TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

For a period of time, the campfire participants act as if they were a single life form. They may rise together, dance together, chant together. From this shared backdrop, it is a short step to the desire to act together, to decide to embark together on a journey, a battle, a building, a celebration.

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.

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.

a throughline requires you first to identify an idea that can be properly unpacked in the time you have available. You should then build a structure so that every element in your talk is somehow linked to this idea.

An issue-based talk leads with morality. An idea-based talk leads with curiosity. An issue exposes a problem. An idea proposes a solution.

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 gift being offered. The second feels like an ask.

Scientists have shown that just the act of two people staring at each other will trigger mirror neuron activity that literally adopts the emotional state of the other person.

“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.”

For an explanation to be satisfying it has to take puzzling facts and build a connection from them to someone’s existing mental model of the world. Metaphors and analogies are the key tools needed to do this.

the best explainers say just enough to let people feel like they’re coming up with the idea for themselves.

when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation.

the process of taking the counter position to what you’re arguing and showing that it leads to a contradiction.

Instead of being told facts, we’ve been invited to join the process of discovery.

Slides move at least a little bit of attention away from the speaker and onto the screen.

the audience member’s brain has to decide whether to focus on your words, your slides, or both, and it’s mostly involuntary.

there is no value in simply repeating in text what you are saying on stage.

words on the screen are fighting your presentation, not enhancing it.

That way, the slide teases the audience’s curiosity and makes your words more interesting, not less.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes imperfection livable. Because when you know something inside out, you can PLAY with what comes your way, rather than shut it out.”

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address clocked in at just over 2 minutes. The speaker before him droned on for 2 hours; what he said is long forgotten.

At the beginning of your talk, you have about a minute to intrigue people with what you’ll be saying. And the way you end will strongly influence how your talk is remembered.

Igniting curiosity is the single most versatile tool at your disposal for ensuring audience engagement.

If a talk’s goal is to build an idea in listeners’ minds, then curiosity is the fuel that powers listeners’ active participation.

curiosity-generating speakers often don’t explicitly ask a question. At least not at first. They simply frame a topic in an unexpected way that clicks that curiosity button.

Instead of saying, “Today I plan to talk to you about my work, but first I need to give you some background . . . ,” you can just start by saying: “Let me show you something.”

Every talk needs mapping—a sense of where you’re going, where you are, and where you’ve been. If your listeners don’t know where they are in the structure of the talk, they will quickly get lost.

inject variety into the way you speak, variety based on the meaning you’re trying to convey.

We’re strange creatures, we humans. At one level, we just want to eat, drink, play, and acquire more stuff. But life on the hedonic treadmill is ultimately dissatisfying. A beautiful remedy is to hop off it and instead begin pursuing an idea that’s bigger than you are.