182 REFINE AND REHEARSE
they set specific goals, ask for feedback, and continually strive
to improve over the long run. From Ericsson’s research, we have
learned that star performers practice specific skills again and
again over many, many years.
Ordinary speakers become extraordinary because they prac-
tice. Winston Churchill was one of the foremost communicators
of the twentieth century. He was a master of persuasion, influ-
ence, and motivation. Churchill, too, deliberately practiced the
skills required to inspire millions of British during the darkest
days of World War II. “He would prepare in the days before a big
parliamentary speech, practicing quips or parries against any
number of possible interjections. Churchill practiced so thor-
oughly that he seemed to be speaking extemporaneously... he
held his audience spellbound,” wrote Churchill’s granddaughter
Celia Sandys and coauthor Jonathan Littman in We Shall Not
Fail. “The lesson is simple but requires lots of hard work. Practice
is essential, particularly if you want to sound spontaneous.”^7 The
world’s greatest communicators have always known that “spon-
taneity” is the result of planned practice.
You can speak the way Jobs does, but it takes practice. Jobs
makes an elaborate presentation look easy because he puts in
the time. In The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Paul Vais, a NeXT
executive, was quoted as saying, “Every slide was written like
a piece of poetry. We spent hours on what most people would
consider low-level detail. Steve would labor over the presenta-
tion. We’d try to orchestrate and choreograph everything and
make it more alive than it really is.”^8 Making your presentation
“more alive” takes practice. Once you accept this simple prin-
ciple, your presentations will stand out in a sea of mediocrity.Ten Thousand Hours to Mastery
There are no “naturals.” Steve Jobs is an extraordinary pre-
senter because he works at it. According to Malcolm Gladwell
in Outliers, “Research suggests that once a musician has enough
ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distin-
guishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.