Research-Backed Ways to Impress Anyone in Two Seconds

"Say you have a big pitch coming up. You make an impressive agenda, put together a killer deck, and practice answering hard questions. But there’s a problem. This is all focused on the middle and end of your pitch, and it skips over the most important part: the first two seconds. And if you don’t nail those, guess what? Your hard work is irrelevant. Here’s why: In 1992, researchers Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, then at Harvard, found that our first impressions are essential for our success. In their experiment, they asked students to rate two-second video clips of professors teaching. Then they took these ratings and compared them with that same professor’s student evaluations after an entire semester of teaching. The result: Teachers who got low video-clip ratings also got poor student evaluations. And teachers who got strong ratings on their video clips also received the best student evaluations." Vanessa Van Edwards, Entrepreneur, 5 January 2017 Read more