Tomorrow morning I am supposed to give a four minute talk. And that seems hard.<\/p>\n
I’m used to giving hour long talks, or 30 minute talks, or even 10 minute talks. But there is something about a four minute talk that brings things to a whole other level.<\/p>\n
When you only have four minutes, every moment counts. I like showing live demos in my talks, but in that amount of time, your live demo needs to work right on cue, without fail. <\/p>\n
For one thing, you won’t have time to try your demo again. For another thing, if it doesn’t work, you’ve disrupted the rhythm of the entire experience.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, if you manage to get a four minute talk right, it’s wonderful thing. When every second counts, what you say can have a lot of impact.<\/p>\n
I’m reminded of Blaise Pascal’s famous apology: “Je n\u2019ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n\u2019ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”<\/em>**<\/sup><\/p>\n ** I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tomorrow morning I am supposed to give a four minute talk. And that seems hard. I’m used to giving hour long talks, or 30 minute talks, or even 10 minute talks. But there is something about a four minute talk that brings things to a whole other level. When you only have four minutes, every … Continue reading “Short talks are harder”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19930"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19931,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19930\/revisions\/19931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}