Murphy’s law says that the bad events happen exactly at the moment you don’t expect that. It is the same in the presentation. Some weird things may happen before your presentation starts based on Murphy’s law.
We talked about how to prepare a presentation. How to design our slides based on the human brain functions? Then we said some technical tips and tricks. After that about how to present effectively. This part is about Murphy’s Law.
You probably know about Murphy’s Law. Murphy says bad events usually happen at the worst moments. Your nose gets itchy the exact moment that your hands are dirty. When your pen is going to fall, it falls as far as possible which is harder for you to reach. It’s precisely the same in presentations and I want to explain it to you now.
Learn some tricks to overcome Murphy’s law in your presentation.
Consider checking these 10 things before starting a presentation so you can have your best speech and prevent Murphy’s law from happening.
1- Slides
This one was one of the biggest seminars I had. Three thousand audience was there. I checked my laptop before. I was sure of it. But when I wanted to connect it 3 minutes later, it didn’t work no matter how much I tried.
What would you do? First, you have to be completely ready to continue without slides. Never say to the audience that I had very beautiful slides and my laptop is not connecting now. It annoys them.
This is a situation you have to manage by yourself. I strongly recommend you to use your own laptop. Why? Because others’ might have a different kind of fonts and abilities. Software might open while you’re working. You may not have its charger or many other things. In this seminar, I had three different laptops and I had backups for my files. So I could easily use another backup in another laptop. I suggest you do the same thing.
2- Battery and charger
One other thing is the battery for presenter and projector. We have to have backup batteries. I always have a AAA battery (triple-A battery) in my bag. Either for the presenter or the projector.
If your presenter is the Logitech, spotlight which I explained earlier and use, it needs USB Charger and you have to be careful about its charge. If it’s other kinds of presenters, we have to take the charger with us. Also the cell phone charger, we have to take it with us too.
Mobile and laptop charger are important and most speakers forget about them.
For example, my laptop can work for eight hours. I tell myself that my presentation is for four hours, so I don’t need to bring a charger with me.
It’s a mistake because when we connect RGB or VGA Cable, the battery usage increases and your laptop charger will lower very sooner. We indeed have to take the laptop and mobile chargers with us.
3- Different outlets in different countries
One trick to overcome Murphy’s law is to learn about outlets in different countries.
If you ever have traveled abroad, you should know that every country has its power outlet. I bought a world travel adapter kit. Now I know that no matter what country I am in, I can connect my wires easily. So it’s better to search for it and see what kind of adapter you’ll need to use power. It’s a tiny point, but it’s important, it costs 30 or 40 dollars and it can save all your presentation.
For example, you can see here that some countries like England, Hong Kong, Singapore use this kind of threesome plug. New Zealand and Australia like this. Plugs are like this in China. North America and Japan.
I was really troubled in Japan. The outlet in Korea is thick and in Europe is like this. So whatever country you want to go, you have to search for its outlet and plug.
4- Technical problems such as updates
Technical problems always happen. For example, I saw this error before my presentation.
Look, the screen went blue and it took almost an hour to recover.
Another terrible problem is about updates. Whether your system is Mac or Windows, when you turn it off and then turn it on, it starts updating.
It can last for two hours depends on the update size and your computer configuration. It says several minutes but sometimes it will last a lot more than that.
So we have to be careful. Always deactivate all your updates before you go to the seminar. To do that, you can easily google it. Depends on what system you have, you can search: how to disable updates in windows 10 for instance. The tutorial shows up and for each system, there is a different way to disable the updates.
By attending to all these 10 points, you can overcome Murphy’s law and prepare your best speech.
