Shane Joshua

Anthropic CEO: Software engineering will be completely obsolete in 6-12 months…

If you want to get good at public speaking you should try the Method of Loci technique. It’s got me through everything from keynotes to fundraising pitches to wedding speeches. Do this well and you won’t need notes and you'll have more stage presence. It works like this: 1. Write down your talk and break it down into blocks, each block covering a few sentences (about 20 seconds of speaking time). A 10 minute talk will have around 30 blocks. 2. For each block create an image in your head that helps you remember the content (a mnemonic). The more extreme the better. It helps to include people doing crazy actions as the human brain is particularly good at remembering faces and responding to motion. Write down each mnemonic in as much detail as possible - you can also create the actual images using AI tools. 3. Choose a location you know very well (e.g. your house) and pick a set route that you can physically walk through. 4. Select 30 notable items from your route (one for each block of your speech). These need to physically stand out and be hard to miss. For example, in your living room these may be, your sofa, TV, a plant, a painting on the wall etc. 5. Assign each of your 30 mnemonics to the 30 items in order. Physically walk through your route as you do this and really concentrate on making the images feel real and fixed in their locations. 6. Now lie down, close your eyes, and walk the same route in your head, bringing to your mind’s eye each mnemonic at each location. Repeat until the route and your mnemonics are extremely clear and easy to recollect. 7. Now practice your talk out loud whilst actually walking through your route, without any notes, doing each block at its designated location. 8. Then practice your talk out loud but with your eyes closed walking through your route in your mind. Do this a few times and you’ll find you can get through your entire talk without much effort. 9. Now you’re now ready to present your talk. 10. When you present in front of an audience you now don’t need to worry about forgetting the content. You'll feel less nervous and you won’t need to refer to notes or slides. You can be fully present in the moment and focus your full attention on delivery and engaging with your audience, making eye contact and reading the room for reactions - adjusting your tone, speed and energy accordingly. This makes you more charismatic. 11. Importantly, whilst you now know your talk inside-out, you’ve not memorised it word-for-word by rote. This means that each time you do your talk it comes out slightly differently, so it sounds fresh and natural. This technique is not new. It’s how Roman politicians like Cicero would memorise long speeches thousands of years ago. It works because for the vast majority of human history, our survival did not depend on memorizing lists of words or numbers. Instead, it depended on spatial data which enabled us to be effective hunter gathers. So next time you’re doing a talk, engage your primal side and you’ll be fine!

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