If you have ever given an elevator pitch for an idea, company or even your next vacation, you know how hard it can be to clearly and concisely explain your ideas before your audience looses interest.
The one person who has had the most impact on my ability to speak and present is Professor Patrick Winston at MIT. He taught us how to simplify a concept, company or project in to four sentences and repeat it back eloquently. While this seems trivial, it has had a major impact on my life.
- VISION: A sentence describing the over all abstract goal and outcome, explaining why it matters.
- STEPS: The small number of specific, concrete steps which you are doing which make this successful.
- NEWS: An interesting fact about something which just happened, identifying where you are in the process.
- CONTRIBUTION: Now that you have their attention, explain what this will mean for the, the industry or the user.
- VISION: The vision of the company/paper/system is to revolutionize industry X by cutting the cost of Y by Z.
- STEPS: We are doing this through steps A, B and C.
- NEWS: This led to a breakthrough last week where the prototype actually works!
- CONTRIBUTION: We can now provide world-wide blah which will save 100,000 lives.
QED.
