Boiling down a concept to a crisp and clear 30 second soundbyte has always been something very difficult for me. I always feel like those types of short pitches are really phony--whenever I've heard them delivered by others, they sounded rehearsed and artificial. The readings provide a lot of good insight into how to organize the pitch and deliver it, but the hardest part is to do it genuinely.
Personally, I've always found that the more I practice something, the less genuine it becomes. Maybe that just means I'm not a good actor, but I thing there's something more to it than that. To really be able to explain something very clearly, one must be very knowledgeable about it and truly be an expert. Perhaps the reason it's so hard is because when an idea is still developing in one's mind, one isn't truly yet an expert with it.
Like Enes, I'm presenting onlyinpgh at the New Ventures Competition this Friday, and I just had an experience that speaks a little to this. Last semester I completed a write-up of the business idea that ended up being around 15 pages (10 pages of text with 5 pages of appendices). Over the weekend all the people in the competition had to submit a business plan, but the maximum length was 5 pages total.
Cutting the plan down by two thirds was very difficult and really forced me to think about what was important to say and how to say it as clearly and concisely as possible. After finishing the 5-page document, I looked back at the 15-pager to see if I missed anything important or if key details had been lost by condensing it so much. Nothing was lost at all, and if anything the arguments were much stronger in the shorter version.
I think it's the same with pitching. When we get our pitches ready for class I'm going to write out what I want to say and then time myself. Then I'm going to force myself to figure out how to say the same thing in half as much time...and then probably try to halve it again because I have a tendency to ramble... :)
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