This is gonna be quick.
A friend of mine runs a group teaching economics and market movements to a hyper niche audience.
Smart guy. Knows his shit. But today he asked me how to make his presentations more interesting.
And in soap box fashion I shared this:
Melt your entire personality into what you’re teaching.
Every hobby. Every interest. Every weird obsession. All of it gets folded into the economics lessons like you’re making the world’s most interesting burrito.
The fastest way to do this? Metaphors and analogies.
Connect market movements to his favourite fictional characters. Explain economic concepts through movies he loves. Use sports analogies. Music references. Whatever the fuck he’s into and make that the vehicle for the lesson.
Hell, he can even go there with the taboo shit. Politics. Religion. Sex. The stuff everyone’s too scared to touch. Because when you connect dry economic theory to something people actually have feelings about, suddenly it’s not boring anymore.
Which goes back to the subject line: We don’t know what we don’t know.
But we do know the things we’re obsessed with. Our hobbies. Our passions. The shit we think about in the shower.
And when someone teaches us something new by connecting it to something we already love? That’s when learning stops feeling like work and starts feeling like a conversation with someone who actually gets it, which is pretty damn magical if you think about it. Just look back on the days when you were taught things in school. Dry and boring and that’s probably why we’re all as mentally deranged as we are now…
Anyways…
The only thing your audience really needs is you being you. I’m talking about bringing your whole weird self to the table. Make the connections nobody else would make. Teach economics like you’re explaining it to your best friend at a bar. (Famous copywriting idea tbh)
That’s how you make economics or anything interesting.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. If you’re teaching anything. Writing, marketing, woodworking or underwater basket weaving. The same rule applies. You don’t want to sound like everyone else in your field. You want to be interesting and entertaining while talking about your field. That’s a massive paradigm switch and it works like magic.