CHANNEL THEIR INNER ZEN 89
This slide format gives me the willies. It should scare the heck
out of you, too. Designer Garr Reynolds calls these creations
“slideuments,” an attempt to merge documents with slides.
“People think they are being efficient and simplifying things,”
according to Reynolds. “A kind of kill-two-birds-with-one-stone
approach. Unfortunately, the only thing ‘killed’ is effective
communication.”^5 Reynolds argues that PowerPoint, used effec-
tively, can complement and enhance a presentation. He is not in
favor of ditching PowerPoint. He is, however, in favor of ditch-
ing the use of “ubiquitous” bulleted-list templates found in both
PowerPoint and Keynote. “And it’s long past time that we real-
ized that putting the same information on a slide in text form
that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help—in fact,
it hurts our message.”^6
Creating Steve Jobs–like slides will make you stand out in
a big way, if only because so few people create slides the way
he does. Your audience will be shocked and pleased, quite
simply because nobody else does it. Before we look at how he
does it, though, let’s explore why he does it. Steve practices Zen
Buddhism. According to biographers Jeffrey Young and William
Simon, Jobs began studying Zen in 1976.^7 A Zen Buddhist monk
even officiated at his wedding to Lauren Powell in 1991.
A central principle of Zen is a concept called kanso, or simplic-
ity. According to Reynolds, “The Japanese Zen arts teach us that
it is possible to express great beauty and convey powerful mes-
sages through simplification.”^8 Simplicity and the elimination
We’ve been trained since youth to replace paying attention
with taking notes. That’s a shame. Your actions should demand
attention. (Hint: bullets demand note taking. The minute you
put bullets on the screen you are announcing, “Write this down,
but don’t really pay attention to it now.”) People don’t take notes
when they go to the opera.^9
SETH GODIN, SETH’S BLOGNo More Pencils