People create change by being different and almost every major innovation whether it was scientific or cultural was done by someone who was seen as a crazy at the time, as the only way for people to innovate is to break the norm.

Apples “think different” Advertisement

Apple made a commercial back in 1997 titled, “Think Different” and used it up until 2002 in all of their marketing. The commercial featured many influential people who have made great change with think different written beneath them. The campaign featured many notable faces including Gahndi, Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Pablo Escobar according to Wikipedia.

When we were originally looking at the list someone had edited Pablo Escobar on there. So here’s a thing I made

For our project we were given the option to pick any of the people on the list and make a pechekucha presentation about them to the class. The presentation needed to have nine slides with a 20 second autoplay on each slide. This meant that I had to talk fast and get my points across clearly with limited time on each topic. My thesis for the whole presentation needed to answer the question of why was this person thought of as crazy and how did they change the world? 

Nikola Tesla’s “think different” poster

For my presentation I chose Nikola Tesla as I had heard of some of his work before the project started. Researching his life was interesting and shocking as he was quite possibly anything but your average guy and could actually be seen as literally crazy. Nikola Tesla was a Serbian Immigrant to the United States in the early 1900’s who had a high level education in engineering and physics. He was very interested in electricity and it’s uses and would devote most of his time researching it. He was seen as a mad scientist at the time with his inventions being decades ahead of their time or just plain weird. He would also work extremely hard when he was in his lab and wouldn’t leave except for meals while he worked 22 hour shifts only getting 2-3 hours of sleep.  

Obviously he was not a normal person and this made researching him even more enjoyable. What was even more enjoyable is some of his wacky inventions that revolutionized modern electronics. One his most famous inventions is the Tesla Tower which was an early prototype for wireless transition of information through electricity. However he didn’t get enough money to produce it from his supporters as his idea was deemed to far out there for it to seem like a reasonably possible achievement. He also spent no time socializing or doing things for entertainment and he was solely dedicated to his work. 

Tesla working in his lab

The slides went in order of my talking points and I think that my presentation went very smoothly and I got all my points across. I think if I were to do it again I would have added my own edited media and I would have spent a bit more time on picking the photos that I was going to put in the slides rather than having all of them be from one line in that slides script. 

Other than a few stumbles I thought that my presentation went really well and I feel pretty confident that I got my message across. 

Edit: I got some critique from Ms. Maxwell on the presentation at the time of writing this. It points out a few of the key parts in my presentation and gives some thoughts about them. It also makes the order of how my presentation went a bit easier to understand so I’ll put the notes below.

Feedback from Presentation:
-Tesla
– GREAT introduction great hook
-Tesla was born in the Austrian Empire – high level of education in physics
-very good clear voice and informative
-Tesla would work 22 hour shifts!
-would eat at 8:10 every night – he was CRAZY!
-Tesla Tower – part of his wireless transmission tour
-not much interest in this project – people started to find out about his project – this is your ONE day! Good shift in the story
-very well done you knew this story well!

I feel like the feedback is accurate to how I thought it went and I would be fine with doing some more presentations in the future.