Nicollet.Net

Let me start this post by noticing that the sentence «It bears repeating» can be found on answers.com, categorized as follows:

Answers.com > Wiki Answers > Categories > Animal Life > Wild Animals > Mammals > Land Mammals > Bears > Black Brown and Grizzly Bears > Bears or Bares repeating?

Nice one. And now, for something completely different, if you’ve done any speech writing, you know that a speech should have a central theme, a leitmotiv, a single idea that it tries to get across, and any other elements in the speech are just salad dressing wrapped around that idea to help it come across correctly.

Apple Keynotes are an excellent example, because their leitmotiv is quite obvious:

What is very interesting about Apple keynotes is how obvious their leitmotiv is : they’re great. They’re fantastic. They’re awesome. They’re easy to use. And they only have one message, so that when all those tech editors and bloggers and sneezers leave the conference room, the message just sticks.

Did I mention my blog is awesome?

You might grab the attention of several people. That’s not very hard, assuming that you have the right network or enough money. You can speak to them. Maybe they’re willing to listen to everything you say (as in the Apple Keynote crowd situation). Maybe they’re willing to remember everything you say (as in a typical classroom situation). But they’re not geniuses. No one becomes an expert just because they’ve listened to another expert for a short while.

You can have your audience leave with one idea. One emotion. What is it going to be?