TED Talks

Highlights

• But with the right mindset, you can use your fear as an incredible asset. It can be the driver that will persuade you to prepare for a talk properly.

  Location 147

• 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.

  Location 259

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

  Location 269

• 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.

  Location 427

• 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.

  Location 503

• 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?

  Location 512

• The key is to present just one idea — as thoroughly and completely as you can in the limited time period. What is it that you want your audience to have an unambiguous understanding of after you’re done?

  Location 526

• But throughlines that connect large numbers of concepts don’t work. There’s a drastic consequence when you rush through multiple topics in summary form. They don’t land with any force. You know the full background and context to what you’re saying, and so the insights you offer may seem profound to you. But for the audience, which is coming to your work fresh, the talk will probably come across as conceptual, dry, or superficial.

  Location 573

• 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.

  Location 577

• 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.

  Location 625

• 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: Introduction — getting settled, what will be covered Context — why this issue matters Main Concepts Practical Implications 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.”

  Location 643

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

  Location 1086

• Note: Homeostasis, hedonic treadmill etc

• At TED we have a guideline based on Einstein’s dictum, “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”fn2

  Location 1176

• There’s one other key explanation tool. Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it isn’t. You’ll notice I’ve used that technique in this book already, for example, by discussing talk styles that don’t work before going on to those that do. If an explanation is building a small mental model in a large space of possibilities, it’s helpful first to reduce the size of that space.

  Location 1183

• Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to leave a slide onscreen once you’ve finished talking about it. Here’s Tom again. Just go to a blank, black slide and then the audience will get a vacation from images and pay more attention to your words. Then, when you go back to slides, they will be ready to go back to work.

  Location 1612

• Other speakers still seem to believe that you enhance the explanatory power of your slides by filling them with words, often the same words that they plan to utter. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Those classic PowerPoint slide decks with a headline followed by multiple bullet points of long phrases are the surest single way to lose an audience’s attention altogether. The reason is that the audience reads ahead of the speaker, and by the time the speaker covers a specific point, it feels old hat.

  Location 1625

• Bullets belong in The Godfather. Avoid them at all costs. Dashes belong at the Olympics, not at the beginning of text.

  Location 1690

• Use builds — add words and images to a slide through a series of clicks — to focus people’s attention on one idea at a time. Give your audience enough time to absorb each step. Don’t feed too much of the slide at a time or people will get overwhelmed.

  Location 1694

• People were scratching their heads and starting to feel stressed for him. You could hear his voice starting to tighten. He coughed. I handed him a bottle of water. For a moment it seemed to help. But no. In horrifying slow motion, the talk imploded in front of us. As comedian Julia Sweeney later remarked, it was as if he was disappearing into one of the black holes he was talking about.

  Location 1791

• And — the one thing people dread most — you forget what you were going to say next, your mind goes blank, and you freeze.

  Location 1810

• Harvard professor Dan Gilbert advises his students to speak their talks into a recorder first, then transcribe them, and use that as the initial draft of their talk. Why? “Because when people write, they tend to use words, phrases, sentence structures, and cadences that no one uses in natural speech. So when you start with written text and then try to adapt it for performance, you are basically trying to turn one form of communication into another, and odds are that your alchemy will fail.”

  Location 1919

• One temptation many speakers fall prey to is to use their slides as crutches. In the worst form, this means a series of dismal slides covered with text and bullet points that the speaker works through laboriously. Most people by now understand that this is a truly terrible way to give a talk. Every word you speak that someone has already seen on a slide is a word that carries zero punch. It’s not news anymore.

  Location 1959

• The other problem with a memorized speech is that when it fails, it fails catastrophically. If you’re just talking, following a rough outline, if you slip up a bit and forget a small piece, it’s barely noticeable to anyone but you. But if you’re reciting something from memory and draw a blank, you’re likely to freeze with nowhere to go. It’s like your mental teleprompter has frozen.

  Location 2000

• Tags: [[favorite]]

• My talk was not written out word for word or memorized. But it was rehearsed — at least twenty-five times, using ten note cards and a timer. There’s a kind of unintentional memorization that develops naturally from repetition. I think that’s what you’re after. Memorization feels safer, but a little risk is good. Fear is energy, and you want some of that running through your wires.

  Location 2066

• Tags: [[favorite]]

• As Danny Kahneman explained so powerfully in both his book Thinking, Fast and Slow and in his TED Talk, 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. In short, if the ending isn’t memorable, the talk itself may not be.

  Location 2313

• But even then, people who noticed that the words of the speech, including the jokes, were right there on the monitors at the back of the hall were disappointed. They wanted Bono’s mind live there with them. A written speech could have been emailed to them.

  Location 2635

• Mostly you want to speak conversationally, interjecting curiosity and excitement when it’s appropriate. I ask people to imagine they’ve met up with friends they went to school with and are updating them on what they’ve been up to. It’s that kind of voice you’re looking for. Real, natural, but unafraid to let it rip if what you’re saying demands it.

  Location 2746

• The simplest way to give a talk powerfully is just to stand tall, putting equal weight on both feet, which are positioned comfortably a few inches apart, and use your hands and arms to naturally amplify whatever you’re saying. If the audience seating is curved around the stage a little, you can turn from the waist to address different parts of it. You don’t have to walk around at all.

  Location 2792

• He also banned audience questions, on the grounds that it would be more interesting to cram in another speaker than hear some audience member promote his own business under the guise of asking a question.

  Location 3051

• For my entire entrepreneurial life, my mantra had been to follow the passion. Not my passion — other people’s. If I saw something that people were truly, deeply passionate about, that was the big clue that there was opportunity there.

  Location 3078

• To me, removing the profit motive from the table sent a clear signal of intent. It made it much easier to credibly say to the world, Come and help us build a new approach to discovering and sharing ideas.

  Location 3170

• Halfway through a riveting talk on the power of memes, Dennett said this: “The secret of happiness is: find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.”

  Location 3288