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1-Page Summary of The 3-Minute Rule
Overview
Three minutes is not a lot of time, but it’s enough to make coffee or brush your teeth. Brant Pinvidic says that three minutes is all the time you need to present an idea successfully and sell even the toughest audience on any good idea, product, service or business.
Brant is a business coach who helped hundreds of people improve their pitches. Most of the time, they were skeptical that it could be done because their subject matter was too complicated. But he proved them wrong by helping them transform into effective presenters.
What is his secret? After pitching thousands of ideas, Brant has figured out the essential elements a pitch needs to succeed. He’s sold over 300 TV and movie projects using the techniques you’re about to learn.
In this passage, you’ll learn the following:
Why three minutes are all we have to persuade a modern audience
How to make the most of those three minutes
What a ‘butt funnel’ is and why it’s important
Big Idea #1: Your pitch has three minutes to succeed.
Imagine you’re about to meet with potential investors, customers, partners or collaborators. You have an amazing idea that will change the world and they don’t even know what it is yet. They may not be interested in investing at all if your presentation doesn’t sell them on your idea first.
To put it another way, you have to explain a lot of things and make people believe in your ideas. Therefore, you need to be extra persuasive and design a long PowerPoint presentation with lots of great jokes and catchphrases. You also need to practice the tips and tricks that will help you become an amazing public speaker.
The traditional approach is to use lots of fancy slides, but that’s not the best way. You’d do better if you did the opposite and simplified your presentation. Cut out unnecessary things like fluff and gimmicks. Don’t worry about your delivery as much because it doesn’t really matter in most cases. Just focus on conveying your key information clearly in three minutes or less.
There are two ways to go about it. The first is to be direct and get right to the point. This way, people won’t have a hard time understanding your message or what you want them to do. However, if you don’t give enough details, then they might not understand what you’re talking about or why they should listen to you in the first place. On top of that, these days everyone has so many things going on at once—they’ve got information overload—so their attention span is short and patience isn’t high for anything that wastes their time. They can easily tell whether your idea is credible, interesting, and relevant based on how much detail it provides for them; if there’s not enough of any one of those three qualities in your pitch, then chances are they’ll just pass judgment on it as being useless.
In order to be successful, you have to captivate your audience within the first few minutes of your presentation. If they’re interested in what you’re saying, they’ll be more receptive and eager for more information. However, if not, then it’s unlikely that you’ll win them back.
The three-minute rule is a guideline for how long you should talk. It’s not about the length of your presentation, but rather your pitch. You have to win people over in that time period or else they’ll lose interest and tune out. Whether you realize it or not, you only have three minutes to convince someone to listen to what you’re saying. The question is whether or not you design your speech around the three-minute rule so that you can maximize success and avoid failure?
