Making Speeches Memorable
Some of my clearest, strongest childhood memories are from classic 1950’s horror and sci-fi movies:
The Day the Earth Stood Still– not the one with Keanu Reeves- The Thing with James Arness, who later played Marshall Matt Dillion on Gunsmoke, as the thing
- The Blob, in which Steve McQueen made his debut
- The Creature from the Black Lagoon, originally released in 3-D
- Invaders from Mars, which was my favorite.
I have a bad memory. I can forget my gym locker combination if I don’t use it every week. But I still remember entire scenes and bits of dialogue from movies that I saw almost 50 years ago. Why is that?
I’m trying to understand why we forget so much of what we learn, a question I’ve been addressing in posts yesterday and the day before. Today I’m analyzing the flip side of the question – why do we remember what we do?
Here are three reasons why I remember these movies so vividly and three lessons I apply to making speeches and presentations more memorable.
1. The movies are from my childhood.
I suspect that most people can recall movies they saw as kids. It’s a time when our imaginations are in full bloom. And childhood memories have a special, nostalgic allure.
Lesson #1: Appeal to people’s imaginations and to the experiences, emotions, images, and memories they formed in their childhood.
2. The movies played on the cultural fears and mores of the time.
Those movies make more sense when you understand their context. They are products of the Cold War, when Americans feared aliens (i.e. communists or Russians) who sometimes pass as people like us and who mean us harm. And they reflect the concerns of the Atomic Age, a time when scientists had produced something both amazing and terrifying.
Lesson #2: Create images and tell stories that tap into and resonate with people’s underlying emotions and values.
3. The movies left a lot to the imagination.
I’m sure they’d look hokey by today’s standards. In a way they looked hokey even then. (Some more so than others.) Because the special effects were rudimentary and expensive, they were used sparingly. Monsters and aliens got little screen time. You rarely saw them in full light or long enough to get a fix on them. (If you closed your eyes at the scariest moments, as I usually did, you might miss them altogether.) And that’s part of what made them so scary. Your imagination filled in the gaps with what you found scariest. They remained with you because you had a role in creating them. They were yours.
Lesson #3: Let people project their own details on the images you create and on the stories you tell.
I have two questions for you. 1) What movies from your childhood do you most remember? and 2) Are there reasons why you remember the movies you do other than the reasons I list?
Tags: why we remember speeches
July 17th, 2009 at 1:05 am
1) Indiana Jones, Stargate SG-1, Back to the Future, Rambo, Rocky, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and Lethal Weapon come to my mind.
2) I remember these movies because of the reasons you list and because of the family time involved as well as the music in the movie (notably Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones).
In regards to point 3: Reading the book “How to get your point across in 30 seconds or less”, the author is very explicit in projecting your story with the utmost detail into the listeners mind. I’ve sort of always felt the same way. You’re saying to leave out some details? Are you talking about going into the extremes of details? Or do you really mean large details such as (for example) the size of a dinosaur or the fierce look on its face, etc. ?
July 17th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Shariq,
Both your additions to what makes those movies memorable makes sense to me: 1) music is a powerful emotional cue (can you think of Rock or Star Wars or Inidian Jones without hearing the music in your mind?) and 2) the experience, the people you’re with, also shape the experience. For me, it was less about family time and more about kid time, since my brothers and I saw most of these movies at a Saturday matinee with a theater full of kids like ourselves.
About detail in a story — I believe you have to give a few very specific details to anchor your story in a particular time and place. But, and here’s the but, you have to leave a lot to the imaginations of your listeners so they can hand their own specifics onto the hooks you’ve provided. When I tell my Grandma Ida story, I descibe her in 10 words or so. It makes her real without defining her so specifically that it keeps people from remembering their grandmothers. I can’t tell you how many times someone comes up to me afterwards and says something like, “I had a grandmother just like that…” I know then that my story has become theirs and, as a result, it has much more staying power.
Chris
July 21st, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Two movies from my childhood: “The Magnificent Seven” and “Inherit the Wind.” “The Magnificent Seven” fits all your criteria. I wanted to ride with those guys. Steve McQueen was the coolest guy I’d ever seen, and the idea of 7 guys taking on an army of bandits — wow! It perfectly aligned with the cultural moment — JFK had just come in, and the “Seven” could have been his Cabinet — young, cool, fearless! “Inherit the Wind” opened my mind to the DRAMA of history — not the stuff from books, but the stuff they didn’t put in books, the stuff about a drama with big stakes being fought out by two fallible giants battling in a “Thunderdome” of Ideas.
Oh, and one more film, “Dr. Strangelove” — proof positive that, as my high school drama teacher put it, “If you’ve got talent and the courage to take that talent where it wants to go, you can do anything” — including turning nuclear war into a really, really funny comedy.