TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

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.

So a throughline requires you first to identify an idea that can be properly unpacked in the time you have available. You should then build a structure so that every element in your talk is somehow linked to this idea.

FROM THROUGHLINE TO STRUCTURE Let’s pause for a moment on that word structure. It’s critical.

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.”

What matters is that you find the structure that most powerfully develops your throughline in the time available, and that it is clear how each talk element ties into it.

TACKLING TOUGH TOPICS

The first step is to think of your talk not as being about an issue, but about an idea. My former colleague June Cohen framed the difference this way: 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.

THE CHECKLIST As you work on developing your throughline, here’s a simple checklist: Is this a topic I’m passionate about? Does it inspire curiosity? Will it make a difference to the audience to have this knowledge? Is my talk a gift or an ask? Is the information fresh, or is it already out there? Can I truly explain the topic in the time slot allocated, complete with necessary examples? Do I know enough about this to make a talk worth the audience’s time? Do I have the credibility to take on this topic? What are the fifteen words that encapsulate my talk? Would those fifteen words persuade someone they’d be interested in hearing my talk?

“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 person only. Choose someone who is not in your field, but who is generally an intelligent, curious, engaged, worldly person—and someone whom you really like. This will bring a warmth of spirit and heart to your talk.

“Talk about what you know. Talk about what you know and love with all your heart. I want to hear about the subject that is most important to your life—not some random subject that you think will be a novelty.

There are many ways to build ideas. Over the next five chapters we’ll look at five core tools that speakers use: Connection Narration Explanation Persuasion Revelation They can be mixed and matched. Some talks stick to a single tool. Others incorporate multiple elements. A few use all five (and often approximately in the order above). But it’s worth looking at them separately because the five techniques are strikingly different.

Talk Tools

Connection Get Personal

MAKE EYE CONTACT, RIGHT FROM THE START

one thing we can all do is make eye contact with audience members and smile a little. It makes a huge difference.

Ron Gutman gave a TED Talk on the hidden power of smiles. It’s well worth 7½ minutes of your time.)

SHOW VULNERABILITY One of the best ways to disarm an audience is to first reveal your own vulnerability.

Vulnerability is not oversharing. There’s a simple equation: vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability.

MAKE ’EM LAUGH—BUT NOT SQUIRM!

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

The funniest person on our team is Tom Rielly, who runs our fellows program and for years gave a final wrap-up of the conference that skewered every speaker with wicked hilarity. Here’s his advice: 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. Have a funny remark ready if you flub your words, the A/V goes awry, or if the clicker doesn’t work. The audience has been there and you instantly win their sympathy. Build humor into your visuals. You can also have the humor be the contrast between what you’re saying and what you’re showing. There are lots of great possibilities for laughter. Use satire, saying the opposite of what you mean, then revealing your intent, though this is really hard to get right. Timing is critical. If there’s a laughter moment, you have to give it a chance to land. That may take the courage to pause just for a moment. And to do so without it looking like you’re fishing for applause. Very important: If you’re not funny, don’t try to be funny. Test the humor on family or friends, or even a colleague. Are they laughing? If not, change it or spike it. Dangers (even in the hands of people blessed with the gift of humor): Off-color remarks and offensive language: Don’t. You’re not speaking at a late-night comedy club. Limericks or other seemingly funny poetry Puns Sarcasm Going on too long Any attempted humor based on religi...

PARK YOUR EGO

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.

TELL A STORY

We’re born to love stories. They are instant generators of interest, empathy, emotion, and intrigue. They can brilliantly establish the context of a talk and make people care about a topic.

Narration The Irresistible Allure of Stories

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.

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...

Some of the greatest talks are built around a single story. This structure offers the speaker huge benefits: The throughline is taken care of. (It is simply the narrative arc of the story.) Provided the story is compelling, you can evoke an intense response in the audience. If the story is about you, you will create empathy for some of the things you care most about. It’s easy to remember what you’re going to say because the structure is linear, and your brain is extremely comfortable recalling one event right after another.

You don’t want to insult the intelligence of the audience by force-feeding exactly the conclusion they must draw from the tale you’ve told. But you absolutely do want to be sure there’s enough there for your listeners to be able to connect the dots. And this is where knowing your audience well is important. A parable might work very well with an audience that already knows your field, but it will need much greater elucidation for those outside it. It’s important to test your material on someone who knows the audience to see if it lands with clarity but without clumsiness.

Explanation How to Explain Tough Concepts

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. Let’s see how he set about it. Here’s how he begins: When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. An opening line anchored in the here and now, but immediately creating intrigue. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter-pound brain of our ancestor here, [Homo] habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one? Do you feel a little spark of curiosity? That’s the first step to a successful explanation. Once a mind is intrigued, it opens up. It wants new ideas.

From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity, and much less duration than people expect them to have. This almost floors me—a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that, if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Why? Because happiness can be synthesized! . . . Human beings have something that we might think of as a psychological immune system. A system of cognitive processes, largely nonconscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. There it is, synthetic happiness explained. It’s been built on the concepts of prefrontal cortex, experience simulator, and impact bias. And to make it clear, Gilbert uses another metaphor, that of the immune system. You already know what an immune system is, so to think of this as a psychological immune system is easy. The concept is not delivered in a single leap but piece by piece, and with metaphors to guide and show how the pieces fit together. But perhaps we’re still not fully believing it. So Gilbert encourages us that he really does mean what he seems to be saying by giving a series of examples of people’s psychological immune system...

But already we’ve seen enough to reveal the core elements of a masterful explanation. Let’s recap: Step 1. He started right where we were. Both literally, “When you have 21 minutes to speak . . . ,” and conceptually, without daunting assumptions about our knowledge of psychology or neuroscience. Step 2. He lit a fire called curiosity. Curiosity is what makes people ask why? and how? It’s the feeling that something doesn’t quite make sense. That there’s a knowledge gap that has to be closed. This happened right at the start and then was dialed up dramatically with his unexpected data about paraplegics and lottery winners. Step 3. He brought in concepts one by one. You can’t understand the main concept without first being introduced to the pieces on which it depends, in this case prefrontal cortex, experience simulator, and impact bias. Step 4. He used metaphors. It took metaphors like the flight simulator and the psychological immune system to make clear what he was talking about. For an explanation to be satisfying it has to take puzzling facts and build a connection from them to someone’s existing mental model of the world. Metaphors and analogies are the key tools needed to do this. They help shape the explanation until finally it snaps into place with a satisfying aha! Step 5. He used examples. Little stories, like that of Pete Best, help lock the explanation into place. This is like saying to the brain: You think you understand this idea? Then apply it to the...

the core of your talk is explaining a powerful new idea, it is helpful to ask: What do you assume your audience already knows? What will be your connecting theme? What are the concepts necessary to build your explanation? And what metaphors and examples will you use to reveal those concepts?

In 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.

At TED we have a guideline based on Einstein’s dictum, “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”6

Superb TED Talk explainers include Hans Rosling (revelatory animated charts), David Deutsch (outside-the-box scientific thinking), Nancy Kanwisher (accessible neuroscience), Steven Johnson (where ideas come from), and David Christian (history on a grand canvas). I thoroughly recommend them all. They each build inside you something new and powerful that you will value forever.

You can’t give a powerful new idea to an audience unless you can learn how to explain. That can only be done step by step, fueled by curiosity. Each step builds on what the listener already knows. Metaphors and examples are essential to revealing how an idea is pieced together. Beware the curse of knowledge! You must be sure you’re not making assumptions that will lose your audience. And when you’ve explained something special, excitement and inspiration will follow close behind.

Persuasion Reason Can Change Minds Forever

Psychologist Barry Schwartz changed the way I think about choice.

too much choice actually makes us unhappy.

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.

There are lots of tools you can use here, in addition to the intuition pumps mentioned earlier, or the detective story approach. Inject some humor early on. This communicates a useful message: I’m going to pull you through some demanding thinking . . . but it’s going to be fun. We’ll sweat together and laugh together. Add an anecdote. Maybe one that reveals how you got engaged in this issue. It humanizes you. If people know why you’re passionate about the issue, they’re more likely to listen to your logic. Offer vivid examples. If I wanted to persuade you that external reality is nothing like you believe it to be, I might first show a slide of a dramatic optical illusion. Just because something looks a certain way, doesn’t make it so. Recruit third-party validation. “My colleagues at Harvard and I have spent ten years looking at the data, and we’ve unanimously concluded it has to be seen this way.” Or, “And that’s why it’s not just me arguing this; every mother of a two-year-old boy knows this to be true.” Statements like these need careful handling as neither is a valid argument in itself, but, depending on the audience, they may make your argument more persuasive. Use powerful visuals. At one point in his talk, Dan Pallotta uses pie charts to show the results of two nonprofits’ fundraising efforts. First, a bake sale with 5 percent overhead, and second, a professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead. The second one looks terrible, wasteful, until Dan says...

In three sentences . . . 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.

Revelation Take My Breath Away!

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

Another simple but super-compelling wonder walk was science writer Mary Roach’s talk on orgasm. She walked us through ten things we never knew about orgasm, including a video of a Dutch farmer with a pig that you perhaps should not watch in the company of either your parents or your children! Wonder walks don’t have to be earnest. They can be funny, provocative, and punchy.