I work often with a very successful Japanese writer, Matsuno Shuho. Together we have published more than a dozen books, on the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) tests, the primary business and academic English competency measures in the world, as well as one on the speeches of Barack Obama.
Several years ago, when our first book together came out, I was so excited that I went to one of the biggest book stores in town and stood near the stack of books on the end of the aisle. I wanted to see someone, a complete stranger, buy the book. One woman strolled up and, after glancing over the other books, she picked ours up.
I was practically holding my breath as I waited for her to delve into our beautiful book. I wanted to see it first intrigue and then captivate her. I wanted her to lose all sense of time and get lost in my lovely English examples and then snap back to her senses and rush off to the cashier to buy it and take it home to cherish. Instead, she gave it the one-second thumb through and casually tossed it back in the general direction of the pile. It was all I could do not to yell at her to put it back neatly on the stack. Actually, as soon as she left, I did exactly that.
While I may have been a bit deluded in my fantasy, it taught me two very important lessons. First of all, I realized that one second was about how long we had to catch a prospective customer’s attention, and considering that vast numbers of competing books, we were lucky to get that.
More importantly for our purposes, I realized that it didn’t matter if we had written the finest TOEIC test preparation book ever. It didn’t matter if it was the best book of any kind ever written. If the cover, the title and the book design didn’t grab, and hold, someone’s attention long enough for them to get the gist of what we were trying to do, our ideas didn’t matter. They were going to end up being recycled into cardboard.
Your presentations and speeches face the same hurdle. It doesn’t matter if you are presenting the secrets of fabulous wealth, perfect health and eternal life. If you can’t grab your audience’s attention, and hold it long enough for them to realize the value of what you are offering, it doesn’t matter.
You might as well have stayed home.
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