Other Interests: pursuing your passion

Passionate presentations

It takes a lot of hard work to produce an inspiring presentation that lasts less than 15 minutes. Such speeches usually read well but you don't get the full effect until you see a video.

Presentation Zen has collected links to videos of such presentations including Martin Luther King's
I Have a Dream speech. (Thanks also to You Tube).

Asking the right questions: when why is not the first question

Asking "why" can sometimes reveal important information but if the question is not asked at the right time it will get a defensive response ("I don't know").

It is often better to ask questions to establish the facts: how, what, who, when.

Why? by Charles Tilley discusses the reasons people use to explain events or behavior. He lists four basic types of reasons: conventions (socially accepted clichés like "My train was late," or "We're otherwise engaged that evening"), stories (simplified cause-effect narratives), codes (legal, religious) and technical accounts (complicated narratives, often impenetrable to nonspecialists).

Malcolm Gladwell's The New Yorker's review  discusses the book and highlights the importance of story telling as a device to explain "why" in a non-threatening way. Why? can still be asked but story telling can provide background information that makes sense of "why".