TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

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.

Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.

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.

Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality.

Your goal is not to be Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. It’s to be you.

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. We’ll call that something an idea.

The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.

Style without substance is awful.

An important idea, wrapped up in a fresh story, can make a great talk if it’s told the right way.

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.

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

Generosity evokes a response.

As my colleague Bruno Giussani puts it, “When people sit in a room to listen to a speaker, they are offering her something extremely precious, something that isn’t recoverable once given: a few minutes of their time and of their attention. Her task is to use that time as well as possible.”

more and more speakers, attracted to the drug of audience adoration, are trying to walk this path. Please don’t be one of them. Here’s the thing about inspiration: It has to be earned. Someone is inspiring not because they look at you with big eyes and ask you to find it in your heart to believe in their dream. It’s because they actually have a dream that’s worth getting excited about. And those dreams don’t come lightly. They come from blood, sweat, and tears.

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.

Dream of something much bigger than you are. Go and work on that dream as long as it takes to achieve something worthwhile. And then humbly come and share what you’ve learned.

there’s no real takeaway, all the speaker has done—at best—is to entertain.

There’s a helpful word used to analyze plays, movies, and novels; it applies to talks too. It is throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Every talk should have one.

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.

What is the precise idea you want to build inside your listeners? What is their takeaway?

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.

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.

You will only cover as much ground as you can dive into in sufficient depth to be compelling.

By choosing a throughline you will automatically filter out much of what you might otherwise say.

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.

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.

Every single thing we see or hear is evaluated before we dare embed it into an actionable idea.

At TED, our number-one advice to speakers on the day of their talk is to make regular eye contact with members of the audience. Be warm. Be real. Be you. It opens the door to them trusting you, liking you, and beginning to share your passion.

Audiences who laugh with you quickly come to like you. And if people like you, they’re much readier to take seriously what you have to say. Laughter blows open someone’s defenses, and suddenly you have a chance to truly communicate with them.

The stories that can generate the best connection are stories about you personally or about people close to you. Tales of failure, awkwardness, misfortune, danger, or disaster, told authentically, are often the moment when listeners shift from plain vanilla interest to deep engagement.

If you want to reach people who radically disagree with you, your only chance is to put yourself in their shoes as best you can. Don’t use language that may trigger tribal responses. Start with a vision of the world as seen through their eyes. And use every one of the tools described here to build a connection based on your shared humanity.

Stories helped make us who we are. I mean this literally. The best evidence from archaeology and anthropology suggests that the human mind coevolved with storytelling.

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.)

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.

If you’re going to tell a story, make sure you know why you’re telling it,

The key shift needed is an artful edit of your journey that links together critical moments in a way that someone else can derive meaning from them.

But if the journey reveals something powerful you have learned, and if each step in your journey is revealed with humility

and honesty and vulnerability, it is a journey we will gladly make with you.

When talks go public, there may be thousands of eyes watching them. It only takes one person to notice that something’s not quite right, and you can find yourself in hot water. It’s not worth the risk.

If we can’t feel content here, today, now, on our journeys,

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.

the first step to a successful explanation. Once a mind is intrigued, it opens up. It wants new ideas.

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

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.

If 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?

It’s important to achieve clarity in a book, and it’s even more important to have clarity in a talk. Ultimately, your best bet is to recruit help from people new to the topic, because they will be best at spotting the gaps.