Ep 142 How Can I Give a TED Talks Speech May 21, 2016

How can you give a ted talk? How can you give a speech at ted.

Speaking, the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work, and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This is a question I get probably once a week from clients, friends, colleagues, people out who come to my own speeches because they've heard that I've trained a number of speakers who've given TED talks, not just the TEDx but speeches on the main TED platform. Well, the short answer is you just go to Ted.com and you can fill out an application now. Good luck with that if that's your main thing. I want to tell you in much more depth what it really takes to be a speaker at TED and also to be a successful one, because not all TED Talk videos get millions and millions of views. Some get very few. So we'll talk about that in a moment.

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So confession. I have some mixed feelings when I hear a client or colleague or friend of mine or someone come up after a speech say, TJ, I want to speak at ted. How can I speak at ted? On the one hand, I'm incredibly pleased that this person has most likely been watching a lot of TED talks. That certainly better for you than just watching old episodes of Gilligan's island, which I've seen all of those too, by the way. And it shows an appreciation of speaking and it shows a willingness to learn. So that's all wonderful. The problem I have, though, is too many people think, wow, all I have to do is give one speech and I'll be famous. It's kind of like the old go on Oprah 10 years ago and your business is made be famous. Book deals will be showered on me. I'll get TV contracts. And all I can do is just go on and tell everyone how great I am and talk about my business. Sadly, that's not what TED is about. And people who think that, it makes me wonder, do they ever actually watch a TED Talk? Now, at its most basic level, a TED Talk is simply a good speech. It's a good presentation. The organizers at ted, because they have power over people, they're gatekeepers. They get to decide who comes on and who doesn't. They get to tell people, you can't do all the horrible, boring garbage that most industry conferences, trade conferences, business meetings let people get away with. So you can't get up and drone on and on and do a Data dump. You can't get up and show a whole bunch of boring slides with complex numbers and graphs and charts. They just aren't going to let you do it. You can't drone on for 45 or 50 or 60 minutes. You're limited to 18 minutes. And they're pretty strict about that. So part of the beauty of TED is not that there's some magic potion that they give to people and they turn previously boring, tedious, awful people into magical, spirited, gifted communicators on the stage. That's not it. Part of it is they just have a formula. And I don't mean that as a knock. I mean it's a good thing. The formula is you can't speak longer than 18 minutes. You can't put a bunch of text on a slide you can't read. You can't use a teleprompter. You can't get up and just bore people with tedious details and facts and numbers and tell them how great you are and why they should hire you or give you money. And if you just force people to not do those things, you've eliminated the vast majority of problems with presentations. So my first bit of advice, in fact, this is new advice because the book has just come out. Anyone interested in speaking at TED would be, well, well suited to read the book on TED Talks, the official public speaking guide of TED Talks that was written and just published in early May of 2016, the week that I'm producing this, where he tells you exactly what they're looking for. Chris Anderson is the curator, essentially the owner and the top dog at ted, and he just tells you everything they're looking for in speakers. So it's not a huge secret. Here's my biggest advice to people who want to speak at TED is that I need you to step back for a minute. Say, what is your goal? If your goal is to speak more and reach a larger audience, you can do that. Today, people look at Al Gore's TED Talk on global warming and think, well, yeah, if I could just do a speech like that, I'll get a book deal and a movie deal like his, too. Here's what they don't realize. Before Al Gore ever gave his TED Talk a handful of years ago on the environment, he'd given a different version of that speech for probably 20 years. I know. I saw him give that speech in 2001 in New York City at Riverside Church. So he didn't just wake up one day and say, you know what? I'm a famous ex vice President and I'm going to give a speech today and it's going to go. That's not what happened. He had a passion for a subject and he spoke about it for free, for the most part, for decades. And then it was a part of TED and then it had a huge, huge audience and then it was turned into a movie and a best selling book and an Academy Award winning movie. Anthony Robbins is someone who's spoken at ted. Well, Anthony Robbins didn't get famous from his TED Talk. He got famous by giving thousands and thousands of speeches on similar subjects to large and small audiences for the previous 35 years. Yes, there are people in the world where something has happened to them. They become a symbol. They, they were a schoolgirl and were attacked viciously because they wanted to go to school and they got a TED Talk and they became famous. Or something else wildly dramatic happened that they were able to overcome and they were discovered by TED Ascent. Occasionally that happens. But the vast, vast, vast majority of people who speak at TED are people who have a real passion for a particular subject matter, an industry, a topic, some form of activism. They've devoted their lives to becoming great at that, really helping people, knowing as much as they can and speaking out wherever they can. And their TED Talk happens to be one of those venues. And sometimes it comes together quite nicely so that it becomes the biggest speech of their life. But it's certainly not their first speech. For most of them, it's not their first thousand speeches. It is a part of an ongoing process. Now, there's certainly a lot of things you can do to improve your odds, but if I were you, I wouldn't do it with the whole goal of I want to be a TED Talker. That's really about your vanity. What I think you should do is think about what message do you have the world, and then seek every medium you can, every venue you can to share it. Ted's greatest way of putting a spotlight on you is not the 800 people in the room, it's the billion or so people who watch their videos every year. And maybe a million or two might watch yours. So it's YouTube video and it's video on other platforms. Well, if you want to give a speech on Internet video, there's nothing stopping from you doing that today, right now. That's what I'm doing. So don't wait for it. I like ted, but they are another gatekeeper. You don't have to rely on gatekeepers. You can just start speaking yourself. It can be an audience of 10 friends, colleagues, executives. It could be an audience of just yourself and a camera. Start figuring out what you're messing. Now, of course there are ways of getting better. There are a lot of books on how to give ted, like speeches. Full disclosure, I have an online course on how to give a TED Talk and it's on my site at Media Training Worldwide. It's on Udemy, it's on other platforms. And in that course I've distilled the lessons I've learned in training TED speakers over the years. But frankly, the biggest lesson is there's no such thing as a TED Talk. It's just there. Some speeches are a lot better than others. And if you try to give the best possible presentation you can, then you're going to have a larger audience. Now I'm being a little bit facetious. Obviously there are some structures that TED has imposed that are not a part of every speech you give. The 18 minute time limit, which I think is great, does that mean that if you're given 50 minutes or an hour in another venue, you should stop at 18 minutes? The beauty of the 18 minute time limit is it forces people to really think about every word, to be disciplined, to pack the most, not the most words or concepts or facts, but the most impact into a small amount of time. So I think it's a great organizing principle. I frankly think there's room for other speaking organizations to have speeches that are just 30 minutes long or an hour long or five minutes long, because different lengths create different products. I mean, a short story is different from a novel. They both can be good. A movie short is different from a Titanic feature length movie. They're simply different. The big problem most people have with when they say I want to speak at TED is they don't really have ideas that are different, interesting and useful to people. If it's just I work for a paper company and our paper is a little bit cheaper than the others and I'm a nice guy and buy paper for me and I'll take you to a Knicks game that may be perfectly fine as a sales presentation to someone in, in procurement at a company down the street. That's not a TED Talk because no one cares about it. So the far bigger challenge you have when you're trying to think I want to speak on TED is ask yourself, what ideas do you truly have that people haven't heard a million times? What idea do you have that's unique, interesting, useful? What are people going to get out of this that could possibly change their lives? Make them think about things differently in a better way. How are you helping? I mean, TED is about helping. It's not just about complaining about something. And then finally, what have you done? What personal stories, experiences do you have that show you've thought about this issue, that you've overcome this issue, and that you've come up with a real solution that you can share with people in a way that is compelling. It doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be as dramatic as being in a car accident and almost dying. But you need to be able to tell stories that make your main idea come alive. And part of it is the discipline of really figuring out what is your theme, what is your main idea, and how are you going to really bring that to life. It's not the time to tell people the history of your company. It's not the time to sell anything, frankly. Although the ultimate sales pitch is when you can be so interesting, so compelling, so captivating that people are drawn to you and they want to learn more about you and they want to track you down and Google you and find out how to get a hold of you. That is how you'll sell. But it's got to be subtle. The sale part is that you've given people so much value in an interesting way and you never told them about how great you are or your products or your services or your company. If you're willing to do that, then you're at least in the right ballpark of figuring out how to get a TED Talk. But really, what I'm hoping for is aspire to speak as well as the TED speakers every time you speak. If you do that, whether you speak on the TED platform or other platforms, it won't matter. You'll still be reaching people, you'll be using the power of your voice, and you'll be making the world a better place. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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