Jeremey Donovan - How To Deliver A TED Talk: Secrets Of The World’s Most Inspiring Presentations

Copyright 2012 Jeremey Donovan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1468179993
ISBN 13: 9781468179996
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62112-494-8

I f you are an avid viewer of TED videos, then you probably remember what it was like to watch your first TED video. Eighteen minutes of pure inspiration. TEDs mission is to share ideas worth spreading and its missionaries do not disappoint. Though not household names, Sir Ken Robinson, Jill Bolte Taylor, and a thousand others, mesmerize their growing audience with powerful content, delivery, and design.

In the unlikely event that you have not yet watched one of their videos, TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to amplifying electrifying ideas from the domains of technology, entertainment, and design. Though TED has a variety of ventures, the two most notable are their highly exclusive conferences and their highly inclusive practice of posting presentations for free online.

If you have watched enough TED videos, you will notice that two distinctly different types of presenters grace the stage. People with amazing jobs or remarkable talents comprise the first type. The second type is people just like you and me who share their amazing stories.

Individuals such as Pranav Mistry and David Gallo inhabit the amazing jobs category. Marine biologist Gallo captivates his audience with visually astonishing creatures from ten thousand leagues under the sea. Mistry, a MIT Media Labs genius, gives us a peek into the future of how we will interact with data in the physical world. His SixthSense technology, consisting of a wearable camera and projector connected to a Smartphone, allows people to create a telephone keypad on their palm and to materialize and interact with the Internet on any surface. Written words cannot do justice to how revolutionary this technology is, so I encourage you to experience his TEDTalk online.

Remarkable talents can get you onto the TED stage as well. Two noteworthy examples are Arthur Benjamin performing his Mathemagic tricks and Jake Shimabukuros spellbinding rendition of Queens Bohemian Rhapsody on the ukulele. One could never imagine that such amazing sounds could come out of an instrument that looks like a childs guitar with only four strings.

Few of us have had the fortune to land jobs that provoke the envy of our friends. Fewer still have dedicated their lives to a single talent and invested the thousands of hours required to achieve mastery. So, where does that leave the rest of us? How can we make it to the TED stage and inspire the world with our words?

The second type of TED presenters are just like you and me - ordinary individuals with extraordinary stories. Your first reaction may be defeatist. I dont have an amazing story. My life is boring and normal. Im not a brain researcher who was able to study her own stroke like Jill Bolte Taylor. I did not grow up in Africa and become a celebrated writer like Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie.

If you survived into adulthood, then you have countless stories of perseverance in the face of failure. You have loved and you have lost. You have harmed and you have been harmed. Ordinary lives are punctuated by extraordinary moments. Your stories can inspire others; you just need to learn to share them with full emotional force.

The problem is not that you do not have enough stories, it is that you have too many. Jill Bolte Taylor did not emerge from the womb as a brain researcher on one day, have a stroke on day two, and then get invited onto the TED stage on day three. She had thousands of remarkable experiences, but chose to talk about only one. This book will help you pick one remarkable idea and teach you how to share it in an inspiring way.

The TED conference organizers share a set of Ten Commandments with their invited speakers. Though these guidelines do offer a number of compelling best practices, they do not reveal how to give a TED Talk. I have grouped the ten items into two categories below covering content and delivery:

Content

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out Thy Usual Shtick.

Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.

Thou Shalt Tell a Story.

Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither Thy Company, Thy Goods, Thy Writings, nor Thy Desperate Need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Utter Darkness.

Thou Shalt Remember All the While: Laughter is Good.

Delivery

Thou Shalt Reveal Thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.

Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.

Thou Shalt Not Flaunt Thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of Thy Failure as well as Thy Success.

Thou Shalt Not Read Thy Speech.

Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

The pages that follow provide a how-to guide for delivering an inspiring speech based on intensive study of the most popular TED Talks. In step-by-step fashion, you will learn how to select a topic, craft a narrative, master delivery, and refine design.

Note:In adherence with the fair use rule of United States copyright law, this book makes limited use of copyrighted excerpts from TED Conferences LLC for the purpose of criticism and commentary and for the purpose of providing a public good by elevating the presentation skills of aspiring speakers. Though I have no affiliation with TED, it ismy hope that this book significantly increases the number of people exposed to the organization and their mission. All company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

T o create a compelling TEDTalk, you need to begin with the end in mind. After each audience member leaves the auditorium or surfs on to the next website, you must have planted one seed that either awakens their consciousness to a new way of thinking or persuades them to take action. Your objective is to sow a single seed of inspiration.

Selecting a topic requires an act of deep introspection. Although stories are the centerpiece of every TEDTalk, asking What is the most amazing story I can tell? is the wrong question. Instead, begin by asking questions of self-discovery such as: What is the greatest lesson I ever learned? What is the greatest joy I ever experienced? The greatest misery? What is my lifes mission and how can I enlist others to join my crusade?

Once you have your central idea, work backward to build an audience-centric narrative with layers of stories and facts. Imagine you chose to share the greatest lesson you ever learned. Your story becomes how and when you learned it. Most importantly, your talk should include from whom you learned the lesson since the most inspiring stories position someone else as the hero. As you build out your talk, constantly play the role of a skeptical listener asking So what? and What is in it for me?

Of the ten most viewed TED Talks as of the end of 2011, seven focused on inspiring people to change themselves. There is no novelty in the concepts they address; there is nothing new under the sun. (Case in point, that expression is a two thousand year old biblical quote from Ecclesiastes.) Those seven focused on concepts inside the human mind including: mental illness, creativity, leadership, happiness, motivation, success, and self-worth.

The other three most viewed TED Talks cast a wider net by catalyzing interpersonal and societal change. They called us to action or altered our perspective on public health, public education, and diversity. The speakers who gave these talks were not the first to explore those subjects and they will not be the last. They touched us by giving their perspective on why these ideas matter and how you can make a difference.