BACKGROUND:
Susan Weinschenk has managed to more or less create a cottage industry around the intersection of psychology and the creative professional sector. Her first foray into this area was 2012’s also released 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People, and the response was so great that she will be releasing a sequel (100 More Things…) this October.
QUICK SUMMARY:
The title says it all: Susan Weinschenk really does list 100 things presenters should understand about their audiences. Some of these “things” are more robust than others, naturally, and there is some more guided content towards the end of the book in the How-To and Improvement Plan sections, but the book definitely delivers on the title’s promise. Whether it goes very far beyond that is up for debate.
KEY INSIGHTS:
The more experienced someone is in their field, the less likely they are to learn from their mistakes
There are four kinds of creativity: emotional, cognitive, spontaneous, and deliberate
Multitasking is a misnomer
People who shut out negative feedback or don’t incorporate it well are much more likely to focus on the positive feedback they receive
PASS/FAIL:
It’s an easy read, which is no small task given the relative density of some of the more scholarly psychological material. Frequent blog readers will recognize and perhaps appreciate the familiar “listicle” format that dominates most of the book; others may find it stilted or disorganized.
The subject matter is rather dry overall, which lends an interesting shade of irony to the proceedings, as Weinschenk does her best to make the discussion about how to make information interesting…well, interesting.
On the whole, the book is successful in doing what it sets out to do, but ultimately that goal is fairly basic, and as a result, the text feels overly general at times. It’s unclear how many action items there really are in total, but it certainly falls short of 100.
MEANINGFUL QUOTES:
People can’t actually do more than one task at a time. Instead, we switch tasks.
If the topic is of interest to you and she is a good presenter, you can focus on the presentation for 7 to 10 minutes at most. If you’re not interested in the topic or the presenter is particularly boring, then you’ll….tune out within 7 seconds instead of minutes
Other places to focus your practice are on the ending of the presentation and the transitions. What are the last two sentences you will say?
