TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

memorize the opening minute and the closing lines.

Don’t fritter it away with small talk. It really, truly doesn’t matter that much that you are honored to be there, or that the organizer’s wife needs to be thanked.

There are, to be sure, occasions when you can start with a thank-you or two, especially when you’re speaking at an event where there’s a strong sense of community.

However, even in that community setting, keep your thank-yous in check.

How do we build a better future for all? Too broad. Too much of a cliché. I’m bored already. How did this fourteen-year-old girl, with less than $200 in her bank account, give her whole town a giant leap into the future? Now we’re talking.

An elegant closing paragraph, followed by a simple “thank you,” offers the best shot at a satisfying end to your efforts.

You’ll probably want to dress somewhat like they do, but a little bit smarter.

Will you be filmed? If so, avoid wearing brilliant white (it can blow out the shot) or jet black (you might look like a floating head), or anything with a small or tight pattern (it can cause a strange, shimmery, moiré effect on camera).

The audience loves bold, vibrant colors, and so does the camera.

the most important thing is just to wear something that boosts your confidence.

Throughout the process, when faced with self-doubt, I focused as much as I could on the message to deliver, instead of the messenger.

The single most important one is to breathe. Breathe deeply, meditation style. The oxygen infusion brings calm with it. You can do this even if you’re seated in the audience, waiting to be called up.

If you’re offstage and you’re feeling tension surging through your body, it’s worth trying more vigorous physical exercise.

Five minutes before you go on, try to drink a third of a bottle of water.

Get some healthy food into your body an hour or so before you’re on, and/or have a protein bar handy.

Monica’s suggestion to write THIS MATTERS on your notes is wonderful. This is the single biggest piece of advice I can give you.

If you can get comfortable with it, a talk given in front of an audience with no lectern in the way is the best approach.

If you have it memorized completely, or you can deliver it from a short handwritten set of bullet points, the choice is simple. Go out on stage and give the talk direct, human to humans. No lectern, nothing in the way, just you, a single hand-held note card, and the audience. In many ways this is the gold standard to aim for.

In that case, the best bet may be to use a set of hand-held 5 x 8 inch cards, which you simply page through one by one. It’s best to have them on a ring clip, in case you drop them and they get out of sequence.

A single accidental touch on the screen can take you away from your script, and it may take a lot of scrolling and peering to find your place. Perhaps someone will come up with the perfect app to fix this, but so far, as used in real-world conditions, this solution seems slower and clumsier than old-fashioned note cards. It’s fine to have your script on an iPad and to use it as a comfort backup, but I don’t recommend using a smart device for notes you regularly refer to.

Yup

If you must refer to a full script, lengthy notes, a laptop, or a tablet, don’t fake it.

Then commit to knowing the talk really well, so that you can spend lots of time looking out at the audience instead of down at the lectern.

Here are some of the impacts that the added layer can bring: Connection: I trust this person. Engagement: Every sentence sounds so interesting! Curiosity: I hear it in your voice and see it in your face. Understanding: The emphasis on that word with that hand gesture—now I get it. Empathy: I can tell how much that hurt you. Excitement: Wow—that passion is infectious. Conviction: Such determination in those eyes! Action: I want to be on your team. Sign me up.

For me, the key takeaway is simply to inject variety into the way you speak, variety based on the meaning you’re trying to convey. So many speakers forget this. They give a talk in which every sentence has the same vocal pattern.

If your talk is scripted, try this: Find the two or three words in each sentence that carry the most significance, and underline them. Then look for the one word in each paragraph that really matters and underline it twice more. Find the sentence that is lightest in tone in the whole script and run a light wavy pencil line under it. Look for every question mark and highlight them with a yellow highlighter. Find the biggest single aha moment of the talk and inject a great big black blob right before it is revealed. If there’s a funny anecdote somewhere, put little pink dots above it.

You can use every second not just to convey information but to communicate how that information might be received. And all without adding a single extra word.

When you’re introducing key ideas or explaining something that’s complex, slow down, and don’t be afraid to insert pauses. During anecdotes and lighter moments, speed up.

But in most modern settings, oration is best used sparingly. It’s capable of conveying passion and urgency and outrage, but it struggles with the many more subtle emotions. And from an audience perspective, it can be really powerful for 15 minutes, but exhausting for an hour. If you were speaking to a single person, you would not orate. You could not build a day-long conference program around oration.

The simplest way to give a talk powerfully is just to stand tall, putting equal weight on both feet, which are positioned comfortably a few inches apart, and use your hands and arms to naturally amplify whatever you’re saying.

You don’t have to walk around at all.

Constant pacing can be tiring to watch. Pacing punctuated by stillness can be powerful.

Something to avoid is nervously shifting from leg to leg or walking forward and back a couple of steps in a kind of rocking motion.

There are no rules here. Move if you want to. But if you do move, move intentionally.

An interview can be a fine alternative to a talk.

At TED we’ve been experimenting with an interview format that encourages some preparation by both interviewer and interviewee, while still allowing for the in-the-moment cut and thrust of a traditional interview. It’s a conversation accompanied by a sequence of images that has been worked out in advance by both parties. The images act as chapter markers for the various topics to be covered, and they add refreshing reference points for the conversation. When I interviewed Elon Musk, I invited him to send me rarely seen videos illustrating key topics we wanted to talk about, such as his work on building reusable spacecraft. When the appropriate moment came, I simply played the relevant video and asked him to explain what we were

This format is a satisfying halfway point between talk and interview. It allows interviewees to really think about how they want to structure an idea that matters to them. And it decreases the risk of rambling or getting bogged down.

For example, at PechaKucha events, the talk format prescribes that 20 slides are shown with 20 seconds devoted to each one; the slides are advanced automatically, and the speaker has to keep up. Self-proclaimed “geek events,” the Ignite talk series has a similar format, though in this case speakers’ time is reduced to 15 seconds per slide. Both methods make for terrific, fast-moving events.

Interesting

One of the surprises of TED’s success has been that a speaker on video has almost as much impact as a speaker in the room.

Interesting. But still not justification for multisite.

This won’t replace the power of people coming together physically—there are far too many benefits from the ancient experience of real in-the-moment human contact. But direct-to-video talks will be a wonderful playground for rapid experimentation, innovation, and learning.

But when the content and audience are wide-ranging, a speaker’s goal isn’t to exhaustively cover a niche topic.

To understand something, he said, we had to move in the opposite direction. We had to pursue the unification of knowledge. He gave lots of examples in which older scientific theories were replaced by deeper, broader theories that tied together more than one area of knowledge. For example, an elegant worldview based on the sun sitting at the center of the solar system replaced massively complex explanations of the whirling motions of individual planets around Earth.

But more importantly still, Deutsch argued, the key to understanding anything was to understand the context in which it sat. If you imagine a vast spiderweb of knowledge, you can’t really understand the intricate knots in any small part of that web without pulling the camera back to see how the strands connect more broadly. It’s only by looking at that larger pattern that you can gain actual understanding.

This is why theology is important.

What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other.

I don’t need to learn from you everything you know. Of course not. That would take years. What I need to know is how your work connects to everything else. Can you explain the essence of it in a way I can understand? Can you share your work process in layman’s terms? Can you explain why it matters? And why you are passionate about it?

Online video was providing two things that had never before been available so potently: Visibility of the best talent in the world A massive incentive to improve on what was out there

crowd-accelerated innovation.