Karim Vaes

Lately I’ve encountered two speeches I would like to share with you. Both are brought by great men who have been celebrated for their accomplishments. The reason I’m sharing them with you; is because I found both moving & insightful, where I bet you’ll feel the same way after viewing them. The first one is about 15 minutes, yet the second is 76 minutes long. If you want the “management summary” of the second one, click here. But trust me on this one, make time to view the long one! I know it’s lengthy, but I ensure you that it’s an interesting time spent!

Steve Jobs’s Speech at the Stanford graduation of 2005

Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”

References
Six Minutes : about Steve
Presentation Zen : about Randy
Geek & Poke : for the kickass cartoons

The human mind is a sensitive thing… Communication consists of more than 90% non-verbal aspects. Colors have symbolism and color meanings that go beyond ink. Use it to anchor a certain feeling towards your slides.

Below you can find a listing of basic colors and their symbolism:

• Black : heavy, mournful, highly technical, formal, death
• Brown : earth, simplicity, outdoors
• Blue : peace, tranquility, trust, confidence, security
• Purple : royalty, wisdom, spirituality, mystery
• Green : nature, environment, health, reptiles, insects
• Gray : conservative, practical, reliability, security, staid
• Red : passion, excitement, love, intensity, heat, aggression
• Orange : warm, expansive, flamboyant
• Yellow : optimism, happiness, idealism, imagination
• White : purity, reverence, cleanliness, simplicity

If you want a more detailled information check the following pages:
Think Outside The Slide
Symbolism of Color and Colors That Go Together
Color Wheel

Mommy, where do presentations come from?
Answer :

Mostly from people who haven’t put much effort in the preparation of the presentation

A wise man once said “I didn’t have much time to prepare this, so it’s going to be a long presentation.” A lot of presentations I’ve been thru are utterly boring! The speakers tend to put as much text as possible on the slides, and start to read these to you…

Death by Powerpoint
Check out the following presentation by Alexie Kapterev, and it will probably open up your eyes on a lot of things.

| View | Upload your own

Freestyle?
Can you find yourself in the above slide set? Fear not, there are several styles you can use to improve your presentation skills.
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I have a very economic mentality. But my girlfriend has learned me that one also has to live. I always said that I’m working to live, and I don’t live to work. Yet I often fail to put those words into actions. Or is that because I just love the sector I work in?

Anyways, I bought myself a new “toy”. One shouldn’t refer to a motorcycle as a toy. But as the model I bought ‘only’ has a 125cc, I tend to see it as a toy bike compared to the big players.

It’s an Aprilia RS 125; a two-stroke 125cc engine, but limited to 11kW. As this allows me to ride it within Belgian borders without the need for a specific motorcycle license.

In short
The neurological levels are very useful for understanding change from an individual, social or organization point of view. They were proposed by anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979). He defined a hierarchy of abstraction including beliefs, values and identity. He perceived relationships as having a higher abstraction than identity, and therefore influencing lower levels in the hierarchy, such as beliefs and behavior.

Six Logical Levels

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