Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 185. Say Less, Mean More: Craft Compelling Communication

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

How to captivate an audience and make your message stick.Pitches and presentations don’t fall flat because speakers aren’t prepared. For Guy Kawasaki, it’s because speakers miss the point. “If all you're trying to do is inform, you're not going to pull it off. You have to entertain your audience.”A renowned author, speaker, and entrepreneur, Kawasaki knows that the point of great storytelling isn’t about information, it’s about emotion. “Too many speakers think, ‘I need to inform my audience. I need to get my story across,’” he says. But throughout his career, formerly as Chief Evangelist at Apple and now co-founder of Canva, he’s shown how successful communication is about captivating audiences, not conveying facts. “If you entertain people, you have a chance of informing them.”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Kawasaki joins Matt Abrahams to explore practical strategies for building decks, structuring presentations, and tips for keeping audiences engaged. From investor pitches to keynote presentations, these strategies help create effective storytelling — in business and beyond.Episode Reference Links:Guy KawasakiGuy’s Book: Think RemarkableEp.82 It’s Not About You: Why Effective Communicators Put Others FirstEp.47 Quick Thinks: How to Use Storytelling to Be a Better Founder  Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:39) - The Key to Great Storytelling (04:27) - The Purpose of a Pitch (08:12) - How to Structure a Pitch Effectively (09:44) - The 10-20-30 Rule for Slide Presentations (13:10) - Using Images vs. Text in Presentations (13:51) - Lessons from Podcasting (15:22) - The Final Three Questions (20:46) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

Hi, Matt here. I wanted to remind you that for each episode, we provide English language learning support, where we share useful information to help you develop your English skills. Check out these English language learning and other resources, along with our newsletter and deep dive videos at FasterSmartre.io under Resources. Now a word from our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production, allowing us to bring you this episode free of charge. know that I only recommend products I truly believe in. If you've listened to the show for a while, you know I am all about clear, effective communication, especially in writing, emails, and documents. All of these influence how we show up professionally.

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Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you, where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Getting to the point is critical in all communication, but especially storytelling and pitching. My name's Matt Abraham's, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm excited to speak with Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a renowned author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He was chief evangelist for Apple in the late 1980s and early 90s. Currently, Guy works for Canva, which he co-founded.

He hosts a podcast and has authored many books, including his latest, Remarkable, Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. Guy, I had a great time chatting with you on your remarkable podcast. It's such a fun conversation. I'm looking forward to our conversation here. Loll, I hope we can exceed what we did there. Well, thank you so much. Should we get started?

Yes. When you craft a story, what are the things that you are thinking about in terms of sequencing, how you start, how you end? What's your thought process? It starts with the awareness that you have to entertain your audience. I think too many people as speakers, they think, oh, my God, I need to inform my audience. And I need to, like, get my pitch across. I need to get my start.

across, you know, my people are telling me these are the three key points. And so what happens is you're working from forward from what you want to do. I want to get my three ideas across, my three key selling points across. And what you have to do is you have to understand that it's not about you, it's about them. And if your audience wants to be entertaining, which is basically every audience, I think if you entertain people, you have a chance of informing them. But if all you're trying to do is inform them and not entertainment, you're not going to pull it off. First and foremost, what I hear you say is that stories are natural and lean into just the comfort and natural way in which we tell stories. And second, thinking about your job is to engage and entertain the audience.

And through that, you can inform them. And deciding the appropriate level of information, a lot of lessons in that has to do with reminding yourself what your purpose which is to engage and entertain and make sure that you just tell the stories as you normally would. Conversation much better than formal presentations. I bet you if we had 100 CEOs or CXOs out there and we said to them, how many of you believe that the top priority in a presentation is to entertain? It would be like zero. Well, just as a personal story on that front, when I was coming up in the academic world learning how to be a teacher,

One of my mentors recently passed away was Phil Zimbardo, and he pulled me aside and said, as a professor, your job is to transmit knowledge and information. But the way you do that is by entertaining. You have to connect, be relevant and engaging. And then the students want to learn. And that makes it so much easier. And I think the same is true in storytelling and business. I want to switch our gears here and talk about a form of storytelling, which is pitching.

And I know you spend a lot of time coaching people on pitching. What is the advice you find yourself? giving over and over again about what makes for a good pitch. The problem with most pitches, it starts off with the fundamental idea that the purpose of a pitch is to get a check. And so people have this fantasy that I am going to just, you shock and odd, this is going to be Desert Storm 3. They're going to just be so shocked and odd.

They're going to ask me for wire transfer instructions. And right there, you're wrong. that screws up the rest of your pitch because the purpose of a pitch is not to get the money. The purpose of a pitch is to stay in the game and not get eliminated. So as long as you're not a no, you still can be a yes. A pitch is a path to the next step, which is due diligence. So just don't get eliminated.

That's problem number one. Problem number two is that I think in every entrepreneur's life, they have gone to some panel or watch some YouTube video where there's a panel of venture capitalists and some moderator who says, So, what do you look for in a deal? And every venture capitalist says, I look for a world class team with a world class product in a world class market. And then the panel, they keep going and say, yeah, I'm looking for really great team. And we stand by our team. We believe in our team. We stick with our team.

And so everybody hears this and they think, oh, my God. So I got to convince them that I have a world-class team. So the CEO stands up in this pitch and spends 15 minutes telling his or her life history that my great grandfather came over in the Mayflower. He landed in Connecticut. He created this hardware store. which became Ace Hardware, and he made a ton of money, so he endowed a chair at Dartmouth. And I got into Dartmouth, and from Dartmouth,

I had a summer intern at Goldman Sachs, and the next year I had an internship at McKinsey. I came out west. I worked for Google. Then I worked for Microsoft. I took my dot-net class. And like 15 minutes later, like, what the hell do you do? Is it hardware, software, or whatever?

So what I tell people in a pitch is you've got to think there's two kinds of airplanes. One airplane is a 787, and the other kind of airplane is a fighter jet. So if you're at SFO and you're in a 787, you have two miles of runway. You can just go bo-b-b-bub-bub. And 1.9 miles later, you're up in the air and the miracle has occurred. Guess what kind of pilot you need to be in a pitch? You need to be Tom Cruise, right? So in the first 30 seconds, you say, my name is Guy Kawasaki.

I'm chief evangelist of Canva. Canva Zaid in the business of democratizing design or an online design server so you can create graphics faster than you can boot Photoshop. That's the Tom Cruise explanation. Two things. One, have the right goal. The right goal is to just get to the next step. It's not to get to the check. It's not to get to the price.

It's just to get to the next step. And then second, get there quickly. It's not about building up all the credibility and explaining everything. It's really about what's the value you bring and get it out quickly. I think that's great advice, not just for pitching, but for communication in general. A lot of people take a long time. There's a lot of buildup, and I think that's really important. I also think, and I believe you believe this too, that a lot of pitching is listening

to understand what is needed and what's important to people. It's not just about coming in and saying all of this. The other thing I recommend I'd like to get your opinion on is a lot of people create one pitch and they just deliver that one pitch across all different audiences. You have to tailor it. After you give the pitch about 20 or 30 times, every time you're going to hear one different thing and you go back to your office and then you make that fix. And after you do this 20 or 30 times, you take back your presentation and you start from scratch. And you let the 20 things that you've heard and you've trying to add, somebody said, I want to know about the patent structure. So you added a

patent page. And somebody said, I want to know about the legal repercussions and trademark implications. So you put that page in. And somebody said, how are you on DEI? So you put a DEI page in it. And pretty soon you've covered every objection. And now you're not Tom Cruise anymore. Now you are flying a Pan Am 747 cargo jet. I think that's really an important point for people to think about. If you continually build change, build change, build change, you can end up with something. that's not what you need. And sometimes it's, let's just start fresh with the input and information that we had learned, and that helps. I want to shift gears to even be more specific. I know you have very strong beliefs on slides and how slides should be designed. You've actually become very famous

for your 10, 20, 30 rule. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that specific rule, but in terms of when you think about slides or things that we add to support our communication, how should we be thinking about that to be effective and not distracting. Being a big David Letterman fan, I figured out that 10 is about the magic number. And I would make the case that if you think you need more than 10 slides to convince someone you have a viable business, that means you don't have a viable business. Ideally, you could convince people in one or two slides. I think the ideal pitch is you have 10 slides ready to roll, but you get to the second or

third slide and you say, would you like a quick demo and you start a demo and the next 50 minutes you're talking about the demo and you never get to slide 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 because people are so entranced by your demo. That's a very good sign. So that's kind of where I'm coming from there. So anyway, the 10, 20, 30 rule is maximum 10 slides. You should be able to give those 10 slides in 20 minutes. I mean, there have been like Nobel Prize winners give 18-minute TED talks.

I'm giving you two more minutes than them because you're not a Nobel Prize winner, but in 20 minutes, you should be able to explain anything. And then the 30 points is because I think people use much too small a font, and they put complete sentences and whole paragraphs. When you put a sentence or a paragraph, it's because you don't know your material well enough. If you need that much text, you don't really know your material, which is your problem. So Nancy Duarte, one of my heroes from Duarte Design, she has something called the glance test. And the way the glance test works is you put up your slide.

People glance at the slide. And then they look at you. And if you put up a slide and they're like the strategic focus of my company is to enable shareholders to receive a reasonable return on equity while enabling employees to self-actualize their goals but providing a patent-pending curve-jumping paradigm shifting solution to the problems at hand while killing as few whales as possible. And now I'm back to the speaker. Steve Jobs' font size was like 190 points.

You and I were not Steve Jobs, so that's why I'm saying 30. Ah, interesting. Yeah, it's almost a heuristic. Yeah, the number of words on a slide implies how well prepared they are. So 10, 20, 30, 30, 30, size font. I often say the mantra should be what's the least amount of information I can put on a slide to add value. Again, it comes back to the fundamental question. People who put a lot of text on the slide think it's because they're going to use shock

and art to get wiring instructions. Again, that's a false assumption. So words versus images, do you find images, graphs, charts, can be as valuable, more valuable than just having words, bullet points? What are your thoughts on that? I believe I agree with that. However, I would say that the danger here is that, like everything else in pitching, less is more.

And some people think if I put four images up, it's better than three. Three is better than two, and two is better than one. But you will flunk the glance test. Because if there's four images, like dolphin, there's a picture of, of a Seagull, there's a picture of Steve Jobs, and there's a picture of the sunset. Oh, what were you saying again? I'm going to switch gears. You also do what I do.

You host a podcast. It's a great podcast. You've had wonderful guests. What are one or two things that you have taken away over all those interviews that you've done in terms of a learning that you've had or some insight that you've gained as a result? I think one of the most, if not the most insight I've gained from my podcast is from someone who has an office about a mile from here. And her name is Carol Dweck.

So Carol Dweck wrote the book, Mindset. And it's all about the growth mindset. You can have a growth mindset and believe you can learn new skills and do new things. Or you can have a fixed mindset and believe you can't.

And that was a fundamental book in my life that, you know, yeah, I want to be on the right side of that dichotomy. And everybody who's remarkable has a growth mindset. There's nobody with a, fixed mindset who's been remarkable. Carol's work is really important because a lot of people get

locked into that fixed mindset and they limit themselves. Carol Dweck's work was great as it is. And then Mary Murphy just put the icing on the cake because Mary Murphy's insight is, yes, a growth mindset is primarily in your head. But if you have a growth mindset in your head, but you're in an organization that has a fixed mindset, it ain't going to work. So you need to have, a growth mindset in a growth mindset organization for it to be optimal. I think even Carol would say that was a brilliant insight that added to her theories. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors.

Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. One pattern I see a lot, especially with people who have strong ideas, is that the hardest part isn't the idea itself. It's getting started, turning something in your head into something real that others can actually see and engage with. That's where tools really matter. Squarespace makes it much easier to take that first step. It's an all-in-one platform where you can build a professional website, claim your domain, and create a clear home for what you're offering.

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structure your ideas under pressure, and make your message land. We had such a practical, wide-ranging conversation that I wanted to share it with you here, so please take a listen. And then, tune in every week to Masters of Scale to learn more about the strategies and mindsets behind extraordinary growth. Find Masters of Scale wherever you get your podcasts. And now back to our conversation. Before we end, I like to ask all my guests three questions.

One I make up just for you and one of similar cross hall. You ready for that? Fire away. I know you have a passion for surfing. I'm curious, how do you use that passion to help you be better at what you do? I think all of us should have some kind of physical activity that we use or have that helps us focus and channel. I'm curious, why surfing and what does it do for you? surfing is not a means to an end.

It is the end in itself. So if you said to somebody, why do you do CrossFit? They will say, I want to be in fitness. I want to lose weight or whatever. Why do I surf? Because I simply love surfing. It's not a means to an end. It's the end itself.

So that's number one. And what I love about surfing, and I started at 60, which is 55 years too late, I started at 60. surfing is the most difficult thing I have ever tried to learn because there are so many variables. There's the water, the speed of the wave, the direction of the wave, the shape of the wave, the other people in the water,

the reef, the kelp, the wind, the tide. And it is both anaerobic and aerobic, and it requires great balance. And you're out in the ocean at dawn. And it's like surfing is the most fun. you can have legally. I appreciate that it's something you're passionate about, and I love that you took it on later in life. Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? There's nobody you could admire more than Steve Jobs. I saw him speak several times,

or many times, actually, and he had such a way of telling a story. Talk about passing the glance test. You could look at his slides for half a second and come back to him. He could really do a demo. He had a sense of timing and pace and, you know, he could sense when the audience, you know, wanted to hear this or that. He was truly magical. I think it's kind of like the story that if you hear that Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant always took more free throws than anybody else on the team, you would say Kobe and Michael are naturally endowed. Why did they have to take more practice shots? I don't know which comes first. If you're naturally endowed, you practice more or you practice more so people think you're naturally in the out. But addition to the growth mindset, there's the work of Angela Duckworth,

which is the grit mindset. And I would say that the flip side of the growth mindset is the grit mindset, because if you're going to grow, you're going to face failure, so you need to persevere in failure, which is grit. Final question for you, guy. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I will tell you that the most important thing is, duh, you have to have something to say. Because not everybody has something to say when they try to create a communication strategy. So you need to have something to say.

And, you know, at an extreme example, I talk to a lot of people and they say, I want to write a book. And I say, why do you want to write a book? He says, well, I want to position myself as a thought leader and a visionary and I want to build credibility. I want to increase consulting. I want to increase speaking.

That's why I want to write a book. You write your book when you have something to say, not because it's going to help position you. I think that's the number one thing. That's 95% of the battle. You have something to say. And I heard you say earlier that making sure that it's entertaining and engaging and that it's relevant to the audience. When we were talking about pitching, you talked about that.

And I think, but first and foremost, you have to have something important to say. And certainly, Guy, you did. You shared with us many concepts that. I think are really important. Be present for your audience. Tell the story as naturally as you can. Make sure that when you use slides, that there's a purpose to those slides and you're not just throwing a lot in. And an important point also is be willing to start fresh, to start new. And that's a really important lesson I need to take. Thank you for your time. My pleasure. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

To learn more about slide design, please listen to episode. 82 with Nancy Duarte. To learn more about pitching, please listen to episode 47 with Stephanos Xenios. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Brian Campos, and me, Matt Ibrahims. Our music is from

Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and check out Faster Smarter.io for DeepDive

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