160 Tweets on How to Deliver a Great Talk (by Chris Anderson)

Chris Anderson, The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

Headline, London 2016. 

1. There is no one way to give a great talk. Any attempt to apply a single set formula is likely to backfire.
2. A key part of the appeal of a great talk is its freshness. We’re humans. We don’t like same old, same old.
3. If your talk feels too similar to a talk someone has already heard, it is bound to have less impact.
4. Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own way.
5. Public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.
6. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview.
7. Writing gives us the words. Speaking brings with it a whole new toolbox.
8. You can use your fear as an incredible asset. It can be the driver that will persuade you to prepare for a talk properly.
9. Your goal is not to be Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. It’s to be you.
10. If you’re a scientist, be a scientist; don’t try to be an activist. If you’re an artist, be an artist; don’t try to be an academic.
11. If you’re just an ordinary person, don’t try to fake some big intellectual style; just be you.
12. Presentation literacy isn’t an optional extra for the few. It’s a core skill for the twenty-first century.
13. 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.
14. Anyone who has an idea worth sharing is capable of giving a powerful talk.
15. The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.
16. Go and work on something that is worth sharing. Style without substance is awful.
17. Many of the best talks are simply based on a personal story and a simple lesson to be drawn from it.
18. Language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener.
19. 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.
20. It’s only from that common ground that your audience can begin to build your idea inside their minds.
21. The speaker’s job is to give to the audience, not take from them.
22. If you’re going to gift people with a wondrous idea, you first have to spend some preparation time. Rambling is not an option.
23. Inspiration can’t be performed. It’s an audience response to authenticity, courage, selfless work, and genuine wisdom.
24. The point of a talk is… to say something meaningful. But it’s amazing how many talks never quite do that.
25. If there’s no real takeaway, all the speaker has done— at best— is to entertain.
26. A good exercise is to try to encapsulate your throughline in no more than fifteen words.
27. Vulnerability is something to be treasured, not hidden from.
28. It’s certainly not the case that a shorter talk means shorter preparation time.
29. “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
30. You cover less, but the impact will actually be significantly greater.
31. Author Richard Bach said, “Great writing is all about the power of the deleted word.”
32. The secret of successful talks often lies in what is left out. Less can be more.
33. Plan your talk. Then cut it by half. Once you’ve grieved the loss of half of your talk, cut it another 50 percent.
34. Great speakers find a way of making an early connection with their audience.
35. One thing we can all do is make eye contact with audience members and smile a little. It makes a huge difference.
36. The best tool to engender that trust? Yup, a smile. A natural human smile.
37. Eye contact, backed by an occasional warm smile, is an amazing technology that can transform how a talk is received.
38. One of the best ways to disarm an audience is to first reveal your own vulnerability.
39. Authentic vulnerability is powerful. Oversharing is not. If in doubt, try your talk on an honest friend.
40. Humor is a wonderful way to bring the audience with you.
41. When you laugh with someone, you both feel you’re on the same side. It’s a fantastic tool for building a connection.
42. Laughter blows open someone’s defenses, and suddenly you have a chance to truly communicate with them.
43. Laughter says, ‘We as a group have bonded with this speaker’. Everyone then pays more attention.
44. Caution: Successfully spending that much time on humorous stories is a special gift, not recommended for most of us.
45. If you can find just one short story that makes people smile, it may unlock the rest of your talk.
46. Telling a joke that you downloaded off the Internet will probably backfire.
47. What you’re looking for are hilarious-but-true stories that are directly relevant to your topic.
48. Nothing damages the prospects of a talk more than the sense that the speaker is a blowhard.
49. Remember that the purpose of your talk is to gift an idea, not to self-promote.
50. The biggest killer of connection: tribal thinking.
51. When people aren’t prepared or ready to listen, communication can’t happen.
52. Offer the right level of detail. Too little and the story is not vivid. Too much and it gets bogged down.
53. When you combine a truthful story with a desire to use it for others’ benefit, you can give your listeners an extraordinary gift.
54. You can spend so much time telling the story that you miss drawing out the necessary conclusions.
55. In the right hands, a parable can entertain, inform, and inspire all in one.
56. A key part of planning a talk is to have the balance right between the concepts you are introducing and the examples and metaphors needed to make them understandable.
57. First share a draft script with colleagues and friends. Then try it out in front of a private audience.
58. For understanding to take place, it’s crucial the listener knows where she is on that tree.
59. Some of the most important elements in a talk are the little phrases that give clues to the talk’s overall structure: “One recent example…” “On the other hand…” “Let’s build on that…” “So, in summary…”
60. Ultimately, your best bet is to recruit help from people new to the topic, because they will be best at spotting the gaps.
61. Maybe one such transgression can be handled, but when jargon terms pile up, people simply switch off.
62. You don’t have to over-explain. Indeed, the best explainers say just enough to let people feel like they’re coming up with the idea for themselves.
63. There’s one other key explanation tool. Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it isn’t.
64. Explanation is building a brand-new idea inside someone’s mind.
65. Persuasion means convincing an audience that the way they currently see the world isn’t quite right.
66. There’s another form of reasoned argument, known as reductio ad absurdum, that can be devastatingly powerful.
67. Instead of being told facts, we’ve been invited to join the process of discovery.
68. Most people are capable of being convinced by logic, but they aren’t always energized by it.
69. The language of reason may have to be bolstered by other tools that make the conclusions not just valid, but meaningful, exciting, desirable.
70. If people know why you’re passionate about the issue, they’re more likely to listen to your logic.
71. Persuasion is the act of replacing someone’s worldview with something better.
72. Reason is best accompanied by intuition pumps, detective stories, visuals, or other plausibility-priming devices.
73. Share with us, in accessible human language, what you were dreaming of when you started the work.
74. One clever way to ensure that the walk maintains energy is to make the slides automatically advance.
75. The ability to paint a compelling picture of the future is truly one of the greatest gifts a speaker can bring.
76. The more actionable a future vision can be, the better.
77. It’s a striking fact that at least a third of TED’s most viewed talks make no use of slides whatsoever.
78. The majority of talks do benefit from great slides, and for some talks, the visuals are the difference between success and failure.
79. Having no slides at all is better than bad slides.
80. The key elements to strong visuals? They fall into three categories: Revelation, Explanatory power, Aesthetic appeal.
81. Often the best explanations happen when words and images work together.
82. Limit each slide to a single core idea.
83. With a talk and slides you have two streams of cognitive output running in parallel. The speaker needs to blend both streams.
84. It doesn’t make sense to leave a slide onscreen once you’ve finished talking about it.
85. Just go to a black slide and then the audience will get a vacation from images and pay more attention to your words.
86. Those PowerPoint with a headline followed by multiple bullet points of long phrases are the surest single way to lose an audience’s attention.
87. There is no value in simply repeating in text what you are saying on stage.
88. The main purpose of visuals can’t be to communicate words; your mouth is perfectly good at doing that.
89. Concepts in a talk need to be limited.
90. There are numerous ways to structure a talk that can allow moments of visual indulgence that will increase the audience’s sense of delight.
91. Give your audience enough time to absorb each step.
92. A badly produced video will have your audience thinking more about its poor quality than about its content.
93. Test your presentation— especially your slides— on family or friends who are not in your field.
94. Testing is extremely important, especially on very technical or abstruse subjects.
95. If you are uncomfortable with someone else’s slide recommendations, trust your instincts.
96. As in all things with graphics, less is more.
97. The huge advantage of going the scripted route is that you can make the best possible use of your available time.
98. The big drawback of a script is that, unless you deliver it in the right way, the talk may not feel fresh.
99. Being read to and being spoken to are two very different experiences.
100. Refer to the script but compensate by looking up during each sentence to make eye contact with the audience.
101. It’s important that you feel as if you’re in speaking mode, not reading mode.
102. It’s all about giving meaning to the words as you speak as naturally and passionately as you can.
103. It must come across as if you are sharing these ideas for the first time.
104. Dan Gilbert advises to speak the talks into a recorder first, then transcribe them, and use that as the initial draft.
105. Toss away your notes, move to the front of the stage, and speak the conclusion directly from the heart.
106. There’s a lot to be said for going unscripted. It can sound fresh, alive, real, like you are thinking out loud.
107. It is important to distinguish unscripted from unprepared.
108. Try out the talk several times to be sure it can indeed be done within the time limit. If not, you must cut material.
109. Prepare a talk that is no more than 90 percent of your time limit.
110. A great talk is both scripted AND improvisational. It is precisely like a great jazz performance.
111. There’s a very obvious tool you can use to improve your talk: Rehearse. Repeatedly.
112. Most of the big TED hits happened only because of the hours of prep the speakers put in.
113. Rehearse by yourself. Rehearse with your eyes closed. Rehearse walking in the garden.
114. In your rehearsals, include your visuals, since timing with them is critical.
115. If you are confident and at ease, everyone will have a better time.
116. There’s a kind of unintentional memorization that develops naturally from repetition.
117. The best memorized talks are known so well that speakers can concentrate on their passion for the ideas they contain.
118. How was my tone of voice? Did it sound conversational (usually good) or as if I was preaching?
119. In our crazy modern attention economy, people respond to crisp, powerful content.
120. In history, many of the most powerful talks were short and to the point.
121. You should plan to cut your material until you’re sure you can finish well under the limit.
122. If you know you’re going to be OK on time, it will allow you to focus 100 percent on the topic you should be focused on.
123. At the beginning of your talk, you have about a minute to intrigue people with what you’ll be saying.
124. The way you end will strongly influence how your talk is remembered.
125. However you deliver the talk, I strongly encourage you to script and memorize the opening minute and the closing lines.
126. You want an opening that grabs people from the first moment. A surprising statement. An intriguing question. A short story.
127. Every piece of content in our modern era is part of an attention war.
128. Every talk needs mapping— a sense of where you’re going, where you are, and where you’ve been.
129. The clichés really don’t help anyone.
130. Never end with a video. End with you!
131. Don’t apologize! Plan more carefully! Your job was to give the best talk you could in the time available.
132. An elegant closing paragraph, followed by a simple “thank you,” offers the best shot at a satisfying end to your efforts.
133. Use your fear as motivation. That’s what it’s there for. It will make it easier for you to truly commit to practicing your talk.
134. Breathe deeply, meditation style. The oxygen infusion brings calm with it.
135. Drink water. The worst aspect of nerves is when the adrenaline sucks the water from your mouth and you struggle to speak.
136. Find “friends” in the audience. Early in the talk, look out for faces that seem sympathetic.
137. Speaking to friends will help you find the right tone of voice.
138. The effect of larger lecterns has been to create a huge visual barrier between speaker and audience.
139. No reading! That’s the only way to stay warmly connected to the audience.
140. The audience can enjoy the fact that you’re clearly making an effort not to read the speech, looking around, making eye contact, smiling.
141. In short, it’s OK to be vulnerable. It’s also OK to find your place of comfort and confidence. And it’s essential to be authentic.
142. What is that something extra? It’s the human overlay that turns information into inspiration.
143. Voice coaches speak of at least six tools you can use: volume, pitch, pace, timbre, tone, and something called prosody.
144. Prosody is the singsong rise and fall that distinguishes, for example, a statement from a question.
145. Inject variety into the way you speak.
146. The absence of pauses or changes of pace communicates that there is no single part of your talk matters more than any other part.
147. If your talk is scripted, try this: Find the two or three words in each sentence that carry the most significance, and underline them.
148. When you’re introducing key ideas, or explaining something that’s complex, slow down, and don’t be afraid to insert pauses.
149. During anecdotes and lighter moments, speed up.
150. Going too slowly is actually the bigger problem, since it allows time for people’s minds to wander off.
151. Talk conversationally… and be ready to accelerate in passages where it’s natural to do so.
152. When you want to emphasize a point, stop and address your audience from a stance of quiet power.
153. Just make sure your body knows it’s not there solely to transport your head. It’s allowed to enjoy its own time on stage.
154. Human attention is a fragile thing; if you add too many extra ingredients, the main thrust of a talk may get lost.
155. Let’s also never forget that substance matters more than style. Ultimately, it’s all about the idea.
156. We’re entering an era where we all need to spend a lot more time learning from each other.
157. Every field of knowledge is different, but they are all connected. And they often rhyme.
158. Something in the way you describe your process may give me a crucial insight or catalyze a new thought in me.
159. Presentation literacy should be a core part of every school’s curriculum, on par with reading and math.
160. Seeding a valuable idea, I am convinced, is the most impact that’s possible for an individual to have.

Chris Anderson

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

Headline

London 2016

269 pp.