enough to attend a TED talk), you would probably think: Well, that presentation can’t exist in my work; we’re all accountants and accounting is boring. Our jobs and schools expose us to so many uninspiring presentations that we have come to think: well, that’s just the way it is.
“It doesn’t matter”
When you’re sitting in a bad presentation and look around you, you will see people checking their phones, drawing on their notepads, looking outside the window. And then, it dawns on you: It doesn’t matter. Whatever the presenter is trying to communicate will be lost anyway. Why would you spend time in a presentation that can blow everyone away when the reality is - nobody cares. For a lot less work, you can get through your presentation and meet everyone’s expectations. Those expectations, more often than not, tend to be really low (precisely because we’ve become so used to that standard).
Roger Bannister was the first person in recorded history to run a mile in under four minutes. Imagine if he was plagued with these thoughts. Imagine if he had thought: well, humans are just not meant to run that fast. Or: Even if I run the mile in under four minutes, why would it matter? These thoughts seem somewhat ridiculous now that he, and many others, have done it. Imagine if Steve Jobs had had those same thoughts. These people made their mark and were able to influence so many precisely because they rejected the thoughts of “that’s just the way it is” and “it doesn’t matter”. Instead they believed that what they were doing mattered and that the status quo could be changed. It all starts with that daring proposition. You can be great! You DO NOT have to accept mediocrity. Think about that the next time you’re up there giving a presentation. You can break the mold. And that matters a lot.
Get Presenting.
