88 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
designs his slides as well. “It’s laziness on the presenter’s part
to put everything on one slide,” writes Nancy Duarte.^3 Where
most presenters add as many words as possible to a slide, Jobs
removes and removes and removes.
A Steve Jobs presentation is strikingly simple, visual, and
devoid of bullet points. That’s right—no bullet points. Ever. Of
course, this raises the question, would a PowerPoint presentation
without bullets still be a PowerPoint presentation? The answer is
yes, and a much more interesting one. New research into cog-
nitive functioning—how the brain works—proves that bullet
points are the least effective way to deliver important informa-
tion. Neuroscientists are finding that what passes as a typical
presentation is usually the worst way to engage your audience.
“The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat,” writes Dr.
Gregory Berns in Iconoclast.^4 In other words, the brain doesn’t
like to waste energy; it has evolved to be as efficient as possible.
Presentation software such as PowerPoint makes it far too easy
to overload the brain, causing it to work way too hard. Open
PowerPoint, and the standard slide template has room for a title
and subtitles, or bullets. If you are like most presenters, you write
a title to the slide and add a bullet, a subbullet, and often a sub-
subbullet. The result looks like the sample slide in Figure 8.1.Title
■ Bullet
■ Subbullet
■ Sub-subbullet
■ Bullet
■ Subbullet
■ Sub-subbullet
■ Bullet
■ Subbullet
■ Sub-subbullet- Really in the weeds
Figure 8.1 A typical, boring PowerPoint template.