TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
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Read between September 1 - November 3, 2019
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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, 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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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.
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Ofttimes the heads of organizations are by default their spokespersons, always in selling mode, believing it’s their obligation to honor the hard-working team that surrounds them. And because the work they want to talk about has taken place inside the organization, the most obvious way to describe it may be to anchor it to organizational acts. “Back in 2005, we set up a new department in Dallas in this office building [slide of glass tower here], and its goal was to investigate how we could slash our energy costs, so I allocated Vice President Hank Boreham to the task . . .” Yawn.
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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?”
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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.
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Bill Gates gained headlines across the world by releasing a jar full of mosquitoes during his talk on malaria, joking, “There’s no reason why only poor people should have the experience.”