In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
A businessman finds a fisherman, who is living an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.
He laughs and tells the fisherman how to get rich instead.
The fisherman asks him what he will do after he gets rich.
He replies that he would retire to an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.
There's supposed to be a deep life lesson in there, but it's always felt insincere to me.
To me it is better to have reached the heights of a career, or suffered an epic defeat, even if I do end up in the same place as everyone else in the end.
To me simplicity is made more beautiful when understood through a long personal struggle with complexity. When I can dance with it, having turned a mighty nemesis into an old friend, and teach others to do the same.
Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.