On Talking at TED

Paul Dunn outlines the TED speaking experience. You'll discover the TED '10 COMMANDMENTS' and much, much more

Speaking at TED is, in many ways, speaking at the pinnacle. So ... how do you do it? What are the keys? And how different is it than a ‘normal’ speech or Keynote?

In this insightful piece, Paul Dunn uncovers the learnings in doing not one TEDx talk but two! You’ll discover the TED ‘10 COMMANDMENTS’  and much, much more.

It’s not an over-statement to say that the pinnacle of contributing via speaking is to be invited to speak at TED.

As Anna Kamanetz writes in her Fast Company piece:

In other words, TED is cool. And to be invited to speak there is way cool.
Well, I’ve come as far as you can without actually doing the TED main stage … yet. Late in 2010 I spoke at TEDx in Singapore. And I followed that up 6 weeks later with a totally different talk at TEDx Christchurch (New Zealand ).

You can see them right now on the web too. TEDx Singapore where I talk about ‘WOW!’ is right here  and TEDx Christchurch (where I talk about WHY, MOMENTS and what I call ‘WOOW’ is right here for you.

Both of them were simply awesome to do. And the first one in Singapore was amazing in so many way. Yes the audience said “WOW, that really rocked’. So that’s a great start. But the lessons I learned were even better than that. Let’s take a look.

First, the ‘instructions’ from TED about doing a TED talk are themselves pretty interesting. They tell you, “you have just 18 minutes to give the talk of your life.” And they’re serious about that. In fact, they’ve created 10 Commandments:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. 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 Outer
Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

For me, the most interesting one is the 18 minute strictly imposed limit. I used to joke about never getting invited to TED because it takes me 25 minutes to say hello.  But once you get yourself focused on 18 minutes, it’s amazing the ‘stuff’ you can let go — stuff that perhaps you always thought was so ‘vital’. I went through a process to do that — a process you might find helpful too.

I determined that my goal in that 18 minutes was NOT to teach — it was to inspire (and by the way, that’s probably a goal we should all have).

So as I developed the talk and the slides, I reviewed and reviewed striking out anything that tried to ‘teach’ without inspiring first.

Even so, I ended up with 40 slides! And each one of those slides had at least two builds — in most cases 3. So that’s the equivalent of 120 slides in 18 minutes — an average of 1 slide every 9 seconds. So you can imagine the talk had pace!

Interestingly though, TED traditionally does not like transitions. They say it focuses too much on the content and not enough on the speaker. I get that. But equally, most slides are boring — I make CERTAIN mine are anything but!  And even Seth Godin has a view on that — in one of his blogs he was suggesting that interesting things might happen if you did a slide every 12 seconds.

My second lesson came from Start with Why author and friend Simon Sinek.

Simon did a brilliant TED talk and he nailed it in 18 minutes and 5 seconds. So I asked him for advice. His reply was vintage Simon, “You don’t need my advice for TEDx…you already know what to do.  Be honest.  Be idealistic.  Be yourself.”

Well, ‘myself’ would normally go over time. And that would be the kiss of death in the TED case (as far as I know Anthony Robbins is the only one who’s been able to get over that limit — very cleverly too — see that entire video here).

So, for the first time in my life, I rehearsed the entire talk — not word for word but out loud so that I made sure that the speech transitions made sense and carried the audience along.  I’ve never rehearsed like that before in my life. I did it 3 times. And it came out to less than 16 minutes every time. So I thought that would give me enough ‘cushion’ for audience interaction and some spontaneity.

It did. The notorious (and scary) TED timer clocked it at 18 minutes and 1 second. Again, you can watch it here.

My third lesson was about that ending.

When you’ve got just 18 minutes, it makes you realise that ‘thank you’ is not good enough. You need to end on a real high AND incorporate the thank you in it. You can see how I did that differently in the second talk here.

Point 8 in the TED Commandments is a great one and it’s a help here too. I made sure I got that going early — not with a joke but with a sequence that simply does make people laugh with me as the butt of a story. And then you can build on that.  And importantly, you can build CONTRAST early. About a minute after the first laughter I got a spine tingle myself when I mentioned Nick Morgan’s great point in the first line of his ‘Working the Room’ book — the ONLY reason to give a speech is to change the world.

There’s much more learning to come too on that score too.

The final point for now is a simple one — the role of gratitude and amazement.

How amazing is it that I was able to speak at TEDx. How amazing is it that a talented group of people edited that footage to put it live on the TEDx channel. And how amazing is it that Chris Anderson and his colleagues at TED might just like it enough to put it on the main TED stage.

That is WOW. How wonderful to be able to share that.