“Give me something to hate,” he says

A prominent member of the PowerPoint and presentation community, Tony Ramos, wrote a provocative blog post about creating content in general. Quoting a colleague, Tony mentions how paralyzing it is to attempt perfection on the first try and how liberating it can be to allow your rough draft to be horrible.

And I totally agree with him. Your first draft should stink.

Snarling at your first effort means that it has potential.

The desire to create excellent content on the first try only causes writer’s block. If I spend too much time and effort to get it right at the beginning, I have hard time just getting it written (or posted, record, etc.).

So instead, I try to create something, right now, simply so that I can respond to it. I need to eliminate what I don’t want to write before I can focus on what I do want.

Tony’s view is best summed up by this snippet: “Effective design is iterative; it goes back and forth, edit after edit, review after review, as it homes in on its final form.”

Or do you agree that creating content involves a process of refining something that’s interestingly awful until it’s awfully interesting?

- Eric S.

PS: Tony also has a fantastic video of Larry Lessig delivering his signature style of presentation, like I discussed in this blog post. (In the video, Lessig also uses story-telling, which is a characteristic of the Ethos3 style.)