INTRODUCE THE ANTAGONIST 69
man saw a saber-toothed tiger, he asked himself, “Will it eat
me?” and not “How many teeth does it have?”
The antagonist gives your audience the big picture. “Don’t
start with the details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hier-
archical fashion, form the details around these larger notions,”
writes Medina in his book Brain Rules.^7 In presentations, start
with the big picture—the problem—before filling in the details
(your solution).
Apple unveiled the Safari Web browser during Macworld
2003, designating it the fastest browser on the Mac. Safari
would join several other browsers vying for attention in the face
of Microsoft’s juggernaut—Internet Explorer. At his persuasive
best, Jobs set up the problem—introducing the antagonist—
simply by asking a rhetorical question: “Why do we need our
own browser?”^8 Before demonstrating the new features—filling
in the details—he needed to establish a reason for the product’s
existence.
Jobs told the audience that there were two areas in which
competitors such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, and others fell
short: speed and innovation. In terms of speed, Jobs said Safari
would load pages three times faster than Internet Explorer on
the Mac. In the area of innovation, Jobs discussed the limita-
tions of current browsers, including the fact that Google search
was not provided in the main toolbar and that organizing book-
marks left a lot to be desired. “What we found in our research is
that people don’t use bookmarks. They don’t use favorites very
much because this stuff is complicated and nobody has figured
out how to use it,” Jobs said. Safari would fix the problems by
incorporating Google search into the main toolbar and adding
features that would allow users to more easily navigate back to
previous sites or favorite Web pages.
One simple sentence is all you need to introduce the antago-
nist: “Why do you need this?” This one question allows Jobs to
review the current state of the industry (whether it be brows-
ers, operating systems, digital music, or any other facet) and to
set the stage for the next step in his presentation, offering the
solution.