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as automation and artificial intelligence eliminate millions of jobs, the humans who stand out are those who can foster deep, emotional connections with other people. Emotional connection is, after all, the one domain where humans have an edge over robots.
Everyone has an idea to share, but those ideas are worthless if they are not expressed effectively.
“TED is where brilliant people go to hear other brilliant people share their ideas.”
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
The brain cannot ignore novelty,
Don’t sabotage your potential because you can’t communicate your ideas.
Science shows that passion is contagious, literally. You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself.
The most popular TED speakers don’t have a “job.” They have a passion, an obsession, a vocation, but not a job. These people are called to share their ideas.
WHAT MAKES YOUR HEART SING? Ask yourself, “What makes my heart sing?” Your passion is not a passing interest or even a hobby. A passion is something that is intensely meaningful and core to your identity. Once you identify what your passion is, can you say it influences your daily activities? Can you incorporate it into what you do professionally? Your true passion should be the subject of your communications and will serve to truly inspire your audience.
“I don’t care about my image, I have no business deal to cut, and I am not trying to impress anyone.
That’s why career, happiness, and the ability to inspire people are connected.
“You’ve got to follow your passion. You’ve got to figure out what it is you love—who you really are. And have the courage to do that. I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams.” —Oprah Winfrey
passion plays a critical role in an entrepreneur’s success.
“When you’re surrounded by people who share a collective passion around a common purpose, anything is possible.”
Effective stories, slides, and body language are important components of a persuasive presentation, yet they mean little if the speaker isn’t passionate about his or her topic.
storytelling is the ultimate tool of persuasion.
Take the audience on a journey.
When God puts a dream in your heart, you know you’re going to succeed. Every ‘no’ means you’re one step closer to ‘yes.’”
“To succeed, you have to persuade others to support your vision, dream, or cause. Whether you want to motivate your executives, organize your shareholders, shape your media, engage your customers, win over your investors, or land a job, you have to deliver a clarion call that will get your listeners’ attention, emotionalize your goal as theirs, and move them to act in your favor. You have to reach their hearts as well as their minds—and this is just what storytelling does.”19
Significantobjects.com
“Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.”
The world’s most charismatic business professionals have great body language—a commanding presence that reflects confidence, competence, and charisma. Command presence is a military term used to describe someone who presents himself or herself as a person with authority, someone who is to be respected and followed. How much would people sacrifice to follow you?
Studies have shown that complex thinkers use complex gestures and that gestures actually give the audience confidence in the speaker.
Chambers is considered one of the most intelligent and visionary executives in high-tech and is said to have a prodigious memory. As McNeil observed, complex thinkers have complex gestures, and Chambers, being a complex thinker, uses large, expansive hand gestures to punctuate nearly every sentence.
“And so I want to say to you, don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.”
Why it works: The human brain loves novelty. An unfamiliar, unusual, or unexpected element in a presentation intrigues the audience, jolts them out of their preconceived notions, and quickly gives them a new way of looking at the world.
“Curiosity is the most important thing you own,”
Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.”
The best ideas will fail to inspire an audience if they’re not packaged effectively.
In this particular presentation, one senior vice president wanted to start with some data that wasn’t entirely new to the roomful of analysts (the growing sales of high-capacity storage cards). In this case he didn’t have to deliver entirely new data as much as he had to present it in a refreshing way. Analysts expect dry charts, so this executive decided to go personal and inject some emotion into his talk. He explained that he’s a digital-photography enthusiast and has a collection of 80,000 digital photos at home, nearly all of them captured on SanDisk cards. He showed pictures of his
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You’ll become a more interesting person if you’re interested in learning and sharing ideas from fields that are much different from your own. Great innovators connect ideas from different fields. When I wrote The Apple Experience about the Apple Retail Store, I learned that Apple executives visited the Ritz-Carlton to learn more about customer service. In turn, many other brands outside of technology have studied Apple to improve their own customer experience. Great innovators apply ideas from fields other than their own.
Only through seeing your own world through a fresh lens will you be able to give your audience a new way of looking at their world.
We all do. We all have unique stories to tell. You might not have the same experiences as the speakers in this chapter, but you have stories just as interesting and valuable in your journey of discovery. Pay attention to the stories of your life. If they teach you something new and valuable, there’s a good chance other people will want to hear about it.
“Schools Kill Creativity” (Sir Ken Robinson) ◾ “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” (Simon Sinek) ◾ “Your Elusive, Creative Genius” (Elizabeth Gilbert) ◾ “The Surprising Science of Happiness” (Dan Gilbert) ◾ “The Power of Introverts” (Susan Cain) ◾ “8 Secrets of Success” (Richard St. John) ◾ “How to Live Before You Die” (Steve Jobs)
If you can’t explain your product or idea in 140 characters, keep working at it until you can.
“If you connect to an audience’s emotional responses then they will perceive the information more vividly, be less distracted, and will be more likely to remember it. Use very concrete and meaningful examples to illustrate abstract points. Use images skillfully, whether they be beautiful, surprising, or disgusting.”
The brain is wired to recall emotionally vivid events and to ignore the ordinary, the mundane. If you want to stand out in a sea of mediocre presentations, you must take emotional charge of your audience.
“Don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.”
I assure you it’s critical: don’t try to be funny. Avoid telling jokes. The moment you start telling the joke about the blonde or the one about the rabbi and the priest, you’re dead. Jokes work only for professional comedians at the top of their game.
You don’t have to be funny to be humorous.
This is the type of humor that works best in most business presentations. Anecdotes and observations are short stories or examples that are intended not to elicit a huge laugh but rather to put a smile on people’s faces and endear the speaker to his or her audience.
It’s natural, authentic humor. I’m not trying to be something I’m not.
Eighteen minutes is thought-provoking. Three hours is mind-numbing.
I believe the Goldilocks zone is a very TED-like 18 to 20 minutes. It’s not too short and not too long. It’s just the right amount of time in which to persuade your audience. If it’s shorter, some members of your audience (especially investors, clients, and customers) might not feel that they received enough information. Any longer, however, and you risk losing the attention of your audience.
“Creativity thrives under intelligent constraints.”
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Courage is the keyword. It takes courage to keep things simple. It takes courage to put one picture on a PowerPoint slide instead of filling it with tiny text that most people in the audience won’t even be able to read. It takes courage to reduce the number of the slides in a presentation. It takes courage to speak for 18 minutes instead of rambling on for much longer. Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Be sophisticated. Keep
The rule of three simply means that people can remember three pieces of information really well; add more items and
