

I saw the title for this book roll across my Twitter feed — can't remember from who, sorry — from someone who had a blog and was advocating for other bloggers to check this book out. When I read the abstract for the book, I immediately added it to my reading list.



  2. Pre-sales people who are responsible for delivering presentations to customers. Understanding why your audience's minds wander, why it's important to identify and address the different kinds of learning gaps, and how to get (and keep) your audience's attention are just three of the topics the book talks about.


1 - There are different kinds of learning gaps

A "knowledge gap" isn't the only kind of gap. There are also:

  • Skills gap
  • Motivation gap
  • Communication gap

In my world I'm typically dealing with either knowledge or skill gaps. To assess the difference between the two, I will ask this question:


If the answer is Yes, then it's not a skill.

If the answer is No, then it's a skill and learners will need practice to develop proficiency.

2 - Storytelling is an incredibly powerful teaching tool




I think that storytelling is one of the most powerful tools that a presenter can use. Not only to be entertaining, but, as I've now learned, to also help their audience encode and remember what they're hearing.

3 - Limited attention span is a myth

Consider the fans of The Lord of the Rings or of Star Wars who visit movie theaters to watch multi-hour marathons of the movies played back to back. They're able to sit through many hours of these movies and be completely glued to the screen.

The key is that they are engaged with what they're watching and they don't have to force themselves (no pun intended) to keep watching.

As a presenter, if you can get your audience into this same state of mind, you've got them hooked. Some things to do to keep their attention:

  • Have audience interact

By the way, it was a Star Wars joke. Force themselves... get it?

Encoding memory for recognition is different than encoding for recall

This is something I learned that I will be applying the next time I'm building study tools for myself: there is a big difference between recognizing information and recalling information.

Consider these two questions:

  • The command to list files in Unix is:
  • The command to list files in Unix is ________

The first question is an example of recognition. Given a little bit of study, it's pretty easy to recognize the correct answer when given some options to choose from.


As the book says:
