I’m going to riff on a way I tend to see humanity, and then I’m going to tie it into presentations.

Every human has two impulses in his/her personality, and those impulses are in complete opposition to each other. The tension between the two never goes away, it is, from birth to death, never resolved, and how the person navigates that tension will become the story of their life.

What are those two impulses?

One is the impulse to disappear into the crowd.

The other is the impulse to stand out.

In most people, probably about 90% of the human population, the impulse to disappear into the crowd tends to win out. If this were not the dominant impulse, we probably would have ceased to be a species hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This impulse to disappear into the crowd doesn’t win out by a lot, but it does by enough to do the job. It’s typically about 51% of the total impulse strength of the two competing impulses.

That means that for any given person, over a lifetime, the impulse to disappear into the crowd will tend to lead to compounded decisions that will lock the person into a pattern of behavior that reinforces social structures.

However, the 49% in opposition never goes away. It is always present, in pretty much every human being you meet. No matter how strong their 51% (be like everyone else) appears, you probably won’t have to scratch very deep to find the 49% of them that wants to shout out to the world, “forget you all, let me be me!”

Even if you agree with this way of seeing the world, you may wonder what can be done with this. And since this is predominantly a newsletter about presentations, I’m going to look at it through the perspective of presentations:

When you are giving a presentation, the audience will tend to move like a mostly unified organism. If they like you, most of them will probably like you. If they hate you, most of them will probably hate you.

However, if you want someone in the audience to disagree with the audience, keep the existence of that 49% in mind. Almost half of every single person sitting in front of you is on the edge of screaming “forget you all, let me be me.” Meaning that the potential for some audience members to dissent is way higher than it might appear at first.