TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
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I turn on a TV interview show, slightly louder than usual, to create maximum cognitive interference. Then (no kidding) I hold one leg behind me and recite my talk to my reflection in the mirror. If I stop smiling, I have to start over. If I stall out, I have to start over. If I survive one entire recitation, I won’t forget my talk and the smiles will happen as they may.
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Don’t think of it as reciting the talk. You’re supposed to live it. Embody it. Your sole goal is to get to the point where remembering the words is no longer an effort and you can use your stage time to impart passion and meaning to the audience. It must come across as if you are sharing these ideas for the first time.
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TED2014 by Andrew Solomon:   We don’t seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning.
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One temptation many speakers fall prey to is to use their slides as crutches. In the worst form, this means a series of dismal slides covered with text and bullet points that the speaker works through laboriously.
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Every word you speak that someone has already seen on a slide is a word that carries zero punch. It’s not news anymore.
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One thing to understand is that audiences really don’t mind one bit if you pause your talk for a moment to take stock. You might feel some discomfort. They won’t. The key is to be relaxed about it. When superstar DJ Mark Ronson came to TED2014, he was masterful at this. He lost his way at one point, but he simply smiled, walked over to a bottle of water, sipped it, told the audience this was his memory crutch, studied his notes, sipped again, and by the time he got going again, everyone liked him even more.
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I have come to think of memorization as something like a soldier’s combat training; when the moment of battle comes, you want to be operating by instinct, not by conscious thought.
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A great talk is both scripted AND improvisational. It is precisely like a great jazz performance: First, the opening and closing are always completely scripted; second, the general structure is fully determined before the first horn blows; but third, what makes jazz interesting and captivating is that in the middle of a tune there is always some point (or several points) in which the player can go off script and spontaneously create something that captures the mood of that particular audience in that particular room at that particular moment in time. The player can take a few moments to do ...more
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Churchill, I think, said this—“Rehearse your impromptu remarks.”
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Whichever mode of speaking you decide on, there’s a very simple, very obvious tool you can use to improve your talk, but it’s one that most speakers rarely undertake: Rehearse. Repeatedly.
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Musicians rehearse before playing. Actors rehearse before opening the theater doors to the paying public. For public talks, the stakes may well be as high or higher than any concert or play, yet many speakers seem to think they can just walk on the stage and get it right the first time. Thus it is that, time and again, hundreds of people in the audience have to suffer countless minutes of needless pain simply because one person didn’t prepare adequately. ’Tis a crying shame.
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The greatest corporate communicator of recent times, Steve Jobs, didn’t get there by talent alone. He put in hours of meticulous rehearsal for every major product la...
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Jill Bolte Taylor, whose talk about her stroke exploded across the Internet in 2008, told me:   I practiced literally hundreds of hours. Over and over again, even in my sleep as I would awake and find myself reciting the talk. Because the piece was so emotional for me, I would relive the morning of the stroke every time I shared the story. Because my emotion was authentic, the story was perceived as authentic, and we took the journey together.
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Rehearse in front of friends. Rehearse by yourself. Rehearse with your eyes closed. Rehearse walking in the garden.
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There’s a kind of unintentional memorization that develops naturally from repetition. I think that’s what you’re after. Memorization feels safer, but a little risk is good. Fear is energy, and you want some of that running through your wires.
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That phrase unintentional memorization is an important one. If you rehearse enough, you may find yourself simply knowing the talk in its best form.
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Repeated rehearsals. But rehearsals that actually created the talk. Here’s what he said:   I once heard Ron Vawter, the greatest actor I’ve ever known, answer a question about his rehearsal technique. He replied, “I just say the words enough times that they sound like they’re coming from me.”
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I always make written notes, but I never write out the talk—talks shouldn’t feel like writing read aloud. Instead, I write down a list of what theater people call beats:
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Some things to ask your audience during or after these rehearsals: Did I get your attention from the get-go? Was I making eye contact? Did the talk succeed in building a new idea for you? Was each step of the journey satisfying? Were there enough examples to make everything clear? How was my tone of voice? Did it sound conversational (usually good) or as if I was preaching (usually bad)? Was there enough variety of tone and pacing? Did I sound as if I was reciting the talk? Were the attempts at humor natural or a little awkward? Was there enough humor? How were the visuals? Did they help or ...more
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In history, many of the most powerful talks were short and to the point. 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.
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Whether or not you memorize your talk, it’s important to pay attention to how you begin and how you end it. 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.
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Audience attention is a truly precious commodity. You always have it when you first arrive on stage. Don’t fritter it away with small talk. It really, truly doesn’t matter that much that you are honored to be there, or that the organizer’s wife needs to be thanked. What matters is persuading the audience that they dare not switch off for a nanosecond.
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You want an opening that grabs people from the first moment. A surprising statement. An intriguing question. A short story. An incredible image.
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Here are four ways to stake your claim to the audience’s attention.   1. Deliver a dose of drama
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Comic Maysoon Zayid, who suffers from cerebral palsy due to a botched medical procedure at her birth, came onto the stage shaking, and began her talk like this: “I am not drunk . . . but the doctor who delivered me was.”
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Activist chef Jamie Oliver came to TED to accept our annual TED Prize. Here’s how he opened. “Sadly, in the next 18 minutes . . . four Americans that are alive will be dead . . . through the food that they eat.” I think you want to hear more.
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In planning your opening, let your talk’s throughline be your guide. How can you tease up the idea of your talk in the most compelling way imaginable? Ask yourself: if your talk were a movie or a novel, how would it open?
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Zak Ebrahim came to TED2014 with an incredible story. But in his original script, he planned to open like this:   I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1983 to a loving American mother and an Egyptian father who tried their best to create a happy childhood for me. It wasn’t until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. But, in fact, when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn’t take long to realize that, for the most part, we all want the ...more
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Here’s the opening of the original script sent to us by sociologist Alice Goffman.   When I was a freshman in college at the University of Pennsylvania, I took a sociology class where we were supposed to go out and study the city through firsthand observation and participation. I got a job working at a cafeteria on campus, making sandwiches and salads. My boss was an African American woman in her sixties who lived in a black neighborhood not far from Penn. The next year I began tutoring her granddaughter Aisha, who was a freshman in high school.   She’s just telling her story in a way that’s ...more
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That brilliant framing allowed her to talk about the tragedy of America’s incarcerated in a way that demands attention: Hey, they could have been college kids.
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2. Ignite curiosity
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If I offered you the chance to hear a talk on parasites, I’m guessing you might decline. But only if you hadn’t met science writer Ed Yong. Here’s how he opened his talk.   A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in ...more
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He goes on to describe how a species of shrimp huddle together only because their brains have been taken over by parasites who need the shrimp to be visible to predator flamingos in whose bellies the parasite can continue its life cycle. In less than a minute flat, your brain is doing somersaults. Whaaat?! Can nature...
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How do you spark curiosity? The obvious way is to ask a question. But not just any question. A surprising question. How do we build a better future for all? Too broad. Too much of a cliché. I’m bored already. How did this fourteen-year-old girl, with less than $200 in her bank account, give her whole town a giant leap into the future? Now we’re talking.
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Here’s how philosopher Michael Sandel began:   Here’s a question we need to rethink together: What should be the role of money and markets in our societies?
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Today, there are very few things that money can’t buy. If you’re sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California, you should know that if you don’t like the standard accommodations, you can buy a prison cell upgrade. It’s true. For how much, do you think? What would you guess? Five hundred dollars? It’s not the Ritz-Carlton. It’s a jail! Eighty-two dollars a night.   If his opening question didn’t immediately grab you, the crazy jail example reveals why the question might matter a lot after all.
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In fact, 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.
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Here’s V. S. Ramachandran:   I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the mean...
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Tease, but don’t give it away Occasionally, speakers try to bring too much to their opening paragraph.
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“Over the next few minutes I plan to reveal what I believe is the key to success as an entrepreneur, and how anyone here can cultivate it. You’ll find clues to it in the story I’m about to tell.”
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As J. J. Abrams pointed out in his TED Talk on the power of mystery, the movie Jaws owes a lot of its impact to the fact that director Steven Spielberg hid the shark for the first half of the movie. You knew it was coming, for sure. But its invisibility helped keep you on the edge of your seat.
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kraken,
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Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li came to TED in 2015 to present her remarkable work, showing how machine learning has enabled computers to visually identify the contents of photographs.
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If you decide to tease a little, please note that it’s still very important to indicate where you’re going and why. You don’t have to show the shark, but we do need to know it’s coming. 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.
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Just bear in mind that your goal is to persuade someone, in only a few moments, that your talk is going to be a worthy investment of their attention.
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If you’ve held people’s attention through the talk, don’t ruin it with a flat ending. As Danny Kahneman explained so powerfully in both his book Thinking, Fast and Slow and in his TED Talk, how people remember an event may be very different from how they experienced it, and when it comes to remembering, your final experience is really important.
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We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature’s sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she’s given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory.
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In 2011, the swimmer Diana Nyad gave a TED Talk in which she described how she had tried to do what no one had ever achieved, to swim from Cuba to Florida. She had tried on three occasions, sometimes persisting for 50 hours of constant swimming, braving dangerous currents and near-lethal jellyfish stings, but ultimately failing. At the end of her talk she electrified the audience by saying this:   That ocean’s still there. This hope is still alive. And I don’t want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails . . . ...more
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The late Rita Pierson, who gave a beautiful talk on how teachers need to build real relationships with their kids, ended with this:   Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. Is this job tough? You betcha. Oh God, you betcha. But it is not impossible. We can do this. We’re educators. ...more
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Therapist Esther Perel called for a new, more honest approach to infidelity that included the possibility of forgiveness. She ended like this:   I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other—what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would ...more