Saturday, May 07, 2005

Too Much PowerPoint Already you ADHD Heads

Teach me everything you know about trees Gene. Do it in 5 minutes. Alrighty then. I have 30 years in the business, a post graduate level of education in horticulture, and you want me to give you a 10 bullet points overview of everything I know. Curse you evil PowerPoint.

As if we didn’t have people with short enough attention spans promulgated by remote controls, microwave ovens, and now the internet, everyone thinks everything is easy like the home makeover shows. Give us a day and we’ll give you the world. 22-minute problem to full resolution TV sitcoms have created an expectation that anything can be mastered if we just had the right PowerPoint presentation. It’s not me you understand, it’s the poor PowerPoint presentation you prepared. We used to have Cliff notes to read great classics. Then they got too long.

I hear this all the time:
  • I don’t have time to read like you do
  • Just give me a quick overview
  • Teach me how to __________________
  • Could you give me one page that tells me all about it. BUY A BOOK!

I know there are all kinds of quick and dirty cribs on the market to help you learn history, WordPerfect, math, exercise. You have seen these laminated sheets for sale in truck stops printed both sides that purport to give you all the information you will ever need. I confess I have bought them.

Video professor will make you a software engineer.

Then there were the quick learn a language books complete with vocab flash cards. I have several; Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French and others. I lived in the hope that in the trip over to those countries I could master the language enough to “pass”. ADHD. If there were only a 5-minute PowerPoint to master Latin we would all be better for it? The illusion is we really believe this is possible. Its not!

So, my friends admit some of your ADHD’ness is laziness. Buy a book. Work. Study. Master it. For goodness sake try living without PowerPoint for a month. The shakes stop after two weeks.

I don’t know why this is so long, the ones who needed to read it stopped after the first line. Sighhhh

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