TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Ants shape each other’s behavior by exchanging chemicals. We do it by standing in front of each other, peering into each other’s eyes, waving our hands and emitting strange sounds from our mouths. Human-to-human communication is a true wonder of the world. We do it unconsciously every day. And it reaches its most intense form on the public stage.

Reason for preaching

Just as the printing press massively amplified the power of authors, so the web is massively amplifying the impact of speakers.

Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners.

The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.

An idea is anything that can change how people see the world. If you can conjure up a compelling idea in people’s minds, you have done something wondrous. You have given them a gift of incalculable value. In a very real sense, a little piece of you has become part of them.

language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener.

You can only use the tools that your audience has access to. If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.

Some public-speaking coaches seek to downplay the importance of language. They may cite research published in 1967 by Professor Albert Mehrabian and claim that only 7 percent of the effectiveness of communication is down to language, while 38 percent depends on tone of voice and 55 percent comes from body language. This has led coaches to focus excessively on developing a speaking style of confidence, charisma, etc., and not worry so much about the words. Unfortunately, this is a complete misinterpretation of what Mehrabian found.

It’s as if you’ve agreed to have a coffee with a friend and discover to your horror that all she actually wanted to do was explain her must-invest time-share scheme to you. You’re out of there at the first opportunity.

Haha, yeah

“When people sit in a room to listen to a speaker, they are offering her something extremely precious, something that isn’t recoverable once given: a few minutes of their time and of their attention. Her task is to use that time as well as possible.”

They may look at talks given by inspirational speakers and seek to copy them . . . but in form only. The result can be awful: the ruthless pursuit of every trick in the book to intellectually and emotionally manipulate the audience.

Especially bad for preachers

they flatter to deceive.

Inspiration is like love. You don’t get it by pursuing it directly.

A good exercise is to try to encapsulate your throughline in no more than fifteen words. And those fifteen words need to provide robust content. It’s not enough to think of your goal as, “I want to inspire the audience” or “I want to win support for my work.” It has to be more focused than that. What is the precise idea you want to build inside your listeners? What is their takeaway?

That depends on the length of the speech. If it is a 10-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

There’s a drastic consequence when you rush through multiple topics in summary form. They don’t land with any force. You know the full background and context to what you’re saying, and so the insights you offer may seem profound to you. But for the audience, which is coming to your work fresh, the talk will probably come across as conceptual, dry, or superficial.

Overstuffed equals underexplained.

“Great writing is all about the power of the deleted word.”

The decision to go with “dreamer” made it easy to anchor version 2 on my time studying philosophy at Oxford and slash back most of the other parts of my life. If I had chosen “entrepreneur” or “nerd” or “global soul,” I’d have made different cuts.

Fascinating

Compassion fatigue

An issue-based talk leads with morality. An idea-based talk leads with curiosity. An issue exposes a problem. An idea proposes a solution. An issue says, “Isn’t this terrible?” An idea says, “Isn’t this interesting?”

“Choose a human being—an actual human being in your life—and prepare your talk as if you will be delivering it to that one person only. Choose someone who is not in your field, but who is generally an intelligent, curious, engaged, worldly person—and someone whom you really like. This will bring a warmth of spirit and heart to your talk. Most of all, be sure you are actually speaking to one person, and not to a demographic (‘My speech is for people in the software field who are between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-eight.’),

Hearing a talk is a completely different thing from reading an essay. It’s not just the words. Not at all. It’s the person delivering the words. To make an impact, there has to be a human connection.

Reason for preaching

our number-one advice to speakers on the day of their talk is to make regular eye contact with members of the audience.

“Formulaic or contrived personal sharing leaves audiences feeling manipulated and often hostile toward you and your message. Vulnerability is not oversharing. There’s a simple equation: vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability.

“We need to have owned our stories before sharing them is experienced as a gift. A story is only ready to share when the presenter’s healing and growth is not dependent on the audience’s response to it.”

Thirty years ago, speakers packed their talks with jokes based on gender, race, and disability. Don’t go there! The world has changed.

Be yourself. The worst talks are the ones where someone is trying to be someone they aren’t. If you are generally goofy, then be goofy. If you are emotional, then be emotional. The one exception to that is if you are arrogant and self-centered. Then you should definitely pretend to be someone else.

Haha

The guideline here is just to be authentic. Is that the real you telling this story? A good test is to imagine whether you would tell this story to a group of old friends. And if so, how. Friends are good detectors of the inauthentic.

If you’re going to tell a story, make sure you know why you’re telling it, and try to edit out all the details that are not needed to make your point, while still leaving enough in for people to vividly imagine what happened.

Some of the greatest talks are built around a single story. This structure offers the speaker huge benefits: The throughline is taken care of. (It is simply the narrative arc of the story.)

overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.

simply being conscious of this bias is not enough. You have to expose your drafts to friends or colleagues and beg for ruthless feedback on anything they don’t understand. The same is true for talks, and especially those talks that seek to explain something complex.

for true understanding to take place, the full hierarchical structure of an idea must be communicated.

long-term memory depends on coherent hierarchical organization of content—chunks within chunks within chunks.

This is often where the curse of knowledge strikes hardest. Every sentence is understandable, but the speaker forgets to show how they link together. To him, it’s obvious.

some of the most important elements in a talk are the little phrases that give clues to the talk’s overall structure: “Although . . .” “One recent example . . .” “On the other hand . . .” “Let’s build on that . . .” “Playing devil’s advocate for a moment . . .” “I must just tell you two stories that amplify this finding.” “As an aside . . .” “At this point you may object that . . .” “So, in summary . . .”

At TED we have a guideline based on Einstein’s dictum, “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”

Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it isn’t.

If an explanation is building a small mental model in a large space of possibilities, it’s helpful first to reduce the size of that space.

too much choice actually makes us unhappy.

reductio ad absurdum, that can be devastatingly powerful. It is the process of taking the counter position to what you’re arguing and showing that it leads to a contradiction.

the detective story.

This device can be used to turn the most daunting topic into something truly intriguing. A regular challenge for speakers is how to turn difficult subjects like disease or starvation or human degradation into talks that audiences will show up for and engage with.

Maybe one that reveals how you got engaged in this issue.

reason is the best way of building wisdom for the long term.

If it’s a vision of the future, you want it to be so vivid and compelling that your audience makes it their own.

The structure Han and Pritchard used is good for most demos: An initial tease Necessary background, context, and/or the invention story The demo itself (the more visual and dramatic the better, so long as you’re not faking it) The implications of the technology

There are two keys to sharing a dream effectively: Paint a bold picture of the alternative future you desire; Do so in such a way that others will also desire that future.