I Could Have Let a Machine Read My Book

It takes me about 21 hours in a recording booth to produce a five-hour audiobook. The other sixteen go to starts, stops, clicks, and do-overs.

My voice wears out in ways I don’t expect. I pick up a habit from voice actors and start drinking apple juice, which they swear cuts the mouth clicks. (Bonus: It’s delicious, and I hadn’t had a glass since I was like six.)

A synthetic voice could read the whole thing in a fraction of the time. A professional narrator could deliver an award-winning read. Either is a reasonable choice, and plenty of authors make it.

But an audiobook about bravery in presentations, read by anyone other than the author, would have been a disservice to the listener. I’m neither a voice actor nor a professional narrator. And I’m willing to bet you’re not a professional presenter.

I’m drinking my own champagne here.

Some Friction Is Load-Bearing

Every shortcut makes the same offer. Hand over the hard part, and get the result sooner. Most of us take the deal without reading the terms, because the terms are usually fine. The dishwasher, the GPS, and spellcheck all made that trade, and nobody wants those hard parts back.

Some hard parts hold the whole thing up, though. Remove one and the result still looks finished. But it doesn’t hold.

In 1994, UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork gave this a name: desirable difficulties. When we space practice out, take notes by hand, or test ourselves instead of rereading, it might feel slower, but we retain what we learn longer. Bjork is careful to separate that from plain difficulty. Useful difficulty makes your brain do the work the easy version skips.

We have the effort to thank for the results.

You Can’t Carry a Presentation You Never Wrestled

In a small MIT study, 54 students write essays three ways: with ChatGPT, with a search engine, or on their own. Minutes after they finish, researchers ask each of them to quote a sentence from the essay they just wrote. Most of the ChatGPT group can’t. Nearly everyone else can. The ChatGPT group also reports feeling the least ownership of what they wrote.

In a later round, a handful of students switch. The ones who wrote on their own first and then got the tool remember more and stay more engaged. The ones who started with the tool and then lost it don’t.

Same tool. Different order.

You can read it, but a presentation you never struggled with is one you can’t carry. You can get through the slides, but you’re not likely to answer the question nobody planned for. You can fill thirty minutes on the calendar, but you won’t see any action in the hour that follows.

When a presenter is meeting their own content for the first time, audiences can tell.

Hand Off Everything That Doesn’t Hold Weight

Give this ten minutes before your next high-stakes presentation.

1. List the hard parts. Everything about the prep you’d love to skip or hand off: gathering material, deciding the point, building slides, formatting, cutting, rehearsing, the pre-sell.

2. Ask of each one: if I skip this, what can’t I do in the meeting? Can I still say the point in one sentence without looking? Can I answer the question I didn’t plan for? Will I know what I cut, and why?

3. Sort it. If skipping it costs you nothing in the meeting, hand it off and enjoy the time. If it costs you one of those abilities, it’s integral. Keep it.

4. Then bring in the tools. Once the thinking is done, AI makes a very good assistant. Before it’s done, it gives you a very fast way to dodge the question.

Most of your list will sort into “hand it off,” and that’s fine. You’ll know which parts you kept, and why.

In 2012, researchers found that people value things they build themselves more than identical things that arrive built. They called it the IKEA effect, and it held only when people finished. So the goal is a finished thought.

Effort with nothing at the end of it earns nothing.

What Are You Carrying Into Your Next Presentation?

When did you last say your point out loud before you walked in?

Which part of your prep would you skip tomorrow if you could, and what would leave with it?

What could you answer in that meeting if the slides went dark?

If a tool did all of it, what would you still need to know cold?

What Would You Never Hand Off?

Most of your list belongs to the tools.

I kept the reading, all twenty-one hours of it. Every presenter keeps something. Now it’s your turn. Five hours of audio took twenty-one in the booth.

If you want to hear them, the audiobook is here:

• Spotify

• Audible

• (coming soon to Apple Books and your library app of choice)

What’s one part of your presentation prep you’d never hand off, even if a tool could do it in minutes? Hit reply and let me know.

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