Carmine Gallo has found nine things successful TED Talks have in common and he shares his insights on how to use these nine secrets in your own presentations. TED, for those who have been living under a rock, is a conference where famous and not so famous people give short presentations. One of TED’s rules is that a talk can’t be longer than 18 minutes. This is one of the Nine Secrets Carmine shares, keep it short.
He also says to have a Tweetable Headline. Keep your title under 140 characters. He goes on to mention several titles that are short. He mentions how to use cadence when you speak. People don’t like someone who speaks either too quickly or too slowly. He says to add a Show Stopper moment, such as that time Bill Gates opened a jar with some mosquitoes in it. He talks about using props and using your hands. Don’t go overboard with either.
Talk like TED was a fun book. He mentions several famous TED Talks, such as The Art of Asking and Do Schools Kill Creativity? Carmine’s list of nine Public Speaking Secrets are not all that secret, most of them sound pretty familiar. Be conversational, know your subject, be funny if you can, use words that paint a picture and elicit emotion from the audience. The one I liked best was to tell stories. He says most TED Talks are filled with stories.
Or maybe it was the best TED Talks are filled with stories. There are plenty of TED Talks out there now that I never made it to the end of their 18 minutes. There is plenty of passion from the person giving the talk, but it doesn’t light a fire in me. I am a bit baffled when he says that some of the speakers spent hundreds of hours perfecting their talks. I think I’ve found the reason I don’t give a lot of speeches.
Talk like TED is still worth reading. And it’s worth the effort to go and watch a few of the talks he mentions.
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