TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
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Read between January 1 - January 1, 2022
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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.
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The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence,
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stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.
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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.
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Style without substance is awful.
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Maybe you’re just lacking self-confidence. There’s a paradox here. You have always been you, and you only see yourself from the inside. The bits that others find remarkable in you may be completely invisible to you. To find those bits you may need to have honest conversations with those who know you best. They will know some parts of you better than you know them yourself.
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An important idea, wrapped up in a fresh story, can make a great talk if it’s told the right way.
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Everyone had to commit, at some point during the year, to giving a TED Talk to the rest of the organization about what they’ve learned. That meant we all got to benefit from one another’s knowledge but, crucially, it also provided the key incentive for people to get on with it and actually learn.
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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.
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Yes, communicating emotion is important, and for that aspect of a talk, one’s tone of voice and body language do indeed matter a great deal. We discuss this in detail in later chapters. But the whole substance of a talk depends crucially on words. It’s the words that tell a story, build an idea, explain the complex, make a reasoned case, or provide a compelling call to action. So, if you hear someone tell you that body language matters more than verbal language in public speaking, please know that they are misinterpreting the science. (Or for fun, you could just ask them to repeat their point ...more
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The key principle is to remember that the speaker’s job is to give to the audience, not take from them.
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It’s one thing to underprepare. But to boast that you’ve underprepared? That’s insulting. It tells the audience that their time doesn’t matter. That the event doesn’t matter.
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Here’s the thing about inspiration: It has to be earned.
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Beautiful slides and a charismatic stage presence are all very well, but if there’s no real takeaway, all the speaker has done—at best—is to entertain.
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It is throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Every talk should have one.
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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?
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But when the audience knows where you’re headed, it’s much easier for them to follow.
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But the biggest obstacle in identifying a throughline is expressed in every speaker’s primal scream: I have far too much to say and not enough time to say it!
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But throughlines that connect large numbers of concepts don’t work.
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It’s a simple equation. Overstuffed equals underexplained. To say something interesting you have to take the time to do at least two things: Show why it matters . . . what’s the question you’re trying to answer, the problem you’re trying to solve, the experience you’re trying to share? Flesh out each point you make with real examples, stories, facts.
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To provide an effective talk, you must slash back the range of topics you will cover to a single, connected thread—a throughline that can be properly developed. In a sense, you cover less, but the impact will actually be significantly greater.
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“Great writing is all about the power of the deleted word.”
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“Kill your darlings.
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‘What can you unpack in a meaningful way in 18 minutes?’”
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You will only cover as much ground as you can dive into in sufficient depth to be compelling.
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A. Introduction—getting settled, what will be covered B. Context—why this issue matters C. Main Concepts D. Practical Implications E. Conclusion
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What? So What? Now What? It’s a bit like that.”
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An issue-based talk leads with morality. An idea-based talk leads with curiosity.
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An issue exposes a problem. An idea proposes a solution. An issue says, “Isn’t this terrible?” An idea says, “Isn’t this interesting?”
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It’s much easier to pull in an audience by framing the talk as an attempt to solve an intriguing riddle rather than as a plea for them to care. The first feels like a gi...
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“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.’), because a demographic is not a human being, and if you speak to a ...more
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Knowledge can’t be pushed into a brain. It has to be pulled in.
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One of the best ways to disarm an audience is to first reveal your own vulnerability. It’s the equivalent of the tough cowboy walking into a saloon and holding his coat wide open to reveal no weapons. Everyone relaxes.
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Brown strongly recommends that you don’t share parts of yourself that you haven’t yet worked through.
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By offering little gifts of laughter from the start, you are subtly informing your audience . . . Come along for the ride, dear friends. It’s going to be a treat.
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Build humor into your visuals. You can also have the humor be the contrast between what you’re saying and what you’re showing. There are lots of great possibilities for laughter.
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Name-dropping Stories that seem designed only to show off Boasting about your or your company’s achievements Making the talk all about you rather than an idea others can use.
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I can’t end this chapter without lamenting the biggest killer of connection: tribal thinking.
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Base it on a character your audience can empathize with. Build tension, whether through curiosity, social intrigue, or actual danger. Offer the right level of detail. Too little and the story is not vivid. Too much and it gets bogged down. End with a satisfying resolution, whether funny, moving, or revealing.
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The concept is not delivered in a single leap but piece by piece, and with metaphors to guide and show how the pieces fit together.
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Step 2. He lit a fire called curiosity.
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Step 3. He brought in concepts one by one.
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Step 4. He used metaphors.
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Step 5. He used examples.
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Understanding. We can define it as the upgrading of a worldview to better reflect reality.
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so a key part of planning a talk is to have the balance right between the concepts you are introducing and the examples and metaphors needed to make them understandable.
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What do you assume your audience already knows? What will be your connecting theme? What are the concepts necessary to build your explanation? And what metaphors and examples will you use to reveal those concepts?
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Steven Pinker suggests that overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.
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A talk isn’t a container or a bin that you put content in, it’s a process, a trajectory.
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but if you could fly and you wanted someone to fly with you, you would take their hand and take off and not let go, because once the person drops, that’s it!
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