TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Sometimes speakers get it exactly backwards. They plan to take, not give.

An organization is fascinating to those who work for it—and deeply boring to almost everyone else. Sorry, but it’s true. Any talk framed around the exceptional history of your company or NGO or lab and the complex-but-oh-so-impressive way it is structured, and the fabulously photogenic quality of the astonishingly talented team working with you, and how much success your products are having, is going to leave your audience snoozing at the starting line. It may be interesting to you and your team. But, alas, we don’t work there.

“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.

Inspiration is like love. You don’t get it by pursuing it directly. In fact, there’s a name for people who pursue love too directly: stalker. In less extreme cases, the words we use are almost as bad: cloying, inappropriate, desperate. And sadly, this behavior prompts the opposite of what it desires. It prompts a pulling back. It’s the same with inspiration. If you try to take the shortcut and win people over purely with your charisma, you may succeed for a moment or two, but soon you’ll be found out, and the audience will flee.

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?

Here are the throughlines of some popular TED Talks. 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.

There’s a simple equation: vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. It can be anything from an attempt to hotwire connection to attention-seeking, but it’s not vulnerability and it doesn’t lead to connection. The best way I’ve found to get clear on this is to really examine our intentions. Is sharing done in service of the work on stage or is it a way to work through our own stuff? The former is powerful, the latter damages the confidence people have in us.”

A story is only ready to share when the presenter’s healing and growth is not dependent on the audience’s response to it.” Authentic vulnerability is powerful. Oversharing is not. If in doubt, try your talk on an honest friend.

Anyone who grows up on a normal media diet assumes that our world is crippled by constant violence—wars, murders, assaults, terrorism—and that it seems to be getting worse. Pinker, in just 18 minutes, persuaded the TED audience that this assumption was dead wrong. That actually, when you pulled the camera back and looked at the real data, the world is becoming less violent, and that this trend has extended across years, decades, centuries, and millennia.

Many talks given within companies could be improved if they were thought of as wonder walks. Presentations that plod through your department’s recent work bullet point by bullet point can quickly get boring. Suppose, instead, an effort were made to ask: How can we link these projects together to build excitement? How can we communicate what is delightful, unexpected, or humorous about them? How can we switch the tone from “look what we’ve achieved” to “look how intriguing this is”? Suppose, instead of a series of bullet points, there was an attempt to pair each step of the walk with an intriguing image?