A keen jazz fan (and amateur musician), I like the title of Garr Reynolds’s latest blog post: Jazz and the art of connecting. Auch! Garr has collected some good quotes from jazz magicians (and musicians) and drawn parallels to the art of presenting. Here’s one of my favourites:
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
This is my favorite quote of all. Many presenters — very smart people — either take something essentially simple and confuse an audience or simply fail to make their more complicated material meaningful to their audience. Simplicity ain’t easy. In fact it’s hard.