Ep 158 Review of Chris Anderson's 'Ted Talks The Official Guide to Public Speaking' June 6, 2016

The curator of TED Talks has written a new book on public speaking. Does he deliver.

Speaking, the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

Chris Anderson has been the curator, sort of the head guy, the big cheese over at TED Talks for the last 15 years or so. So he's had a ringside seat at thousands of speeches and certainly some of the best presentations in the entire world. And he's had an instrumental role in coaching and preparing these people. So of all people in the world, he's in a pretty good slot to deliver advice on how to give a great presentation and what to avoid too, because you can only imagine the horrible speeches that are sent to him on a daily basis that he has to sift through. Now, when I heard he was writing a book and news of this has been out for more than a year, I had some fears of, uh, oh, is he just going to get a whole bunch of celebrity endorsers because he knows every famous person in the world because they all speak there? Is he going to get tons of media attention because of his connections and put out a book that frankly isn't very good but will still be a huge success because of all of his connections? That was my worry, and I got to tell you, I was wrong. This book delivers. I've read thousands of books on public speaking in my life. I've written half a dozen, and this one truly does stand out. It's at minimum the best public speaking book of the last decade. But I'd be hard pressed to find a better one. Now, you go back to Dale Carnegie's book, which came out at this point 80, 90 years ago and has been periodically updated. A lot of that book still stands up to the test of time. And I think ultimately that this book could be as influential. Again, the full name of the book, TED Talks, the Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson, you can pick it up at Amazon. And by the way, I bought one. They didn't give me a review copy. I'm not an affiliate or anything like that. I paid full price for this and I would strongly endorse that you do the same thing. If you only had two books on public speaking and you know you don't have many of mine, we're not talking about mine. Now, having this book as well as Dale Carnegie's original book, I think would be the strong foundation for a library on public speaking. Now, don't be confused. This is not a book just on how to give a TED Talk. Yeah, it is about that, but most of it applies to any type of presentation, investor pitch, speaking to your board of directors, talking to a community organization about why they should fund something you're trying to do. It really is applicable because deep down, the fundamental thing about TED talks is they don't have all the boring, horrible things that put most people to sleep. And he gets into the book, all the many, many things that do make up a good TED talk and what makes it work. But if you really had to describe a TED Talk, I think in just one thing in negative terms, it would be, it's not a boring data dump. It's not someone reading a bunch of slides. It is basically the absence of all the horrible things that destroy most presentations. And they simply make a rule. One of the rules, for example, is speeches can't be more than 18 minutes long. Now, he has a theory about it. I don't know that I completely agree with the theory, but I do think it is a great discipline to let people know you've only got 18 minutes. Because if you have an hour or however long you want, there's no discipline. And I can be guilty of that from time to time. You're not as focused, you're not as polished. So there is real value to having a specific time limit. You may choose a longer time or a shorter time, but having a discipline is amazingly helpful. One of the key concepts that he brings up is presentation literacy. It's a fantastic concept. His point, something I talk about on this program all the time, is now that the world is connected with the Internet and it's easy to transmit video and, and everyone has video cameras on their cell phones. It's a golden opportunity to literally speak to the whole world or thousands, if not millions of people across the world. It's something everyone can do. So he believes that schools should be teaching the four R's, not the three R's. Reading, writing, arithmetic, the old three R's. He adds a fourth, rhetoric, which is just a fancy word for speaking, speaking to people, being persuasive. It's a fantastic concept. Here's what struck me with this book, because I, as I mentioned, I've read thousands of books on public speech or parts of them, and typically I get about a third of the way through. And my reaction is there's not a single original idea or even a twist on original idea in this book. And I throw it away or I see something that is just such horrible advice, like practice in the dark and you won't get scared. Things that I Just think are horrible advice. Put one pocket, hand in your pocket at all times. Horrible advice. And with this book, I didn't hear any horrible advice. So I really can give you a strong, strong endorsement for this TED Talks book. He points out correctly that speaking is not innate, it's a skill. And he goes through countless examples of people who came to him shaking, nervous, never given a presentation before in their life, and they end up doing a fantastic job, some of them getting millions and millions of views all over the world of their videos, changing their life, getting book deals, they go on lectures. I mean, it really does change people's careers. And I can tell you that from firsthand experience. I do have clients who have done well at ted, gotten book deals, and really taken their career to whole new levels. But again, it's not just about how to speak on the TED stage. It's about how anyone can give a better presentation anytime. One of his big ideas is that a good speech needs a good idea. It can't be just communicating 20 facts or 50 facts or 100 facts. There needs to be focus on one idea. And he lays out something that I'd never seen it described quite like this, but I thought it was well put. He says an issue exposes a problem. If you want to get up and talk about an issue, you can do that. But if you want to go beyond that, if you want to talk about ideas, you have to talk about solutions to the problem. He says that's what a great TED Talk does. A great presentation, whether it's a TED Talk or any other talk, takes the audience on a journey. And I realize that sounds a little bit touchy feely, but it takes the audience on a journey and allows them to see something in the world differently. That's what a good talk does. And because of that, you can't overwhelm them with lots and lots of facts and lots of data points. You can't get up and say, buy my book, hire my consulting firm, I'm the great. You can't do all of that stuff because that's not interesting to people. One of the themes he stresses that I've always stressed is you want to give a great presentation. You have to focus on your audience, not yourself. It's not about me, me, me, me, me. You have to really focus on delivering true value to your audience, an idea that is going to help them either individually or help their communities or their societies or their planet. If you do that, it's much harder to be nervous. It's much harder to freeze up because you're focused on a really important idea that you want to share with people. So just fantastic insights he does give. One of the things he talks about, which you don't see in a lot of other books, is people who are just begging for a standing ovation. Because a lot of TED talks do get standing ovations. But he has this concept that a speaker who craves a standing ovation is kind of like a stalker. They're too emotionally needy. And there are in fact presenters who get standing ovations and nobody remembers anything they said two days later. It, it was just sort of emotionally manipulative. There are other presenters who don't get standing ovations, and yet people remember their ideas, talk about them the next day, the next week, the next year, sometimes even longer. They have real impact. So Anderson believes that your focus shouldn't be on being overly emotionally manipulative, getting people to cry, telling stories just for stories sake, but instead focus on that idea. Don't be a needy speaker. He has some other very specific tips on planning. He says if you're given 18 minutes, regardless of your time, practice out loud and aim for 9/10 of the time. So for example, if, if you're given a 10 minute slot, you speak for nine minutes in your practice. If you're given 18 minutes, it should be 16 minutes and 12 seconds when you're doing your rehearsal. So some fantastic tips that are really, really specific. The other thing I liked about his book, there were some things where he clearly says, I'm just not the expert, I just don't know. And he brought in some of his colleagues, for example, to give tips on how to prepare your PowerPoint slides more effectively, how to dress. So he really came across, I think, as authentic as not Mr. Ego, as helping people. And this is not that Ted needed a lot of good pr, he'd get so much pr. But this is going to be another brick in their wall to really build their reputation and I hope, frankly, elevate public speaking as a genre and public speaking on video as an art form and a genre for the whole world, because there's only going to be more opportunities for all of us. So I do recommend you get the book again. It should be in any bookstore. It's a huge best seller already and it's on Amazon. I buy everything, I do everything I buy with one click and I read the digital copy. You've got to do what works for you. 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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