How Long Should Your Speech

How long should your speech be? A lot of people follow the dictum that shorter is better. Be concise, Shorter, shorter, shorter. Everyone has a short attention span. Guess what? There's no actual evidence to suggest that shorter is better. I've seen speakers talk to an audience from 10am to midnight, and the audience wanted more because the speaker was so interesting, engaging and connected with people. And I've also seen speakers talk for 30 seconds and everyone was asleep after 10 because the speaker was so boring. So the first thing you've got to worry about when coming up with the length of your speech is speak for as long as you need to to communicate the ideas you want in an interesting, memorable way. And don't be boring. If you're boring, it almost doesn't matter how long your speech is, it's going to be a failure. Now, a lot of people like to point to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and say, oh, it was two minutes long and that was a huge success. And the guy who spoke after him spoke for two hours and nobody remembers him. This is supposed to trump the idea that you ever want to have a long speech. Well, guess what? Abraham Lincoln rose to fame, rose to prominence, rose to the leadership of his party in part by taking part in five hour debates with Stephen Douglas when he ran for the Senate. And he would often give 30 minutes, 60 minute speeches, sometimes 90 minutes. So Lincoln himself gave many lengthy, lengthy speeches. The key to him is versatile, saying the right thing, great wordsmith, but also great delivery. So it's not about being shorter. TED Talks gets a lot of positive attention by limiting the speakers to 18 minutes. And in fact, there was research done by the US Defense Department in 1974 that purported to show that the perfect length of a speech, 17 and a half minutes. Do I believe this? No. Again, if you're boring, everyone's tuned out after a minute. And since 1974, there's this invention called an Internet and a cell phone. And anyone can leave your speech and check email and check sports scores and check whatever favorite website they have. So you don't have the luxury of being boring. After or up to 17 minutes or even 2 minutes, you will lose your audience. So how long do you speak? If it's your agenda, you're meeting your organization, I don't think that's the right question to ask. What you've got to do is step back and say, what's my goal? What do I want this audience to do? What messages do I absolutely have to convey to them and get them to remember, focus on that, come up with your messages, come up with your stories. And the length will often take care of itself. If it's your own group of employees and you typically have a Monday morning staff meeting that lasts an hour, whether you talk for seven minutes and are brief and nobody remembers it or 14 minutes probably is not going to matter within the context of the day or the week or your career. So don't just artificially make it shorter. Take as much time as you need to to really convey the idea. And if you've done what I've asked in earlier episodes, narrow your key ideas down to a handful. You shouldn't take three and four and five hours. The beauty of TED Talk's limit is it's a tremendous discipline because it's frankly easier to talk for an hour. A lot of the best speakers on TED would also be great if you gave them an hour. But it's more concentrated, it's more focused, it requires a greater discipline. That's why some books that are 40,000 words are much better to read than books that are 600,000 words. They're better editor, so keep that in mind. The goal is not to be shorter. The goal is not speaking exactly 25 minutes. The goal is to speak the entire time and be interesting, not be boring and to be memorable. If you do that, the length will take care of itself.