How To Win An Argument: Heated Debates

There are two ways you can write down your speech:

1. How you want to say it;
2. As an outline or a skeleton.

When you've written it down it's going to take more than several times to figure out what you're trying to say and this is the sculpting process where you edit, add, or delete parts of your speech to make it sound better.

• The key to memorizing a speech is to memorize it hierarchically. You begin with the broad chunks, moving to specific paragraphs, phrases, up until the intonation and your timing with the words.
• When starting with the chunks you simply write out the main points of the speech then cover them up and recall them.
• Moving up to the small points you can expand your bullets to represent each idea with one or two key words and quiz yourself until you have it memorized.

An argument for not trying to please people: You should never work on something with the sole purpose of adding it to your resume.

• The benefit of this outlook is it makes you highly independent. Satisfaction comes from within, not from other's opinions of you.
• The downside is that you need to deal with people. Trying not to please people might isolate you and your ideas. You might need to get a degree if your dream job requires a degree, even if the degree itself is worthless.

The world is driven by marketing. When you interact with other people, you need to know how to sell yourself. This means that you would want to fill your resume with activities that look good.

• Instead of being focused on yourself, you craft an authentic story around yourself that is driven by a strategy.
• The downside is that its hard to separate your independence from what other people think of you, knowing that you need to market to them.

• Culture is a way of perspective and identity, and people speaking the same language immediately bond and form a connection.
• If an English speaking person learns Spanish, the underlying culture that emphasises ‘passion’ or ‘enjoying the experience’ is a more important cultural value in the countries who are natively Spanish.
• The culture of a certain place may include cuisine, history, music and notable personalities, but language becomes the salt without which the culture is tasteless.

The local language is the preferred route to understand the culture due to 2 reasons:

1. Most people don’t speak English very well, due to their learning it as a second or third language. These people do not represent the real sampling of the country's population, just being the better-educated cosmopolitans who speak a global language.
2. Most translations are poor substitutes for the real cultural essence, and a person needs to learn the original language to fully understand the context and culture.