Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.
Personal stories are the emotional glue that connects your audience to your message.
The greatest communicators have unknowingly used a story pattern. They not only use anecdotes effectively, but their communication followed a persuasive story pattern of tension and release. That tension and release is created by contrasting [what is] with what could be as a structural device.
The future isn't a place that we're going to go, it's a place that you get to create.
Practice design, Not Decoration: Don't just make pretty talking points. Instead, display information in a way that makes complex information clear.
Ideas need to stand out to be noticed. There is so much noisy information out there that if your message is bland, it won't be heard or acted upon. To avoid obscurity, you need to clash with your environment. Incorporating contrast into your presentation will help it stand out. You create contrast by using the presentation form. For example, you can state the problem, then the solution. State an opposing perspective, then your perspective. State the past, then your picture of the future. Adding the cadence of contrast will pull your idea out of obscurity.
The only difference between the failure of a great idea and the success of a medocre idea was the way in which the idea was communicated.
I love women. I always have. I'm not pretending that I understand them, but I just love women. I love being in their presence and I love everything about them.
The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
I'm a former hippie, so clothes are important to me - your clothes defined you in that period. I guess clothes still defines people. But, I change a lot. I'm in my Brooks Brothers period now.
It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and [Robert von Neumann ] would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.