What I learned from debate
Debate is something that took over my life. I obsessed over it. I threw away weekends for it. When people invited me out, I'd say, "I can't. I've got debate." I even joined a facebook group of the same name (as the quote).
But it's something I have surprisingly few regrets about. It's such an enriching experience to learn, not just how to stand up and speak, but to do it in a focused and structured way.
1. It taught me where Iraq was.
I confess. I was horrible at geography and history before this. I could tell you that I had heard of North Korea but I wouldn't have been able to accurately point it out on a map.
Because of debating, I can safely say that I can at least point out a few countries.
2. It taught me to never stray from your objective.
You should never ever explain more than important. Because they'll stop listening to you anyway after they hear what they want. And all you'll end up doing is wasting everyone's time including your own.
And the importance of having a clear objective becomes that much clearer. Now, I utterly hate people who do things or say things that don't help them achieve their objective. Ok well, maybe I don't hate them. But it's so frustrating to hear them blabber on and on about irrelevant things, or to see them do so many things that are pointless.
Of course, to only do things relevant to your objective, you have to have an objective in the first place. Over 4 years, debate drummed it into me that you must always have an objective.
3. It honed my skills in explaining complex ideas in an economy of words.
You only have 7 minutes to explain how you want to save the world before bedtime.
Let's say it takes 5 seconds to say a sentence. That's only 84 sentences you can say to describe the political situation in some country on the other side of the world and explain why aid is the worst thing you can do to the farmers in the area as well as put forward your own solution for the problem at hand and of course defend it from the arguments of your opponent.
Did I mention you have to find the flaws in what your opponent says and attack those too? 7 minutes is waaaayyyyy too short.
4. It made me meet so many kinds of people.
There are a number of awesome people in this world. It seems that a huge proportion of them are in debate. Not only that, you get to meet so many varieties. I don't just mean in terms of race or culture. I also mean in terms of people who are just different. Their styles, their personalities, their very outlook on life.
And where else could you find such a diverse group who would be more than willing to talk and talk and talk and...
5. It allowed me to get away from the calculator.
I'm in engineering. The hard sciences don't give much room to discuss world issues in class. In law or economics or sociology, you discuss world issues all the time. So I stepped out of my classroom and tried to be a little more well-rounded. I didn't want to just be a guy who knew how numbers worked. I wanted to know what those numbers meant.
Engineering is supposed to use science to solve real world problems. How do I do that unless I know what those "real world problems" are?
So...
If you've got the time, join debate. It's so worth it.
If you haven't got it, make time.
Whitespace
My little brother was born into a world where the internet already existed. A world where all the information in the world is available at your fingertips. I can find out in 15 minutes what it took a few days to find out a few decades ago. So with all this information that we have, we cram in more and more and more. You can open yahoo.com and see how they cram in so much into just one page.
Of course, having a whirlwind of data isn't always the best either. There's always a thing called whitespace.
Whitespace
When you have too much information at a time, your brain won't be able to process all of it at once. It needs space between information. For example, that pause people make after saying something important. Or the way a webpage looks so so soooo much better when everything useless is taken out and you have the minimum to see.
One reason why people like the facebook layout is because it doesn't cram too much on the same page (or at least that's true if people don't have a bunch of apps). By spacing the columns of information and limiting the information that gets there in the first place, you can better appreciate and concentrate on what you DO have on the page.
Put large blocks of space in between the blocks of text and things look much better.
Learning whitespace
So I think that we might need learning whitespace too for the same reason. Learn 3 things in half an hour and you'll walk away with all 3. Learn 48 things in a half an hour seminar and you'll still only walk away with 3. You might have written all 48 down but in the end you'll only grasp the overall concept of all 48 and not the individual concepts of each.
So we need learning whitespace. And that's when I realized what storytelling really does.
I've always been a believer that the best way to get information across is to tell a story. Our mind has evolved over thousands of years of oral storytelling to accept stories as the best medium to send information across generations.
A story (a well told story) compresses information into the format that's best to learn in. Data like dates and names are spaced properly, with the story parts in between to catch your attention again. So you get a bit of info, then while you're processing it, the author catches your attention with a little story before going on to the next bit.
Books should only have a few major points
I always complained that those hundred ringgit books would only have 3 or 4 main points in a book. Sometimes only 1 point in the whole book! Now I realize maybe it's better that way.
Of course this only goes for books that aren't story books in the first place. Because any book that wants to get a point across should always use stories to do it.
So...
Whenever everything looks too cluttered, just add a little whitespace.
Speaking in Public Doesn’t Need Perfection
My heart beats faster. I start to feel that slight churning in my stomach. I wonder if this is such a good idea? Walking in front of 100 people and letting them watch me do so horribly. After all, I'm barely prepared! I know what I want to talk about but what will I say? What words will I use? What if I don't use the perfect words that will make my whole audience like me?
These are real thoughts that go through my head every time before a presentation or a speech. But I can still go up and deliver it. And I'm proud to say that my speeches are not too boring. And it's because I know that it doesn't need to be perfect.
People WANT to enjoy your speech
It takes a lot of effort to travel somewhere to sit down and hear you speak. It takes a lot of time out of their busy day to do so. If your audience is there, they want you to succeed. They want you to do well.
Think about it. Have you ever thought to yourself, "I wish this speaker was boring"? Never. It's always, "I hope this next speaker isn't too boring".
Your audience has already made a huge investment. They've come all the way there and they have to spend the next few minutes listening to you anyway, so they might as well try to enjoy it, right? And they'll try to enjoy it as much as possible.
Your audience want to find any excuse possible to enjoy your speech so if you do even the smallest thing well, or make even one tiny joke, they'll remember that and conveniently forget the rest.
Nobody remembers the bad parts, they only remember the good parts
I'm sure you've heard thousands of speeches before. It could be your teachers at school, speeches on TV, a seminar you've been to, toasts at weddings and even the opening speeches at most programs. What do they have in common? 99% of them are quite boring.
What else do they have in common? I don't remember that 99%. I don't remember who gave the speeches. I don't remember what they said in the speeches. Most probably I wasn't even paying attention.
I do remember all the good speeches I heard though. I still remember the faces of the speakers (sometimes I didn't get to find out their names), what they talked about, where it was that I heard it and even when I heard it.
So it turns out that even if you perform extremely horribly, guess what? The audience was expecting that anyway. 99% of speeches ARE boring. They won't bother remembering it and will have forgotten it later. So it's ok to mess up. No one cares.
3 points is more than enough
Ever thought that you need to make sure that your audience gets all your knowledge? Or maybe you just wanted to impress them with how much you know? It turns out that talking too much bores people!
"Oh my God! Seriously?" *sarcasm*
Seriously though, having too many facts and figures and points that you want to explain will only overwhelm your audience. Stick to 1 or 2 points. Have a maximum of 3 points. Preferably only one. Be clear what they are. Repeat it. Emphasize it.
If you're telling a long story to explain one of those points, at the end of it tell your audience how that story links to that point. Because they'll probably forget.
When the speech ends you want them to come away thinking only one thing. That point that you wanted to get across. Just that single one.
So your speech doesn't need to be perfect
It doesn't have to be perfect and it probably won't be perfect. But that's ok. It will still be better than 90% of speeches if you just keep it short and stick only to the simple message you want to get across.
Once you're done reading this, I hope you'll come away with only one point which is, "Speaking in public doesn't need perfection. It only needs to be just a little bit ok. And short. Keep it short."
Speaking Plain English vs. Using Jargon
What if people forgot about your words?
I always heard people speak using big words. No, wait, that's not true. I always heard about people who speak using big words.
Growing up, I never heard it much myself. Rather, I grew up reading storybooks. Good old fiction. Whether it was mystery or horror, fantasy or comedy, it was all good to me. When I ran out of books, I'd even read magazines (though of course they weren't as much fun). I opened a few books that were non-fiction as well. Every time, the book pulled me in. I forgot about the words. Want to know why? It's coz they wrote in Plain English.
Everybody uses Plain English... right?
So I grew up thinking that everybody used Plain English. Explaining things using simple words so that people would already understand the words and could now concentrate on understanding your message instead.
The only ones that didn't were people who wanted to sound smart. After all, don't you sound smart when you start saying words that have 10 syllables?
Jargon
Then I found out about Jargon. It turns out that in every field and in every industry, they have things that would be very complicated to explain but happen all the time. So special words were made up to refer to them easily. Instead of calling something "a super tiny sensor that's made to detect sudden changes in movement up to 5 times of gravity", an engineer could just call it "a 5G accelerometer". Shorter. Simpler. Not a bad thing at all. Not until you put 20 words of Jargon one after another. Then it becomes a LOT harder to understand.
Which should we use?
It took me a long time to understand that for some people, it's not that they don't want to use Plain English. They can't. They simply don't know how to because they haven't been trained for it and have never had to do it in their lives. Every time they've been asked to present any information, nobody has taught them to use Plain English.
When I was taking my degree, I joined my university's debate club. I had a great chance to hear people present complicated facts and arguments in a way that the audience could understand. I heard people present these things day in and day out for 4 years.
Mistakes
It quickly became clear to me that most people don't know how to keep it simple. The usual mistakes people make?
1. They assume the people listening know as much as they do.
They immediately start talking and assume that the audience know the same things that they have read and studied about. You'll start hearing acronyms like UNCHR, FDI, ASEAN+3 and things like junta (pronounced hunta), naming and shaming, floating currencies and locus standi.
What?!
Take a few moments. Say what you mean. Don't put fancy terms out there if people might not know them. You only use Jargon when people are ALL from the same background.
2. They say everything else about the issue except the issue itself.
You know who they are. The people that ramble on and on and on while you're wondering what they're telling you about. You heard them talk about the current global recession and the potential for bio-engineered plants in 3rd world countries, but what does that have to do with hiring nurses from the Philippines?
If you want to say something, say it. You don't have to explain it.
3. They assume people can read minds and can get what they mean.
Let's say that I tell you that we should reward green companies to help save the environment. And I stop there. You could understand it in many different ways.
What kind of reward do I mean? Tax subsidies? Exclusive government contracts?
What does green mean? Not burning anything? Filtering their smoke? Donating to organizations that help the environment?
By leaving it at that, it becomes very vague and each person understands it his own way (if he even understands it at all). So say exactly what you mean.
Not too short, not too long
So on the one hand, you have to keep it short. Say exactly what you mean and nothing else. On the other hand, if it's too short people might not understand what you mean. Right?
Wrong. People only don't understand when you use Jargon. So make it as short as possible while still using Plain English words. The same words that you grow up with and read in story books. The same words that you use while chatting with someone over drinks.
When you use this same simple language, it makes things easier. It frees his mind from spending time to understand the meaning of the word that you just said. Instead he can use that time to understand the meaning of your sentence and to imagine it in his head. He can see it, hear it, feel it.
When you can make people forget your words, you can make them remember your dreams.