Lifehack: Audiobooks

When the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson was announced I instantly pre-ordered it for my Kindle. I’ve read numerous books on Apple and Steve Jobs before, but none of them were authorized by Jobs. So I was excited to finally get the complete story. But when the book got released in November ’11 I tried to read it, but just couldn’t get into it. The book starts a bit slow, I already knew most of the early stories and maybe most important I just didn’t have the time to read for a while.

That’s when I tried audiobooks. I’ve seen those Harry Potter 20-cd packs at bookstores selling for over €50,- so I never looked further into this medium before. But after a quick web search I found Audible, an online audiobook mp3 store, owned by Amazon. Audible has this neat promo which gives you 2 free audiobooks upon registering without charging your creditcard!

So I downloaded the Steve Jobs book to listen in my car to try this concept. As I drive for over 2 hours each day I already listen a lot to BNR FM Radio (10% news, 10% traffic updates, 40% commercials, 40% boring bs blah), a selection of weekly podcasts and of course Spotify. Now, a few weeks later, the FM radio time has been minimized and mostly been replaced by a range of cool audiobooks.

Listening to somebody telling you a story is easy, takes almost no effort and is very relaxing. While listening you can think about the story instead of being annoyed by radio DJ’s and commercials. This made my daily car rides way more efficient. I recommend you to check this out too. Go to Audible, get the free books and give it a try.

By the way, the Steve Jobs biography was superb! What a great story and I even got some great new insights out of it!

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Being an Apple fan/evangelist for almost all my life I experienced numerous introductions of cool new Apple products. Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997 he delivered most of these product launches in his famous keynote speech (Stevenote) at MacWorld or WWDC. Anyone who has ever watched one of these events will admit that Jobs’ presentation skills are outstanding. Somehow he is able to deliver a performance that will fascinate you from the first until the last minute.

Now move over to the world of SAP and probably 80% (or more) of the presentations we attend. I watched the Vienna SAP TechEd keynote a few weeks ago through the live video stream. The speed of the presentations was very low and the slides were boring and stuffed with text. After a while people in the audience started to write tweets like:

Keynote #sapteched09 about speed of change? In stead of ppt with figures I like to see real SAP stuff, come on.

OK, we get the business case. Can we move on how attendees can use SAP technology 2 implement the business solution?

Ouch. Not good.

Luckily for us (and the guys at SAP) Carmine Gallo, a BusinessWeek columnist, wrote a great book on how to give a presentation like Steve Jobs. The book is overloaded with concrete examples from keynotes from the past. For example how to keep your slides simple and visual and why you should never, ever, use bullet points in your slides (it is actually the least effective way to deliver information). If Jobs starts talking about the Apple 2009 results, the slide simply says “2009″.

Gallo also shows that Jobs uses tons of short Twitter-like headlines that are easy to remember. At the introduction of the iPod, Jobs could have said something like:

Today we are introducing a new, ultraportable MP3 player with 6.5-ounce design and a 5 GB hard drive, complete with Apple’s legendary ease of use.

Instead he said:

iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket.

Feel the difference?

I found this video of Gallo in which he outlines the key topics of the book while showing some examples from actual Steve Jobs keynotes. You can find more info at Gallo’s BusinessWeek blog, at The Cult of Mac or at Amazon.