Einstein once said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

I liked the exercise you wrote regarding explaining something via text message. I wonder if the wide adoption of twitter has increased our ability to boil topics down to their most relevant bits?

When our team had our senior design capstone presentation for an engineering project, we had to sum up over 1200 man-hours of work into 15 minutes. We kept trying to compress down: 25min -> 20min -> 18min -> 17.5min -> 17min, but we could not hit the 15min mark.

What we decided to do was have everyone take the challenge of presenting each of our 24 slides in less than 15 seconds each by boiling down each slide into a “headline”.

We found ourselves hitting 14min and the presentation was much more succinct and clear than before.