TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

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

you don’t have to overexplain. Indeed, the best explainers say just enough to let people feel like they’re coming up with the idea for themselves.

Persuasion means convincing an audience that the way they currently see the world isn’t quite right. And that means taking down the parts that aren’t working, as well as rebuilding something better. When this works, it’s thrilling for both speaker and audience.

Sometimes a demo is stunning enough that it allows an audience to imagine truly exciting applications and implications. And then the demo becomes not just a demo, but a vision of the future.

Slides move at least a little bit of attention away from the speaker and onto the screen. If the whole power of a talk is in the personal connection between speaker and audience, slides may actually get in the way of that.

Having no slides at all is better than bad slides.

The mistake is to assume that you have to explain every image. You don’t.

Being read to and being spoken to are two very different experiences.

You may have the entire thing there in front of you, but it’s important that you feel as if you’re in speaking mode, not reading mode. The audience can tell the difference.

Practice makes imperfection livable.

if you go this route, even if you’re a truly great writer, do your audience the honor of knowing your script so well that you can still give a sense of feeling it in the moment. Mean every sentence.

Every word you speak that someone has already seen on a slide is a word that carries zero punch. It’s not news anymore.

The best feedback will be from people who can tell you where there are gaps in your narrative or where you are making assumptions that people will know x, y, z.

the value of practice is less about memorization than about making you comfortable and less stressed.

Igniting curiosity is the single most versatile tool at your disposal for ensuring audience engagement.

How do you spark curiosity? The obvious way is to ask a question. But not just any question. A surprising question.

Curiosity is the magnet that pulls your audience along with you. If you can wield it effectively, you can turn even difficult subjects into winning talks.

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.

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.

What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other.

find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.”