Resenhas - TED Talks

Élida Mercês 11/05/2021

Tecnologia, Entretenimento e Design = TED
O processo de aprendizagem favorecido pelo TED, que é um programa gratuito oferecido ao público, também não paga cachê aos palestrantes, mas oferece a eles uma plataforma, que é a Internet, capaz de conectá-los a milhões de pessoas ao redor do mundo, influenciar cada uma delas e favorecer novas oportunidades aos envolvidos.

site: https://longedesereno.com.br/tecnologia-entretenimento-e-design-para-inspirar/

GABICHAVES 21/08/2021

Abre a mente para apresentações inspiradoras.
Quem é apaixonado pelas apresentações do ted sem dúvida vai amar o livro. A lista que ele trás no fim é um plus sem valor, inúmeros teds inspiradores e com citações no texto que te ajudam a conectar o que há de melhor em cada talk. Sempre que vejo um da lista retomo a parte citada no texto para ver a mágica por traz, e sem dúvida o que está por trás de apresentacoes incríveis é deslumbrante!

Moitta 11/04/2018

TED Talks
I’d like to suggest that Sophie’s gift is a beautiful metaphor that can apply to any talk. 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. We’ll call that something an idea. A mental construct that they can hold on to, walk away with, value, and in some sense be changed by.


Style without substance is awful.


People love stories, and everyone can learn to tell a good story. Even if the lesson you might draw from the story is familiar, that’s OK — we’re humans! We need reminding! There’s a reason religions have weekly sermons that tell us the same things over and over, packaged different ways. An important idea, wrapped up in a fresh story, can make a great talk, if it’s told the right way.


So, language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener. And there’s the key clue to how to achieve the miracle of re-creating your idea in someone else’s brain. 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. So instead, start with theirs.


Some public-speaking coaches seek to downplay the importance of language. They may cite research published in 1967 by Professor Albert Mehrabian and claim that only 7 percent of the effectiveness of communication is down to language, while 38 percent depends on tone of voice and 55 percent comes from body language. This has led coaches to focus excessively on developing a speaking style of confidence, charisma, etc., and not worry so much about the words. Unfortunately, this is a complete misinterpretation of what Mehrabian found. His experiments were devoted primarily to discovering how emotion was communicated. So for example, he would test what would happen if someone said “That’s nice,” but said so in an angry tone of voice, or with threatening body language. Sure enough, in those circumstances, the words don’t count for much. But it is absurd to apply this to speaking over all (and Mehrabian is so sick of being misapplied that his website contains a bolded paragraph begging people not to do this).


Like all good movies or books, a great talk is transporting. We love to go on adventures, travel someplace new with an informed, if not quirky, guide who can introduce us to things we never knew existed, incite us to crawl out windows into strange worlds, outfit us with new lenses to see the ordinary in an extraordinary way … enrapture us and engage multiple parts of our brains simultaneously. So I often try to fashion my talks around embarking on a journey. What’s powerful about this metaphor is that it makes clear why the speaker, like any tour guide, must begin where the audience is. And why they must ensure no impossible leaps or inexplicable shifts in direction. Whether the journey is one of exploration, explanation, or persuasion, the net result is to have brought the audience to a beautiful new place. And that too is a gift. Whichever metaphor you use, focusing on what you will give to your audience is the perfect foundation for preparing your talk.

Many speakers have fallen in love with their ideas and find it hard to imagine what is complicated about them to people who are not already immersed. 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?


“Dear John. Could you come tell us the story of your kayaking adventure in Kazakhstan?” But even when the topic is clear, the throughline is worth thinking about. A talk about kayaking could have a throughline based on endurance or group dynamics or the dangers of turbulent river eddies. The desalination talk might have a throughline based on disruptive innovation, or the global water crisis, or the awesomeness of engineering elegance.


found my ego really trapping me. If my TED Talk goes viral, I need people to know what a great pianist I am! That I can also paint! That I write fantastic lyrics! That I have all these OTHER talents! THIS IS MY CHANCE! But, no. The only way the talk can truly soar is if you take your ego out of it and let yourself be a delivery vehicle for the ideas themselves. I remember going to dinner with TED regular Nicholas Negroponte and asked if he had any advice for my talk. He said something that my Buddhist-leaning mentor has been saying for years: leave space and SAY LESS.


You will only cover as much ground as you can dive into in sufficient depth to be compelling.


“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.”


An issue-based talk leads with morality. An idea-based talk leads with curiosity. An issue exposes a problem. An idea proposes a solution. An issue says, “Isn’t this terrible?” An idea says, “Isn’t this interesting?” It’s much easier to pull in an audience by framing the talk as an attempt to solve an intriguing riddle rather than as a plea for them to care. The first feels like a gift being offered. The second feels like an ask.


Connection Narration Explanation Persuasion Revelation


People aren’t computers. They’re social creatures with all manner of ingenious quirks. They have evolved weapons to protect against dangerous knowledge polluting the worldview they depend on. Those weapons have names: skepticism, mistrust, dislike, boredom, incomprehension.


When you walk onto the stage, you should be thinking about one thing: your true excitement at the chance to share your passion with the people sitting right there a few feet from you. Don’t rush in with your opening sentence. Walk into the light, pick out a couple of people, look them in the eye, nod a greeting, and smile. Then you’re on your way.


Willing to be vulnerable is one of the most powerful tools a speaker can wield. But as with anything powerful, it should be handled with care. Brené Brown has seen a lot of speakers misinterpret her advice. She told me: “Formulaic or contrived personal sharing leaves audiences feeling manipulated and often hostile toward you and your message. Vulnerability is not oversharing. There’s a simple equation: vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. It can be anything from an attempt to hotwire connection to attention-seeking, but it’s not vulnerability and it doesn’t lead to connection. The best way I’ve found to get clear on this is to really examine our intentions. Is sharing done in service of the work on stage or is it a way to work through our own stuff? The former is powerful, the latter damages the confidence people have in us.”


Brown strongly recommends that you don’t share parts of yourself that you haven’t yet worked through. “We need to have owned our stories before sharing them is experienced as a gift. A story is only ready to share when the presenter’s healing and growth is not dependent on the audience’s response to it.”


Caution: Successfully spending that much time on humorous stories is a special gift, not recommended for most of us. But if you can find just one short story that makes people smile, it may unlock the rest of your talk.


Humor is a skilled art, and not everyone can do it. Ineffective humor is worse than no humor at all. Telling a joke that you downloaded off the Internet will probably backfire. Indeed jokes per se seem hackneyed, clumsy, and unsophisticated. What you’re looking for instead are hilarious-but-true stories that are directly relevant to your topic or are an endearing, humorous use of language.


When you can pull together humor, self-deprecation, and insight into a single story, you have yourself a winning start.


When it comes to sharing a story from the stage, remember to emphasize four key things: Base it on a character your audience can empathize with. Build tension, whether through curiosity, social intrigue, or actual danger. Offer the right level of detail. Too little and the story is not vivid. Too much and it gets bogged down. End with a satisfying resolution, whether funny, moving, or revealing.


Some of the greatest talks are built around a single story. This structure offers the speaker huge benefits: The throughline is taken care of. (It is simply the narrative arc of the story.) Provided the story is compelling, you can evoke an intense response in the audience. If the story is about you, you will create empathy for some of the things you care most about. It’s easy to remember what you’re going to say because the structure is linear, and your brain is extremely comfortable recalling one event right after another.


Remember, the goal is to give. Personal stories sometimes fail to do that. They may entertain or intrigue or boost the speaker’s ego. But they don’t automatically give the audience something they can walk away with: Insights, actionable information, perspective, context, hope.


different people want very different things but often don’t have the language to say what they want, until you find the right questions to ask them.


You don’t want to insult the intelligence of the audience by force-feeding exactly the conclusion they must draw from the tale you’ve told. But you absolutely do want to be sure there’s enough there for your listeners to be able to connect the dots. And this is where knowing your audience well is important.


Many of the best TED Talks achieve their greatness through masterful explanation. And there’s a beautiful word for the gift they give: Understanding. We can define it as the upgrading of a worldview to better reflect reality. There is evidence from numerous diverse sources, from neuroscience to psychology to educational theory, that this is how understanding must happen. It’s built as a hierarchy, with each layer supplying the elements that construct the next layer. We start with what we know, and we add bits piece by piece, with each part positioned by using already understood language, backed by metaphors and examples. The metaphors, perhaps literally, reveal the “shape” of the new concept so that the mind knows how to slot it in effectively. Without this shaping, the concepts can’t be put in place, so 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.


If the core of your talk is explaining a powerful new idea, it is helpful to ask: What do you assume your audience already knows? What will be your connecting theme? What are the concepts necessary to build your explanation? And what metaphors and examples will you use to reveal those concepts?


for true understanding to take place, the full hierarchical structure of an idea must be communicated. A major finding of cognitive psychology is that long-term memory depends on coherent hierarchical organization of content — chunks within chunks within chunks. A speaker’s challenge is to use the fundamentally one-dimensional medium of speech (one word after another) to convey a multidimensional (hierarchical and cross-linking) structure. A speaker begins with a web of ideas in his head, and by the very nature of language he has to convert it into a string of words. This takes great care, right down to individual sentences and how they link. A speaker has to be sure that listeners know how each sentence relates logically to the preceding one, whether the relationship is similarity, contrast, elaboration, exemplification, generalization, before-and-after, cause, effect, or violated expectation. And they must know whether the point they are now pondering is a digression, a part of the main argument, an exception to the main argument, and so on.


What this means is that some of the most important elements in a talk are the little phrases that give clues to the talk’s overall structure: “Although …” “One recent example …” “On the other hand …” “Let’s build on that …” “Playing devil’s advocate for a moment …” “I must just tell you two stories that amplify this finding.” “As an aside …” “At this point you may object that …” “So, in summary …”


There’s one other key explanation tool. Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it isn’t.


If explanation is building a brand-new idea inside someone’s mind, persuasion is a little more radical. Before construction, it first requires some demolition. 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.


What do I mean by priming? The philosopher Daniel Dennett explains it best. He coined the term intuition pump to refer to any metaphor or linguistic device that intuitively makes a conclusion seem more plausible. This is priming. It is not a rigorous argument; it is simply a way of nudging someone in your direction. Barry Schwartz’s shopping story was an intuition pump. Had he just gone straight to “Too many choices can make you unhappy,” we might have been skeptical.


As he tells the story, we sense his stress and we remember all the times we have ourselves been stressed by endless shopping excursions. Even though his story is a single story of a single man and can’t possibly by itself justify the statement that too much choice makes you unhappy, nonetheless we get where he is heading. Suddenly, the case he’s building seems a lot more plausible. Dennett points out that many of the most revered passages of philosophical writing are not reasoned arguments, but powerful intuition pumps like Plato’s cave or Descartes’ demon.


There’s another form of reasoned argument, known as reductio ad absurdum, that can be devastatingly powerful. It is the process of taking the counter position to what you’re arguing and showing that it leads to a contradiction. If that counter position is false, your position is strengthened (or even proven, if there are no other possible positions that could be taken).

Here’s a more attractive way to build a case. At TED, we call it the detective story. Some of the most compelling persuasion talks are structured entirely around this device. You start with the big mystery, then travel the world of ideas in search of possible solutions to it, ruling them out one by one, until there’s only one viable solution that survives.


There are lots of tools you can use here, in addition to the intuition pumps mentioned earlier, or the detective story approach. Inject some humor early on. This communicates a useful message: I’m going to pull you through some demanding thinking … but it’s going to be fun. We’ll sweat together and laugh together. Add an anecdote. Maybe one that reveals how you got engaged in this issue. It humanizes you. If people know why you’re passionate about the issue, they’re more likely to listen to your logic. Offer vivid examples. If I wanted to persuade you that external reality is nothing like you believe it to be, I might first show a slide of a dramatic optical illusion. Just because something looks a certain way, doesn’t make it so. Recruit third-party validation. “My colleagues at Harvard and I have spent ten years looking at the data, and we’ve unanimously concluded it has to be seen this way.” Or, “And that’s why it’s not just me arguing this; every mother of a two-year-old boy knows this to be true.” Statements like these need careful handling as neither is a valid argument in itself, but, depending on the audience, they may make your argument more persuasive. Use powerful visuals


reason is the best way of building wisdom for the long term. A robust argument, even if it isn’t immediately accepted by everyone, will gradually gather new adherents until it becomes unstoppable.


Persuasion is the act of replacing someone’s worldview with something better. And at its heart is the power of reason, capable of long-term impact. Reason is best accompanied by intuition pumps, detective stories, visuals, or other plausibility-priming devices.


Connection, narration, explanation, persuasion … all vital tools. But what’s the most direct way of gifting an idea to an audience? Simply show it to them. Many talks are anchored this way. You reveal your work to the audience in a way that delights and inspires. The generic name for this is revelation. In a talk based on revelation, you might: Show a series of images from a brand-new art project and talk through it Give a demo of a product you’ve invented Describe your vision for a self-sustaining city of the future Show fifty stunning photos from your recent trip through the Amazon jungle There’s an infinite variety of possible revelation talks, and their success depends on what is being revealed.
In a talk based on images, your main goal might just be to create a sense of wonder and aesthetic delight. If it’s a demo, you’re probably seeking to amaze and to create a new sense of possibility. If it’s a vision of the future, you want it to be so vivid and compelling that your audience makes it their own.


The appeal of this type of talk from a speaker’s point of view is that the structure is clear. You’re simply walking the audience through your work, or through something you’re passionate about, one piece at a time. Each piece is accompanied by slides or video, and you simply proceed from one to the next, building excitement as you go.


Paradigm and dialectic are not technical terms like DNA that specialists can’t avoid. They’re metaconcepts — concepts about other concepts, rather than concepts about things in the world. Academese, bizspeak, corporate boilerplate, and art-critic bafflegab are tedious and incomprehensible because they are filled with metaconcepts like approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency, and variable.


Lifting the lid on your process is one of the key gifts of any creative talk.


How can we switch the tone from “look what we’ve achieved” to “look how intriguing this is”?


The structure Han and Pritchard used is good for most demos: An initial tease Necessary background, context, and/or the invention story The demo itself (the more visual and dramatic the better, so long as you’re not faking it) The implications of the technology


the ability to paint a compelling picture of the future is truly one of the greatest gifts a speaker can bring.

One of the first key decisions you need to make—and ideally you’ll make it early on in your talk preparation—is whether you will: write out the talk in full as a complete script (to be read, memorized, or a combination of the two), or have a clearly worked-out structure and speak in the moment to each of your points.


The huge advantage of going the scripted route is that you can make the best possible use of your available time.


Despite these caveats, for the majority of speakers, the most reliable way to say what you really want to say in the most powerful way is to first script it out and get to know it so it’s part of you. But that is hard work. For most of us, an 18-minute talk can easily take five or six hours to memorize. An hour a day for a week. If you don’t have that time available, don’t even try to go this route. When you show up on stage, you really don’t want to be struggling to remember a script.


You haven’t really memorized your talk thoroughly until you can do an entire other activity that requires mental energy while giving your talk.


If you drive a lot, you could consider recording the talk (just read it into your smartphone, for example) and then playing it back on low volume, while you try to speak just ahead of it. Then try again with the speed accelerated


Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes imperfection livable. Because when you know something inside out, you can PLAY with what comes your way, rather than shut it out.” So that’s the key. Don’t think of it as reciting the talk. You’re supposed to live it.


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.”


There’s a lot to be said for going unscripted. It can sound fresh, alive, real, like you are thinking out loud. If this is your most comfortable speaking style, and if you are covering material that is very familiar to you, this may be your best choice. But it is important to distinguish unscripted from unprepared.


So how do you prepare for an unscripted talk? A lot will depend on what type of journey you plan to take the audience on. A talk built around a single story will be a lot easier than one where you’re trying to construct a complex explanation or a nuanced argument. But the key to the process is to go back to the metaphor of the journey and ask yourself what each step of the journey looks like. At a minimum, a label for each step can be your set of bullet points or mental notes.


People should do whatever makes them comfortable on stage and helps them to relax. If memorizing works, they should do that. It doesn’t for me. One of my priorities in giving a talk is to establish a personal relationship with the audience, and to do that I want room to improvise. Whether it’s ten people or ten thousand, a seminar or a rally, I feel it’s essential to talk with people, not at them, and to be authentic in doing it. I do plan talks carefully, however. When I walk on stage, I always know what I want to have said before I walk off again. But I also want to connect with these people in this room today. It doesn’t matter how many rooms I’ve spoken in before, today’s audience is always new and different.


Here’s the bottom line: The majority of TED speakers do in fact script their whole talk and memorize it, and they do their best to avoid letting it sound memorized. If you have time to do that, and to work your way past the robotic Uncanny Valley, it probably gives you your best shot at encapsulating all you want to say and avoiding the usual traps of a memorized talk. But if you don’t have the time to truly memorize until the talk is second nature, or if you already know that’s just not how you give a great talk, please don’t go this route. The key is to find the mode you can feel confident about, and commit to it. If that choice seems a little stressful, here’s some good news: As you start to rehearse, the difference between the two modes starts to fade. The starting points may be different, but in both cases you end up with a talk that is meticulously prepared and passionately delivered.

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.


And by the end, I’m mostly just talking out the transitions. Slides help, of course, but rehearsing the transitions is especially important. The audience needs to hear in your voice when you’re doubling down on an idea, versus when you’re changing subjects.


What we’re really talking about here is not two different ways of delivering a talk, but rather, it’s two different ways of constructing a talk. Some people start with a script, others with a set of bullet points, but the process of rehearsal moves these much closer together. In both cases, the goal is a carefully structured talk, delivered with in-the-moment focus.


When people think a talk sounds rehearsed, the problem is not too much rehearsal, it’s too little rehearsal. The speaker is stuck in the Uncanny Valley.


Some things to ask your audience during or after these rehearsals: Did I get your attention from the get-go? Was I making eye contact? Did the talk succeed in building a new idea for you? Was each step of the journey satisfying? Were there enough examples to make everything clear? How was my tone of voice? Did it sound conversational (usually good) or as if I was preaching (usually bad)? Was there enough variety of tone and pacing? Did I sound as if I was reciting the talk? Were the attempts at humor natural or a little awkward? Was there enough humor? How were the visuals? Did they help or get in the way? Did you notice any annoying traits? Was I clicking my tongue? Swallowing too often? Shifting from side to side? Repeatedly using a phrase like “you know” or (worse) “like”? Were my body gestures natural? Did I finish on time? Were there moments you got a little bored? Was there something I could cut?


For a high-stakes talk, it’s very important to rehearse multiple times, preferably in front of people you trust. Work on it until it’s comfortably under your allocated time limit and insist on honest feedback from your rehearsal audience. Your goal is to end up with a talk whose structure is second nature to you so that you can concentrate on meaning what you say.


Whether or not you memorize your talk, it’s important to pay attention to how you begin and how you end it. At the beginning of your talk, you have about a minute to intrigue people with what you’ll be saying. And the way you end will strongly influence how your talk is remembered. However you deliver the rest of the talk, I strongly encourage you to script and memorize the opening minute and the closing lines. It helps with nerves, with confidence, and with impact.


Audience attention is a truly precious commodity. You always have it when you first arrive on stage. Don’t fritter it away with small talk. It really, truly doesn’t matter that much that you are honored to be there, or that the organizer’s wife needs to be thanked. What matters is persuading the audience that they dare not switch off for a nanosecond. You want an opening that grabs people from the first moment. A surprising statement. An intriguing question. A short story. An incredible image.


Ask yourself: if your talk were a movie or a novel, how would it open? That doesn’t mean you have to cram something dramatic into the opening sentence; you definitely have a few moments of audience attention.


Neuroscientists speak of questions creating a knowledge gap that the brain fights to close. The only way the brains of the audience can do that is by having their owners listen hard to what you have to say. This is good. How do you spark curiosity? The obvious way is to ask a question. But not just any question. A surprising question.


In fact, curiosity-generating speakers often don’t explicitly ask a question. At least not at first. They simply frame a topic in an unexpected way that clicks that curiosity button.


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. And by “difficult subjects,” I don’t just mean Advanced Physics. Even harder are talks about challenging issues and causes. If you want to advance new ideas about HIV or malaria or human slavery, you have to be aware that it’s hard for people to open up to these topics. They know they’re going to be made to feel uncomfortable at some point. It’s tempting to them to shut down ahead of time and pull out the iPhone. A great way to counter that is to lead with curiosity.


If your talk topic is challenging, curiosity is probably your most powerful engine of engagement.


Tease, but don’t give it away Occasionally, speakers try to bring too much to their opening paragraph. They essentially give away the punchline of their talk.


It’s OK to save the big revelations for the middle or end of your talk. In the opening sentences your sole goal is to give your audience a reason to step away from their comfort zone and accompany you on an amazing journey of discovery.

You can think of a talk opening the same way, except with different timings. First there is the 10-second war: can you do something in your first moments on stage to ensure people’s eager attention while you set up your talk topic? Second is the 1-minute war: can you then use that first minute to ensure that they’re committed to coming on the full talk journey with you?


I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other — what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?


I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, “How do we make people pay for music?” What if we started asking, “How do we let people pay for music?”


In both cases, a surprising question carried with it a pleasing moment of insight and closure, and prompted a long standing ovation.


This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there’s no guarantee … to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we’re wondering, Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this? just to be able to stop … and say, “I’m just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive.” And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we’re enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, I’m enough, then we stop screaming and start listening, we’re kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we’re kinder and gentler to ourselves. That’s all I have. Thank you.


Let your body help you! There’s a series of important things you can do before going on stage that really help circumvent the adrenaline rush. The single most important one is to breathe. Breathe deeply, meditation style.


Avoid an empty stomach. When you’re nervous, eating may be the last thing you want to do, but an empty stomach can exacerbate anxiety. Get some healthy food into your body an hour or so before you’re on, and/or have a protein bar handy.


Remember the power of vulnerability. Audiences embrace speakers who are nervous, especially if the speaker can find a way to acknowledge it. If you flub or stutter a little in your opening remarks, it’s fine to say, “Ooops, sorry, a little nervous here.” Or “As you can see, I don’t do a lot of public speaking. But this one mattered too much to turn down.”


Have a backup plan. If you’re worried about things going wrong, plan a few backup moves. You fear you might forget what you were going to say? Have notes or a script within reach


“While they sort that out, let me share with you a conversation I just had with a taxi driver …” or “Oh, this is great. Now I have a chance to mention to you something I had to cut from the talk for time reasons …” Or “Great, we have a couple of extra minutes. So let me ask a question of you. Who here has ever …”


It’s not about you, it’s about the idea you’re passionate about. Your job is to be there in service of that idea, to offer it as a gift. If you can hold that in mind as you walk onto the stage, you’ll find it liberating.



If you can get comfortable with it, a talk given in front of an audience with no lectern in the way is the best approach. The vast majority of TED Talks are like this, and we encourage everyone to give it a try. But there are tradeoffs, and in today’s TED, we’ve concluded that there are multiple ways to give a talk, both for variety’s sake, and to meet the needs of a given speaker. It’s good for speakers to push the edge of their comfort zone. But as I described earlier, you can also go too far. I learned from Daniel Kahneman and others that letting someone speak in a setup that makes him feel confident and allows him to most naturally find the words he needs matters even more than maximizing vulnerability.


The key first question: in order to give your talk effectively, how many notes will you need to refer to? If you have it memorized completely, or you can deliver it from a short handwritten set of bullet points, the choice is simple.


But not everyone can get comfortable with this approach, and perhaps not every talk justifies the time it takes to do well in this situation.



Voice coaches speak of at least six tools you can use: volume, pitch, pace, timbre, tone, and something called prosody, which is the singsong rise and fall that distinguishes, for example, a statement from a question.


If your talk is scripted, try this: Find the two or three words in each sentence that carry the most significance, and underline them. Then look for the one word in each paragraph that really matters and underline it twice more. Find the sentence that is lightest in tone in the whole script and run a light wavy pencil line under it. Look for every question mark and highlight them with a yellow highlighter. Find the biggest single aha moment of the talk and inject a great big black blob right before it is revealed. If there’s a funny anecdote somewhere, put little pink dots above it. Now try reading your script, applying a change in tone for each mark. For example, let yourself smile while looking at the pink dots, pause for the big black blob, and speed up a little for the wavy pencil line, while speaking more softly. How does that sound?


Now try one more thing. Try to remember all the emotions associated with each passage of your talk. Which are the bits you’re most passionate about? Which issues could make you a little angry? What are you laughing at? What are you baffled by? Now let those emotions out a little as you speak. How’s it sounding? Try doing this with a friend present, and see what she responds to and what she rolls her eyes at. Record yourself reading it and then play it back with your eyes closed. The point is to start thinking of your tone of voice as giving you a whole new set of tools to get inside your listeners’ heads. You want them to understand you, yes, but you also want them to feel your passion. And the way you do that is not by telling them to be passionate about this topic, it’s by showing your own passion. It spreads automatically, as will every other emotion you authentically feel.


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.


As with your wardrobe choice, once you’ve found a presentation style that works for you, don’t overthink it. Don’t try to be someone else. Focus on your content and your passion for it … and don’t be afraid to let your own personality shine through.



With all the tools available today in a modern theater — lighting, surround sound, hi-res projection — it’s something of a tragedy that the world’s best visual artists often don’t make use of them. Instead of thinking about how to immerse an audience in their work, they assume that, since they were invited to give a talk, that’s what they have to do. My hope for the future: more show, less tell.


Many of the innovations mentioned above are potentially powerful, but they shouldn’t be overused. The basic technology of human-to-human speaking goes back hundreds of thousands of years and is very deeply wired into us. In seeking modern variants, we must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Human attention is a fragile thing; if you add too many extra ingredients, the main thrust of a talk may get lost.


Passion was a proxy for potential.


knowledge of specific facts inevitably became specialized. But understanding? No. Not at all. To understand something, he said, we had to move in the opposite direction. We had to pursue the unification of knowledge. He gave lots of examples in which older scientific theories were replaced by deeper, broader theories that tied together more than one area of knowledge.


But more importantly still, Deutsch argued, the key to understanding anything was to understand the context in which it sat.

Online video was providing two things that had never before been available so potently: Visibility of the best talent in the world A massive incentive to improve on what was out there