Talk Like TED: 9 Tips from Reviewing the Most Popular TED Presentations

By Sam Piha

Sam Piha

TED Talks are a cultural phenomena. These are 18 minute presentations by the world’s leading thinkers in a variety of disciplines. These talks inspired the format for our How Kids Learn conference. They have been viewed by over a billion people. Carmine Gallo recently wrote a book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.  

These 9 tips on giving presentations are useful for youth program leaders who give presentations, and can be shared with older youth who are interested in improving their public speaking. His 9 tips, taken from an article in Forbes, are listed below:

Carmine Gallo,
Forbes Magazine Contributor

1. Unleash the master within. Passion leads to mastery and mastery forms the foundation of an extraordinary presentation. You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself. You stand a much greater chance of persuading and inspiring your listeners if you express an enthusiastic, passionate, and meaningful connection to your topic.

2. Tell three stories. Tell stories to reach people’s hearts and minds. Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and engage the human brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the audience will agree with the speaker’s point of view. Recently I wrote this column about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Her original TED talk was going to be “chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal.” Instead she told three stories and ignited a movement. Stories connect us. Tell more of them.

3. Practice relentlessly. Harvard brain researcher Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor had this “stroke of insight” that has been viewed 15 million times on TED.com. Dr. Jill rehearsed her presentation 200 times before she delivered it live. Practice relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a conversation with a close friend.

4. Teach your audience something new. The human brain loves novelty. An unfamiliar, unusual, or unexpected element in a presentation jolts the audience out of their preconceived notions, and quickly gives them a new way of looking at the world. Robert Ballard is an explorer who discovered Titanic in 1985. He told me, “Your mission in any presentation is to inform, educate, and inspire. You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.”

5. Deliver jaw-dropping moments. The jaw-dropping moment—scientists call it an ‘emotionally competent stimulus’— is anything in a presentation that elicits a strong emotional response such as joy, fear, shock, or surprise. It grabs the listener’s attention and is remembered long after the presentation is over. In this column on how Bill Gates radically transformed his public-speaking skills, I demonstrate how Gates learned to incorporate a jaw-dropping moment into many of his public presentations, including his now famous TED talks.

Sir Ken Robinson on How Schools Kill Creativity

6. Use humor without telling a joke. Humor lowers defenses, making your audience more receptive to your message. It also makes you seem more likable, and people are more willing to do business with or support someone they like. The funny thing about humor is that you don’t need to tell a joke to get a laugh. Educator Sir Ken Robinson educated and amused his audience in the most popular TED talk of all time: How Schools Kill Creativity. Robinson makes humorous, often self-deprecating, observations about his chosen field, education. “If you’re at a dinner party and you say you work in education—actually, you’re not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education…” Robinson makes very strong, provocative observations about nurturing creativity in children, and he packages the material around humorous anecdotes and asides that endear him to the audience. Lighten up. Don’t take yourself (or your topic) too seriously.

7. Stick to the 18-minute rule. A TED presentation can be no longer than 18 minutes. Eighteen minutes is the ideal length of time to get your point across. Researchers have discovered that “cognitive backlog,” too much information, prevents the successful transmission of ideas. TED curator Chris Anderson has been quoted as saying that 18 minutes is “long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention.”

8. Favor pictures over text. PowerPoint is not the enemy. Bullet points are. Some of the best TED presentations are designed in PowerPoint. Others use Apple Keynote or Prezi. Regardless of the software, there are no bullet points on the slides of the best TED presentations. There are pictures, animations, and limited amounts of text—but no slides cluttered with line after line of bullet points. This technique is called “picture superiority.” It simply means we are much more likely to recall an idea when a picture complements it.

9. Stay in your lane. The most inspiring TED speakers are open, authentic, and, at times, vulnerable. Researcher Brené Brown even gave a TED talk on the topic of vulnerability and how her own research led to her personal journey to know herself. Opening up paid off for Brown in a big way. Oprah discovered Brown on TED, invited Brown to be on her show, and today Brown is a bestselling author and regular contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine.

For a piece by Charlie Rose, where he explored TED Talks, shown on a recent 60 Minutes, click here. One thing we learned from his piece is that TED provides coaches for all of the speakers months before they present on stage. This is to ensure that their presentations are simple and provocative.