TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Human-to-human communication is a true wonder of the world.

public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.

Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview.

That’s the power of a single talk. You might not be leading an organization, but a talk can still open new doors or transform a career.

Amy Cuddy gave a hugely popular talk about how changing your body language can raise your confidence level.

scientist named Sophie Scott stepped onto the TED stage, and within 2 minutes the entire audience was howling with uncontrollable laughter.

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. I am using the word idea quite broadly here. It doesn’t have to be a scientific breakthrough, a genius invention, or a complex legal theory. It can be a simple how-to. Or a human insight illustrated with the power of a story. Or a beautiful image that has meaning. Or an event you wish might happen in the future.

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.

Style without substance is awful.

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

EFFICACY

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.

In other words, the power of language alone conjured up the same mental experiences that others had while watching a movie.

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.

There’s one other beautiful metaphor for a great talk. It is a journey that speaker and audience take together. Speaker Tierney Thys puts it this way: Like all good movies or books, a great talk is transporting.

When human-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson spoke at TED,

Compare that statement to this one: “Back in 2005 we discovered something surprising. It turns out that it’s possible for an average office to slash its energy costs by 60 percent without any noticeable loss of productivity. Let me share with you how . . .” One mode retains interest. One kills it. One mode is a gift. The other is lazily self-serving.

Inspiration can’t be performed. It’s an audience response to authenticity, courage, selfless work, and genuine wisdom. Bring those qualities to your talk, and you may be amazed at what happens.

There are lots of spoken sentences, to be sure. But somehow they leave the audience with nothing they can hold on to. 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.

There’s a helpful word used to analyze plays, movies, and novels; it applies to talks too. It is throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element.

Here’s the start of a talk thrown together without a throughline. “I want to share with you some experiences I had during my recent trip to Cape Town, and then make a few observations about life on the road . . .” Compare that with: “On my recent trip to Cape Town, I learned something new about strangers—when you can trust them, and when you definitely can’t. Let me share with you two very different experiences I had . . .”

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?

More choice actually makes us less happy.

Let’s bring on a quiet revolution—a world redesigned for introverts.

President Woodrow Wilson was once asked about how long it took him to prepare for a speech. He replied: 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.

Author Richard Bach said, “Great writing is all about the power of the deleted word.” It’s true of speaking too. The secret of successful talks often lies in what is left out. Less can be more.

And here’s version 2: I want you to come with me to a student’s room at Oxford University in 1977. You open the door, and at first it seems like there’s nobody there. But wait. Over in the corner, there’s a boy lying on the floor, face up, staring at the ceiling. He’s been like that for more than 90 minutes. That’s me. Twenty-year-old me. I am thinking. Hard. I am trying . . . please don’t laugh . . . I am trying to solve the problem of free will. That deep mystery that has stumped the world’s philosophers for at least two millennia? Yup, I’m taking it on. Anyone looking objectively at the scene would have concluded that this boy was some weird combination of arrogant, deluded, or perhaps just socially awkward and lonely, preferring the company of ideas to people.

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.

pieces of work. The most viewed TED speaker at the time of writing this book is Sir Ken Robinson. He told me that most of his talks follow this simple structure: A. Introduction—getting settled, what will be covered B. Context—why this issue matters C. Main Concepts D. Practical Implications E. Conclusion 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?” 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.

Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert also believes in planning a talk for an audience of one. She offered me this advice: “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

But most important of all, says Gilbert, is to pick a topic that lives deep within you. “Talk about what you know. Talk about what you know and love with all your heart.

Knowledge can’t be pushed into a brain. It has to be pulled in.

Before you can build an idea in someone else’s mind, you need their permission. People are naturally cautious about opening up their minds—the most precious thing they own—to complete strangers. You need to find a way to overcome that caution. And the way you do that is to make visible the human being cowering inside you.

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.

By the same logic, if you’re feeling nervous, it can actually work in your favor. Audiences sense it instantly and—far from despising you as you may fear, the opposite happens—they begin rooting for you. We often encourage speakers who look like they may struggle with nerves to simply be ready, if necessary, to acknowledge it. If you feel yourself choking up, then pause . . . pick up a bottle of water, take a sip, and just say what you’re feeling. “Hang in there a moment . . . As you can see, I’m feeling a little nervous here. Normal service will be restored soon.” Likely as not, you’ll get a warm round of applause, and a crowd dying for you to succeed.

Humor hacks away the main resistance to listening to a talk. 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.

Humor is a skilled art, and not everyone can do it. Ineffective humor is worse than no humor at all.

blowhard.

TED speaker Salman Khan put it beautifully: Be yourself. The worst talks are the ones where someone is trying to be someone they aren’t. If you are generally goofy, then be goofy. If you are emotional, then be emotional. The one exception to that is if you are arrogant and self-centered. Then you should definitely pretend to be someone else.

Dan Pink, an accomplished speaker whose talk on motivation has 10 million views and counting, walked onto the stage looking just a bit overconfident and began speaking in a voice that was just a tad too loud. But after his first few sentences, we were all in his pocket. This is what he said: I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over twenty years ago I did something that I regret, something that I’m not particularly proud of, something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. Brilliant. Now we liked him after all.

Tony Blair is a master at it, often using self-deprecation to win over potentially hostile audiences. Once, before he was elected British prime minister, he began to tell a story which, he said apologetically, might make people worry whether he was qualified to govern.

TELL A STORY Storytelling is so important that the entire next chapter is dedicated to it, but one of its most important functions is to build connection with the audience.

We’re born to love stories. They are instant generators of interest, empathy, emotion, and intrigue.

Ernesto Sirolli wanted to give a talk about a better approach to development aid in Africa. If you’re going to take on a tough subject like that, it’s a very good idea to connect with the audience first. Here’s how he did it. Our first project . . . was where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and . . . And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that . . . And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, “Thank God we’re here. Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation.” And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. We had these magnificent tomatoes . . . And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, “Look how easy agriculture is.” When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some two hundred hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. And we said to the Zambians, “My God, the hippos!” And the Zambians said, “Yes, that’s why we have no agriculture here.”

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

stories that can generate the best connection are stories about you personally or about people close to you. Tales of failure, awkwardness, misfortune, danger, or disaster, told authentically, are often the moment when lis...

Narration The Irresistible Allure of Stories

Anthropologist Polly Wiessner has spent forty years researching certain forager cultures and periodically recording who said what and when. In 2014, she published a paper that showed a dramatic difference between daytime and nighttime gatherings. Daytime talk, even when larger groups were involved, centered on economic discussions and social gossip. At night, the mood mellowed. There might be singing, dancing, rituals. But the most time was spent on storytelling. Tales that brought people from distant places to the hearth and into the hearts and minds of listeners.