Friday Links 08-02-08

From the Web

What is Happiness? Dozens of notable bloggers weigh in. Blogging friend Alex Shalman is posting interviews with dozens of bloggers about the topic. Great questions and great answers. Check out Leo Babauta’s great entry. My response to Alex’s questions is scheduled be up sometime later in the week.

Best. Speaking Advice. Ever. – Honestly, even if your next presentation is three months away to a crowd of fifteen people, read this list. Here are a few gems:

1. Don’t start with a joke. The audience is not accustomed to you or your speaking style yet. Humor will be difficult at this point.
2. Don’t read the slides! “There is a special circle in hell for those who use laser pointers.”
3. Verbal Punctuation. Provide a mechanism to help people who “fogged out” to easily rejoin the talk. For example: “We have just finished talking about the first heuristic, cycling, I am now going to talk about the second heuristic for helping to make your talks more interesting…”

From the Archives

14 Tips for a Less Materialistic Lifestyle – There is a lot more to life than stuff. Here are some of my thoughts on how to shift your life to focus on the less tangible, but more important aspects of life.

From the Shelf

Infinite Jest – I finally finished this 1200 page literary marathon last week. Time Magazine recently put this 90’s novel by David Foster Wallace in its Top 100 novels of the last century. The best part about reading the book was discovering the new words in Wallace’s verbose writing. ‘Fantods’, ‘post-prandial’ and ‘fricative’ being a few of the hundreds of new words I had never seen before.