Public speaking, or more generally the ancient art of rhetoric, is often the difference between dead ideas and unrealized dreams versus an impactful and fulfilled life.

Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.

Warren Buffett attended the Dale Carnegie public speaking course: “In graduate school, you learn all this complicated stuff, but what’s really essential is being able to get others to follow your ideas….I don’t have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall, and I don’t have my diploma from Columbia up there either — but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed….That $100 course gave me the most important degree I have. It’s certainly had the biggest impact in terms of my subsequent success.”

This was a really useful read on: How to think about public speaking? How to build your ideas? How to connect with the audience? How to be more persuasive and engaging? How to prepare your visuals, and scripts, open and close? How to use your voice and body language?

I’ll be a speaker at a Check24 conference (in Augsburg, Germany) next week and I will be giving a 45-minute speech about “How I read 32 books a year and lessons learned”. That’s why I picked up this book several months ago when I started to prepare for my speech.

I learned a lot of ideas and tried to incorporate them into my presentation.

Happy reading!

Notes on the next book, straight to you