Stuck writing that paper/presentation/email? Feel like there’s nowhere to start, let alone enough content in your brain to carry you through to the end? Maybe what you need is a stone. Figuratively, of course. (Unless you feel like hunting through your garden in an effort to further procrastinate?)
You know the “Stone Soup” story, right? A hungry man asks a woman for food, and she tells him she has none so he begs instead to borrow a pot to make Stone Soup. “Stone Soup?” asks the woman. “Hmm. Fancy that.” The man adds his stone to the pot, waits a little while for the water to start bubbling, and then mentions “You know, a few carrots would really improve the flavor…” and the woman “recalls” she has a few carrots in the cellar. He then suggests onion, potatoes, salt, and so on, until a tasty soup is cooking away. As a last step, he takes out the stone. Taking a taste, the woman exclaims how delicious stone soup is.
When you’re stuck, think of your project as stone soup. It doesn’t matter what you start with, only that you start. Add a stone, or a sentence, or a paragraph you’ll definitely delete later. Once you’ve got your project simmering, it becomes a lot easier to think “Oh, a paragraph about business connections would really help me make my point.” Remember that you have some bullet points in your cellar and add a slide to that presentation. Salt with graphics for that extra flavor. And at the end, take out that one lousy paragraph you started with. You didn’t need it for anything except to start.
An example: Say you need to put together a presentation about sporks. You don’t know where to start, or you’re feeling like you don’t have enough information, or your audience is undefined, or maybe all three and a few more problems besides. Get out your “pot”: a blank PowerPoint document, a whiteboard, a piece of paper – it doesn’t matter as long as it’s got lots of room for “ingredients.”
Now, put a “stone” in that pot. It literally doesn’t matter what you start with. Just get something on that blank page in front of you. “Sporks are good.” “You should buy sporks.” “Sporks are like if forks and spoons had babies.” It doesn’t have to be grammatical or have anything to do with the actual presentation. It just needs to exist.
Great! You’ve officially started your presentation; in fact, technically, you’ve made a complete presentation. It’s only got one slide, but it’s there, and what presentation writer hasn’t heard assurances that “the speaker will provide more details”? But hmm, you don’t have to be satisfied with that. What would make it better? Maybe if you added… some statistics about how easy sporks are to use? Yeah, that’d taste look good. Of course, you don’t have any around… Wait, but didn’t the UX team commission a study? Where’d they put that whitepaper? Find it and get that fact on a page. Hey, this is looking a little more like a presentation now.
You could stop there – that speaker’s charismatic, right? – but… What if you added some comments from satisfied customers? Hasn’t the social media team been keeping track of those? I bet they could supply some. And maybe you could sprinkle in some photos of people using sporks at popular restaurants for flavor. Those’ll definitely go well with the comments.
From there, just keep going. What else would make your presentation great? Data? Text? Photos? Go get everything that sounds good and add it to the pot and simmer edit for flow. Then take out that “stone” that got you started, and maybe a couple others if they happened to get mixed in with the good stuff. They’ve served their purpose and are no longer needed.
Just like that, you’ve got a full-blown presentation – and look what you started with! A presentation from a stone. Fancy that.