Clarity First.Then “Slides”
May 20, 2026
A valuable lesson one of my mentors shared with me early in my career.
“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
It stung because I was guilty of exactly what he was describing. Whenever I encountered a difficult problem, my instinct was to open a presentation, build slides, and structure the thinking visually. It felt productive. It looked like progress.
It wasn’t.
What I was actually doing was using the presentation to avoid confronting the problem directly. The slides gave the illusion of clarity without the substance.
My mentor’s advice was simple. Sit at the table. Talk it through. Hash it out. Get your foundational thinking straight first. Understand the problem so well that you could explain it clearly to anyone without a single slide.
The truth is simple. A PowerPoint cannot solve a problem you have not solved outside of it.
The slides should be the output of your thinking. Not a substitute for it.
Clarity first. Then present.
