Presentation-Secrets-Of-Steve-Jobs

208 REFINE AND REHEARSE
OS X . . . Please join me in a moment of silence as we remember
our old friend, Mac OS 9.” 1
Jobs walked back to the casket, put the box back in, closed the
lid, and gently laid a rose on the top. The audience ate it up. Jobs
made his point, and he had a lot of fun doing it.
Jobs has fun, and it shows. Despite relentless planning and
preparation, hours and hours of rehearsal, and near-fanatical
devotion to getting every slide and every demo just right, sometimes
things go wrong, but Jobs doesn’t let the small stuff get to
him. He’s going to have fun, whether a demo works or not.
“Let’s take a look at how big this market is,” said Jobs as he
described the market opportunity for the iPhone at Macworld
2007. Suddenly, his slides failed to advance. “My clicker’s not
working,” he said. As he walked to the right of the stage to check
the computer, the slide seemed to advance. “Oh, maybe it is
working. No, it’s not.” Jobs picked up another clicker but it, too,
failed to work. He smiled and said, “The clicker is not working.
They’re scrambling backstage right now.” 2 The audience laughed,
and after a few more seconds of trying to fix the clicker, Jobs
simply paused, smiled, and told the following story:
You know, this reminds me, when I was in high school, Steve
Wozniak and I—mostly Steve—made this little device called
a TV jammer. It was this little oscillator that put out frequencies
that would screw up the TV. Woz would have it in his
pocket. We would go out to a dorm at Berkeley, where he
was going to school, and a bunch of folks would be watching
“Star Trek.” He would screw up the TV, someone would go
to fix it, and just as they had their foot off the ground, he’d
turn it back on, and then he’d screw up the TV again. Within
five minutes, he’d have someone like this [contorts his body;
see Figure 18.1] . . . OK, it looks like it’s working now. 3
In this one-minute story, Jobs revealed a side of his personality
that few people get to see. It made him more human, engaging,
and natural. He also never got flustered. I have seen even some
experienced presenters get derailed over smaller problems.