Present Beyond Measure

9Brainstorm Your Content into Slide Format

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

—Albert Einstein

Now that you have an organized outline for your ideas, you're ready to start expanding and translating them into a linear, slide-by-slide sequence.

This is important: your presentation slides should not look like the modular Boxes outline; the audience should never see the boxes. So, how do you take a modular model and transpose it linearly? Don't worry about that yet; I'll show you in the next chapter.

For now, your mission is to generate as many ideas as possible to create your slides.

Again, you might feel tempted to open PowerPoint for a slide fiesta. I'm going to stay your hand once more, because believe it or not, a digital screen isn't the most constructive medium for generating ideas.

Screens? Where we're going, we won't need screens. We're going analog, as in offline!

Why You Should Brainstorm Offline

A large volume of research by Indiana University shows that the act of writing by hand stimulates creativity in a way that no other brainstorming method can.¹ Garr Reynolds, revered master of the presentation stage, popularized the Post-it Note brainstorming method in his seminal work, Presentation Zen. This book became the dojo of my creativity and presentation process, and I suggest making it one of your next reading destinations.

Handwriting has also been found to activate the same neural centers triggered during meditation, explaining why manual brainstorming ...