Jonathan Monsarrat reflects on twenty years of providing inspirational lectures on life and business. His newly launched website helps to provide insight on the key elements of a successful lecture.
We like to think that we're stuck in life
Boston, MA-NH (1888PressRelease) July 26, 2013 - Jonathan Monsarrat still has the lecture notes that won him the Brown University President's Teaching Award in 1993. After twenty years of inspirational lectures on life and business, and a career that includes two patents, a Guinness World Record ® title, and starting a company that was acquired for $160,000,000, Monsarrat has now launched a website that reaches back to his beginnings to showcase his lectures and educate public speakers on effective communication.
Jonathan Monsarrat said, "A lecture has tension between two elements. It's remarkably hard for someone sitting in a lecture to take in new information. A connection that a lecturer may find obvious is going to go over their heads. But if you're too basic in what you say, you bore people. So you counter the need to repeat elements and focus the conversation with humor and audience interaction. That keeps the momentum going. People also need a break to process what the speaker is saying. It can't be all talk, all the time."
As a successful entrepreneur, Monsarrat speaks to businesspeople on topics such as, "The Secret of My Success", where he advocates wooing powerful partners, and "The #1 Mistake You Are Making", where he warns against building a product to solve a societal problem rather than a specific customer's problem. Jonathan Monsarrat also gives inspirational lectures to general audiences based on his Guinness World Record ® art project, Soulburners. Through the Soulburners project, Monsarrat collected more than 12,000 questions about life, written by hand on colored cards, and wrote advice to most of them and hung them for display. "We like to think that we're stuck in life," Jonathan Monsarrat said, "because that's a self-fulling excuse for us to avoid change. But we know deep down that we're not stuck. We know what we need to do. I try to inspire people to ask for help, to take that next step."
About Jonathan Monsarrat
Jonathan Monsarrat has given public speeches since graduating from MIT in 1989 and working full-time at MIT as a lecturer. He went on to earn an MIT MBA and attend Brown University as PhD student before dropping out and founding Turbine, Inc., the videogames company that lead the development of massively multiplayer videogames that thousands of people could play. Turbine was acquired by Warner Brothers for $160 million in 2010.