Why So Many Smart People Suck at Presenting (and How to Avoid It)
We coach a lot of speakers with incredible brainpower and credentials — owners of triple doctorates, endless patents, and ingenious technologies…
And they’re often among the worst presenters we’ve met.
Why? In our experience, they commit two deadly sins of communication:
- Saying too much.
- Saying too little.
Wait… Aren’t those contradictory? Not at all. And most surprisingly, the two sins are often committed at the same time.
If you’re well-educated and smart (and I’m sure you are), you’ve likely made these mistakes yourself.
In this post, I will look at why that is, and then talk about how you can avoid these sins and get your message across.
*Tech entrepreneurs are some of the worst offenders — often assuming that investors already know everything about their space and technology.
First Sin: Saying too much
Think about the smartest person you know, perhaps a professor, engineer, or a doctor. I’d bet they know a lot and have done a lot.
This gives them a BIG reserve of knowledge and experience to draw from. But it also means they have way too much to share. And the more bits of info you have, the harder they are to arrange into a coherent story.
*In fact, lots of very smart people even openly hate on the idea of a simple, coherent story, because they’ve dealt with complexity their entire lives.
Instead of getting “In my 30 years as a community organizer, principle X has served me well time and again…”, you get:
“I started with A, then I moved on to B, but then C happened, I think this means D, but you know what, E makes a ton of sense too, it all depends on F, G, H factors, which are connected by I principle, and ohhh you cannot forget J and K, which interact with X to cause G…”
Example: Scott McCloud’s TED Talk
Take, for example, this early TED talk given by comic book savant Scott McCloud (whose work I adore, by the way):
Brilliant guy, but damn hard to follow.
Here’s a snippet (starting from 6:00), where he lays out four ways of seeing things:
“In comics, it results in a formalist attitude to trying to understand how it works. Then there’s a more classical attitude which embraces beauty and craft, another one which believes in the pure transparency of content, then another one which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience. I even gave them names: — formalist, classicist, animist, and iconoclast.”
Then he added something really helpful:
“Interestingly, it seems to correspond more or less to Jung’s four subdivisions of human thought — thinking, sensation, intuition, feeling — and they reflect the dichotomy of life and art, tradition and revolution, content and form, beauty and truth…”
That sure cleared things up heh?
So in under 60 seconds, McCloud threw 16 ideas at the audience, and I’m really not sure any of it hit the mark. No matter, he instantly reloaded more rounds, ready to fire.
(Btw: That last “interestingly” is a favorite of intellectuals. With one word they signal to you that any given idea in their heads is connected to a hundred others.)
Second Sin: Saying too little
Here comes the really strange part: as the speaker over-supplies us with concepts, they under-explain each one.
They’d simply say something like: “Of course it’s the central tenet of contemporary neoclassical liberal take on this, as you know.”
Uh… no, I DON’T know.
Scroll back and look at what Scott McCloud told us. He spent barely 60 seconds on 16 concepts, without giving any background info on any of them. That’s under 4 seconds for each idea, and none of them are simple.
And that’s the problem.
People with vast intelligence and knowledge often talk like everyone’s supposed to know the background to everything they’re saying.
When he casually refers to “Jung’s four subdivisions of human thought”, McCould is expecting us to go “Oh yeah! That’s amazing!” and not “Um… huh?”
Brilliant people have known things for so long, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to not know things.
This is essentially The Curse of Knowledge, as you know.
How to make sure this doesn’t happen to you
It’s pretty simple: Distill your information into 1–3 key ideas, and make sure that your audience
- Actually cares about it, and
- Has the necessary info to understand it
Take a look at Adam Spencer’s TED talk on, of all things, mathematics — not the easiest topic for even an educated audience:
Notice how he:
- Focused on one topic in math: monster prime numbers.
- Gave us the background info we needed to understand it — not too much, not too little, just right.
- Then told us why all this is important.
For Entrepreneurs…
Many of you work on technologies that are not just new — but pretty different from what’s out there. This likely means that you need to explain quite a few concepts that are new to people.
First, don’t put too many of these into your presentation. Focus on the few that they MUST know to follow your story.
Then, for these key concepts, develop “quick explainers” that run 30–60 seconds. More importantly, don’t just tell them what a concept means — tell them why it matters.
And you’ll become the best kind of presenter—a brilliant storyteller who can make the complex simple and compelling.
