Hello Reader,
I've sat in rooms where the presenter was clearly smart, clearly prepared, and had clearly put real work into what they were sharing. And the audience was — politely — somewhere else.
Not rude. Not checking phones, exactly. Just not really there.
The problem is almost never that the presenter didn't know enough. It's that they knew too much and tried to deliver all of it. Technical professionals fall into this especially: the work is interconnected, the details matter, and if you've spent six months on something, it feels wrong to leave the interesting parts out. But the audience didn't come for the full picture. They came for the one thing that changes what they do next.
There's a distinction I've almost never heard stated clearly that sits at the root of this: topic is not message. The topic tells your audience whether to show up. The message is what they take home. Most presentations have one. The ones that work have both.
In a new video this week, I walk through what that distinction looks like in practice — and the question I ask every time I'm helping someone build a presentation who doesn't know what it's actually trying to say. It almost always breaks the logjam.