TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Indeed, even if there were a successful formula at one moment in time, it wouldn’t stay successful for long. That’s because a key part of the appeal of a great talk is its freshness. We’re humans. We don’t like same old, same old. If your talk feels too similar to a talk someone has already heard, it is bound to have less impact. The last thing we want is for everyone to sound the same or for anyone to sound as though he’s faking it.

As a leader—or as an advocate—public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.

there’s a new superpower that anyone, young or old, can benefit from. It’s called presentation literacy.

TED began as an annual conference, bringing together the fields of technology, entertainment, and design (hence the name).

Conversational sharing can work just as well. In fact, for most audiences, it’s a lot better. If you know how to talk to a group of friends over dinner, then you know enough to speak publicly.

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.

START WITH THE IDEA

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.

Think back over your work of the last three or four years; what really stands out? What was the last thing you were really excited by? Or angered by? What are the two or three things you’ve done that you’re most proud of? When was the last time you were in conversation with someone who said, “That’s really interesting”? If you could wave a magic wand, what is the one idea you’d most love to spread to other people’s minds?

PROCRASTINATE NO MORE

THE ASTONISHING EFFICACY OF LANGUAGE

So, language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener.

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.

YES, WORDS MATTER

the whole 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.

THE JOURNEY

It is a journey that speaker and audience take together.

Common Traps Four Talk Styles to Avoid

THE SALES PITCH

This greedy approach to speaking doesn’t even serve the speaker’s interest.

Reputation is everything. You want to build a reputation as a generous person, bringing something wonderful to your audiences, not as a tedious self-promoter.

The key principle is to remember that the speaker’s job is to give to the audience, not take from them.

THE RAMBLE

I was fuming. It’s one thing to underprepare. But to boast that you’ve underprepared? That’s insulting. It tells the audience that their time doesn’t matter. That the event doesn’t matter.

Rambling is not an option.

THE ORG BORE

An organization is fascinating to those who work for it—and deeply boring to almost everyone else. Sorry, but it’s true.

Everything changes, though, when you focus on the nature of the work that you’re doing, and the power of the ideas that infuse it, not on the org itself or its products.

“Back in 2005, we set up a new department in Dallas in this office building [slide of glass tower here], and its goal was to investigate how we could slash our energy costs, so I allocated Vice President Hank Boreham to the task . . .” Yawn. 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.

THE INSPIRATION PERFORMANCE

The intense appeal of the standing ovation can lead aspiring speakers to do bad things. They may look at talks given by inspirational speakers and seek to copy them . . . but in form only. The result can be awful: the ruthless pursuit of every trick in the book to intellectually and emotionally manipulate the audience.

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.

The Throughline What’s Your Point?

throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Every talk should have one.

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 . . .” The first setup might work for your family. But the second, with its throughline visible from the get-go, is far more enticing to a general audience.

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?

Notice that there’s an unexpectedness incorporated into each of them. More choice actually makes us less happy. Vulnerability is something to be treasured, not hidden from. Education’s potential is transformed if you focus on the amazing (and hilarious) creativity of kids. With body language, you can fake it till you become it. A history of the universe in 18 minutes shows a path from chaos to order. Terrible city flags can reveal surprising design secrets. A ski trek to the South Pole threatened my life and overturned my sense of purpose. Let’s bring on a quiet revolution—a world redesigned for introverts. The combination of three simple technologies creates a mind-blowing sixth sense. Online videos can humanize the classroom and revolutionize education.

Not every talk has to state its throughline explicitly up front like this. As we’ll see, there are many other ways to intrigue people and invite them to join you on your journey. But when the audience knows where you’re headed, it’s much easier for them to follow.

the throughline traces the path that the journey takes.

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. If you’re going to speak to an audience of taxi drivers in London about the amazingness of a digitally powered sharing economy, it would be helpful to know in advance that their livelihood is being destroyed by Uber.

I have far too much to say and not enough time to say it! We hear this one a lot. TED Talks have a maximum time limit of 18 minutes.

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.

THE WRONG WAY The wrong way to condense your talk is to include all the things that you think you need to say, and simply cut them all back to make them a lot shorter.

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.

THE RIGHT WAY

To provide an effective talk, you must slash back the range of topics you will cover to a single, connected thread—a throughline that can be properly developed. In a sense, you cover less, but the impact will actually be significantly greater.

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 l...

“Plan your talk. Then cut it by half. Once you’ve grieved the loss of half of your talk, cut it another 50 percent. It’s seductive to think about how much you can fit into 18 minutes. The better question for me is, ‘What can you unpack in a meaningful way in 18 minutes?’”

Let me try a personal example with you. Let’s say I’ve been asked to speak for just 2 minutes to introduce who I am. Here’s version 1: Although I’m British, I was born in Pakistan—my father was a missionary eye surgeon—and my early years were spent there and in India and Afghanistan. At age thirteen, I was sent to boarding school in England, and after that I went to Oxford University for a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I started work as a local newspaper journalist in Wales, then moved to a pirate radio station in the Seychelles Islands for a couple of years to write and read a world news service. Back in the UK in the mid-1980s, I fell in love with computers and started a series of magazines devoted to them. It was a great time to be launching specialist magazines, and my company doubled in size every year for seven years. I sold it, moved to the US, and tried again. By the year 2000 my business had grown to 2,000 employees and 150 magazines and websites. But the tech bubble was about to burst, and when it did, it nearly destroyed the company. Besides, who needs magazines when you have the Internet? I left at the end of 2001. Happily, I had put some money into a nonprofit foundation that I was able to use to buy TED, which, back then, was an annual conference in California. That’s been my full-time passion ever since. 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...