TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Any attempt to apply a single set formula is likely to backfire. Audiences see through it in an instant and feel manipulated.

Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.

It is the literal alignment of multiple minds into a shared consciousness. 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.

This is common to sports also

I told people I had just gone through a massive business failure. That I’d come to think of myself as a complete loser. That the only way I’d survived mentally was by immersing myself in the world of ideas.

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.

Many of the best talks are simply based on a personal story and a simple lesson to be drawn from it.

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.

The patterns shown in the brains of the second set of volunteers, those who listened to the audio recollections only, matched those patterns shown in the minds of the first set of volunteers as they watched the movie!

Reminds me of snowcrash

Like all good movies or books, a great talk is transporting. We love to go on adventures, travel someplace new with an informed, if not quirky, guide who can introduce us to things we never knew existed, incite us to crawl out windows into strange worlds, outfit us with new lenses to see the ordinary in an extraordinary way . . . enrapture us and engage multiple parts of our brains simultaneously. So I often try to fashion my talks around embarking on a journey.

It’s possible to disagree where the line is between sharing an idea and pitching, but the principle is crucial: Give, don’t take.

A speaker might kid himself that even an unfocused exploration of his brilliant thinking is bound to be fascinating to others. But if 800 people are planning to devote 15 minutes of their day to your words, you really can’t just wing it.

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?

The first step is to find out as much as you can about the audience. Who are they? How knowledgeable are they? What are their expectations? What do they care about? What have past speakers there spoken about? You can only gift an idea to minds that are ready to receive that type of idea.

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.

It reminds me of the famous quote attributed to a variety of great thinkers and writers: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

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.

Whether your time limit is 2 minutes, 18 minutes, or an hour, let’s agree to this as a starting point: You will only cover as much ground as you can dive into in sufficient depth to be compelling.

He said, “There’s an old formula for writing essays that says a good essay answers three questions: What? So What? Now What? It’s a bit like that.”

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?”

Willing to be vulnerable is one of the most powerful tools a speaker can wield.

Vulnerability is not oversharing. There’s a simple equation: vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. It can be anything from an attempt to hotwire connection to attention-seeking, but it’s not vulnerability and it doesn’t lead to connection.

There’s another big benefit of laughter early in a talk. It’s a powerful signal that you’re connecting.

Tell anecdotes relevant to your subject matter, where humor is natural. The best humor is based on observation of things occurring around you and then exaggerating or remixing them.

Ego emerges in lots of ways that may be truly invisible to a speaker who’s used to being the center of attention: 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.

When you can pull together humor, self-deprecation, and insight into a single story, you have yourself a winning start.

What are the elements of a great story? The classic formula is: A protagonist with goals meets an unexpected obstacle and a crisis results. The protagonist attempts to overcome the obstacle, leading to a climax, and finally a denouement. (There can also be interruptions and plot twists.)

When it comes to sharing a story from the stage, remember to emphasize four key things: 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.

Some stories are carefully designed as metaphors. There’s a useful word for this type of story: parable.

A major finding of cognitive psychology is that long-term memory depends on coherent hierarchical organization of content—chunks within chunks within chunks. A speaker’s challenge is to use the fundamentally one-dimensional medium of speech (one word after another) to convey a multidimensional (hierarchical and cross-linking) structure. A speaker begins with a web of ideas in his head, and by the very nature of language he has to convert it into a string of words.

This takes great care, right down to individual sentences and how they link. A speaker has to be sure that listeners know how each sentence relates logically to the preceding one, whether the relationship is similarity, contrast, elaboration, exemplification, generalization, before-and-after, cause, effect, or violated expectation. And they must know whether the point they are now pondering is a digression, a part of the main argument, an exception to the main argument, and so on.

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

And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell. And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.

“Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can’t raise more revenue. If you can’t raise more revenue, you can’t grow. And if you can’t grow, you can’t possibly solve large social problems.”

He’s arguing that it’s crazy how we frown on high salaries for nonprofit leaders. “You want to make fifty million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, you’re considered a parasite yourself.” Rhetorically, that’s a home run.

I’m really excited to be here today. I’ll show you some stuff that’s just ready to come out of the lab, literally, and I’m glad that you guys are going to be among the first to see it in person, because I think this is going to really change the way we interact with machines from this point on.

You should often aim to tease the arrival of a slide before revealing it. And that brings us to the future of cities [click], is much more powerful than [click] Ah, yes. Next I want to talk about the future of cities.

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 overall, you should plan to speak at your natural, conversational pace. For most speakers that’s somewhere in the range 130–170 words per minute.

There are two ways of losing an audience: going too fast is by far the rarer of the two. Going too slowly is actually the bigger problem, since it allows time for people’s minds to wander off. I feel a bit guilty saying this, but if you speak quickly enough, you can get away with the odd leaping segue. I don’t recommend blatant non sequiturs, obviously. Speaking fast also papers over a lot of cracks—no one minds or even notices the odd um or er provided they come quick and fast.

Sir Ken Robinson jokes that some professors seem to view their bodies simply as devices to carry their heads into the next meeting.

For my entire entrepreneurial life, my mantra had been to follow the passion. Not my passion—other people’s. If I saw something that people were truly, deeply passionate about, that was the big clue that there was opportunity there.

That is why I deeply believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s shining statement: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”