Donald Norman Quotes

I'm a presenter.

Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.

If that comes up, I'll just confuse them.

A lot of people think that public speaking means that you are standing at a podium giving a speech, but public speaking comes in lots of different formats.

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun 'at work' and getting paid for it!

Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.

It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers.

Reading off a Teleprompter is an easy skill to do passably well and a difficult skill to do very well. I still have room for improvement there. I still talk too fast and I'm trying to slow myself down.

I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product.

Public speaking? I speak to myself on the street!

And in another point of view, I think it is right that the address of a president should be on his own subject, and that different subjects should be thus brought in turn before the meetings.

I love presentations more than fashion shows. I love speaking to people and walking them through the collection.

Speak up. You have to project! If people can't hear you, it doesn't matter what you say.

I am still working on patter and presentation.

I was driven to give the best possible performance I could based on the material that was given to me and that material was documentary footage of the President speaking to people.

What I do when speaking in public is trying to do it as best as possible and trying to make everybody comfortable with my words. Sometimes getting this is very difficult, but I try my best.

I use circumlocution too often, and instead of getting my point across, I tend to babble.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you want to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.

I spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions, and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear.

I would engage in a sort of syntax destruction that would sound like I was answering the question but actually was not.

Go ahead, Teleprompter, Go ahead!

It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.

I think that no one, or very few, are born as good presenters. It's a skill that you learn. The key is the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides given in 20 minutes using no font smaller than 30 points. If people just adhered to this rule, they would double or triple the quality of their presentations.