TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson.

4/5 rating. 252 pages.

Book #49 of 2021. Read June 20, 2021.

 If you have ever marvelled at the speaking skills of the presenters at TED, this book is a great resource for how to hopefully emulate them in your next public speaking gig.

Chris does a great job of laying out the entire process that goes into preparing for public speaking: including a ton of tips, and ideas for how to best blow away your audience. This all starts with what you are going to present on: what idea is worth spreading?

“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.”

Though there are countless ways to give a successful speech, it basically all comes down to:

“What? So what? Now what?“

What idea are you sharing? Why does it matter? And what should your audience do with that info?

I absolutely love his long talk about visuals and PowerPoint. Chris says:

“[W]ords on the screen are fighting your presentation, not enhancing it.”

“The main purpose of visuals can’t be to communicate words; your mouth is perfectly good at doing that. It’s to share things your mouth can’t do so well: photographs, video, animations, key data.”

Finally, TED is not just a place for people to present. It is all about inspiring, sharing, and making the world a better place.

“And so the central advice I would give is to push yourself as hard as possible to be bold and brave, to try to step outside the comfort zone of what you know for sure or what others have said already, and to give the world questions and inspirations that deserve a thousand conversations.”

“The secret of happiness is: find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.”

I would definitely recommend this book before your next public speech; it will make you think about the process in a completely different way and should bring your talk to a new level of engagement, and success.

Quotes:

“Overstuffed equals underexplained.”

“If we can’t feel content here, today, now, on our journeys, amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it.” – Ben Saunders

“He’s arguing that it’s crazy how we frown on high salaries for nonprofit leaders. ‘You want to make fifty million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, you’re considered a parasite yourself.’”

“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.”

@ted #tedtalks #ted #tedtalkbook #ideasworthspreading #publicspeaking #books #bookreviews #bookrecommendations #presenting

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