TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

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.)

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. Of course, it’s all in the execution, so it’s really worth fine-tuning your stories.

Here’s a great story: Once, when I was eight years old, my father took me fishing. We were in a tiny boat, five miles from shore, when a massive storm blew in. Dad put a life jacket on me and whispered in my ear, “Do you trust me, son?” I nodded. He threw me overboard. [pause] I kid you not. Just tossed me over! I hit the water and bobbed up to the surface, gasping for breath. It was shockingly cold. The waves were terrifying. Monstrous. Then . . . Dad dived in after me. We watched in horror as our little boat flipped and sank. But he was holding me the whole time, telling me it was going to be OK. Fifteen minutes later, the Coast Guard helicopter arrived. It turned out that Dad knew the boat was damaged and was going to sink, and he had called them with our exact location. He guessed it was better to chuck me in the open sea than risk getting trapped when the boat flipped. And that is how I learned the true meaning of the word trust. And here’s how not to tell it: I learned trust from my father when I was eight years old and we got caught in a storm while out fishing for mackerel. We failed to catch a single one before the storm hit. Dad knew the boat was going to sink, because it was one of those Saturn brand inflatable boats, which are usually pretty strong, but this one had been punctured once and Dad thought it might happen again. In any case, the storm was too big for an inflatable boat and it was already leaking. So he called the Coast Guard rescue service, wh...

The first story has a character you care about and intense drama that builds to incredulity before being beautifully resolved. The second version is a mess. The drama is killed by revealing the father’s intent too early; there’s no attempt to share the actual experience of the kid; there are too many details included that are irrelevant to most of the audience, while other germane details like the giant waves are ignored. Worst of all, the key line that anchors the story, “Do you trust me, son?,” is lost. 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.

And that’s a real shame. One of the biggest reasons we turn down applications to speak at TED is when we’re offered compelling anecdotes but no central idea that wraps the narrative together. This is heartbreaking, because the speakers are often wonderful, fascinating people. But without the wraparound of an idea, it’s an opportunity missed.

Explorer Ben Saunders went on a trek to the South Pole that almost took his life. He’s a powerful storyteller and has great photographs to illustrate what happened. As he drew near the end of his talk, we waited expectantly for the usual admonitions adventurers offer us to go out and discover our true selves in whatever challenge we take on. But Ben surprised us. He shared some dark moments he’d experienced since the trek and said the destination he’d been dreaming of for years was less satisfying than the journey. The takeaway? Don’t pin your happiness on the future. If we can’t feel content here, today, now, on our journeys, amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it.

Writer Andrew Solomon described how he was humiliated as a child, even before he came out as gay, and turned the story into an exhilarating essay on identity that anyone could relate to and learn from. There’s always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity, and there are always stories that restore it. If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred and expand everyone’s lives.

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

Law professor Lawrence Lessig is a brilliant purveyor of parables. He came to TED in 2013 to argue that America’s political process had become irredeemably corrupted by money. He had us imagine a foolish country called Lesterland in which only the people named Lester were able to vote. Clearly that would be ridiculous. But then he pointed out that the number of people named Lester in the US is about the same as the number of significant political funders. And that members of Congress have their priorities largely set by those funders, so that effectively it’s only the funders whose views and votes matter. In this parable, we all live in Lesterland.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell also specializes in parables—and the appeal of this form is reflected in the amazing sales of his books and the high number of views on his TED Talks. His most popular talk is, believe it or not, a tale about the development of new forms of spaghetti sauce. But he uses it as a parable for the insight that different people want very different things but often don’t have the language to say what they want, until you find the right questions to ask them.

What’s satisfying about each of these talks is the way they draw out the ...

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert came to TED with a daunting task. In just a single short talk, he planned to explain a sophisticated concept called “synthesized happiness” and why it led us to make wildly inaccurate predictions about our own futures.

Ben and Jerry’s doesn’t have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it’s not because they whipped some up, tried it, and went, yuck. It’s because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say yuck before you make it.

A single vivid example of the simulator in action, and you totally get it. But now the talk takes an intriguing twist. Let’s see how your experience simulators are working. Let’s just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here are two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. And the other is becoming paraplegic. The audience is laughing, but a little nervously, wondering what’s to come.

After all, why do we chase happiness when we have the capacity within ourselves to manufacture the very commodity we crave?

Curiosity is what makes people ask why? and how? It’s the feeling that something doesn’t quite make sense.

If, as I have suggested, the goal of a great talk is to build an idea inside someone’s mind, then explanation is the essential tool for achieving that goal.

Lexicographer Erin McKean offers this as a nice example of the power of metaphor. If you were giving a talk about JavaScript to a general audience, you could explain that people often have a mental model of a computer program as being a set of instructions, executed one after another. But in JavaScript, instructions can be asynchronous, which means that you can’t be confident that line five will always happen after line four. Imagine if you were getting dressed in the morning and it was possible to put your shoes on before your jeans (or your jeans on before your underpants)! That can happen in JavaScript.

We all suffer from a cognitive bias for which economist Robin Hogarth coined the term “the curse of knowledge.” In a nutshell, we find it hard to remember what it feels like not to know something that we ourselves know well.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker suggests that overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.

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.

the little phrases that give clues to the talk’s overall structure: “Although . . .” “One recent example . . .” “On the other hand . . .” “Let’s build on that . . .” “Playing devil’s advocate for a moment . . .” “I must just tell you two stories that amplify this finding.” “As an aside . . .” “At this point you may object that . . .” “So, in summary . . .”

Not to be grandiose, 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!

Einstein’s dictum, “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”

Bonnie Bassler is a scientist working on how bacteria communicate with each other. She gave a talk that dove into some pretty complex but mind-blowing research her lab had been undertaking. By helping us understand it, she opened up a world of intriguing possibilities.

Persuasion Reason Can Change Minds Forever

Psychologist Barry Schwartz changed the way I think about choice.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert showed how the power of storytelling can be a key part of the persuasion toolkit.

What do I mean by priming? The philosopher Daniel Dennett explains it best. He coined the term intuition pump to refer to any metaphor or linguistic device that intuitively makes a conclusion seem more plausible. This is priming. It is not a rigorous argument; it is simply a way of nudging someone in your direction.

If you can walk someone through a reasoned argument convincingly, the idea you have planted in her mind will lodge there and never let go. But for the process to work, it must be broken down into small steps, each of which must be totally convincing.

One of the TED Talks rated most persuasive is that of charity reformer Dan Pallotta, who argues that the way we think about charity means that our nonprofit organizations are hopelessly handicapped.

There’s another form of reasoned argument, known as reductio ad absurdum, that can be devastatingly powerful. It is the process of taking the counter position to what you’re arguing and showing that it leads to a contradiction. If that counter position is false, your position is strengthened (or even proven, if there are no other possible positions that could be taken).

MAKE US DETECTIVES Here’s a more attractive way to build a case. At TED, we call it the detective story. Some of the most compelling persuasion talks are structured entirely around this device.

A simple example is artist Siegfried Woldhek’s talk. He wanted to prove that three famous Leonardo da Vinci drawings were actually self-portraits from different stages of his life. To make the case, he framed the talk as his quest to discover “the true face” of Leonardo da Vinci.

Instead of being told facts, we’ve been invited to join the process of discovery. Our minds are naturally more engaged. As we eliminate rival theories one by one, we gradually become convinced. We persuade ourselves.

Economist Emily Oster wanted to persuade us that the tools of economics could allow us to think differently about HIV/AIDS, but instead of just presenting an economic argument, she became a detective.

Persuasion is the act of replacing someone’s worldview with something better. And at its heart is the power of reason, capable of long-term impact. Reason is best accompanied by intuition pumps, detective stories, visuals, or other plausibility-priming devices.

David Gallo’s brief talk on underwater astonishments was a glorious wonder walk—or, in this case, a wonder dive. He

Another simple but super-compelling wonder walk was science writer Mary Roach’s talk on orgasm.

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And they can be amplified in their power by a tool all too rarely used by speakers: silence. One of the best examples on TED of a wonder walk is by kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin. His

Inventor Michael Pritchard used a similar structure. First he shared a quick thought experiment on how life would be without safe drinking water. Then he embarked on an explanation of the technology behind the “lifesaver bottle” he’d designed.

Amy Cuddy’s popular talk on how your body language affects your own confidence is an artful mix of explanation and personal storytelling. And Salman Khan’s talk begins with his own story and morphs into a wonder walk through the remarkable features his Khan Academy is building, before ending up in dreamscape territory—a thrilling vision of the potential for a new type of education. So I will reemphasize: The above techniques are not to be seen as in any way limiting you. They are tools to help you imagine how you can best undertake your own remarkable construction project in your listeners’ minds.

Google “Hans Rosling: The best stats you’ve ever seen.” Watch and marvel. (The 48-second clip starts at 4:05.)

Scripting To Memorize or Not to Memorize?

As comedian Julia Sweeney later remarked, it was as if he was disappearing into one of the black holes he was talking about.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to TED. Known as the father of behavioral economics, he’s an extraordinary thinker with a toolkit of ideas that can change any worldview.

One of the first key decisions you need to make—and ideally you’ll make it early on in your talk preparation—is whether you will: A. write out the talk in full as a complete script (to be read, memorized, or a combination of the two), or B. have a clearly worked-out structure and speak in the moment to each of your points.

Pamela Meyer, who gave a hit talk on how to detect a liar, appeared to be speaking honestly with this advice: At Camp Seafarer in North Carolina, we had to tread water while singing camp songs. Then, to make it harder, we had to tread water while also wiggling our forefingers in complicated patterns to the beat of the song. You haven’t really memorized your talk thoroughly until you can do an entire other activity that requires mental energy while giving your talk. Can you give your talk while measuring out the ingredients to make brownies? Can you give your talk while filing all the messy papers on your desk into a file cabinet? If you can give your talk while the cognitive load is that high on your system, you can give it well while focused on stage.

fast and slow, singsong and stentorian, cool and cooler.