This short live-stream segment (by TJ Walker) offers a public-speaking tip: regularly watch TED Talks to learn from disciplined, polished speakers. Walker highlights TED’s format—typically 18 minutes or less, limited slides and bullets, topical variety—which forces speakers to avoid common speaking blunders; he encourages making watching TED a habitual, time-efficient practice for skill development.
Chapters
Public speaking tip of the week, which I hope many of you are already doing. Watch ted. TED is the acronym for technology, Entertainment and Design, the organization that is devoted to bringing great speakers, great thinkers and putting their ideas out in the world through speech. The beauty of these speeches is they're typically 18 minutes or less. And if not every one of them being a great speech, at least they've done a wonderful job at forcing speakers not to commit the most fundamental common blunders of speech making. They have an excellent discipline of forcing their speakers not to just give a big data dump. They don't let their speakers get up and put up traditional slides with lots of bullet points and text because it doesn't. They don't let people go on and on and on and speak for an hour. You're not going to get more than 18 minutes. Now, the beauty of TED is there are so many different categories now, subject matter. So if you never care about politics or you never care about environmentalism, you don't have to watch videos on politics or environmentalism. You can just watch videos on technology design if you want to. But great writers, I don't care who you talk to. Talk to any great writer and they've read thousands of books, they can tell you who their top 10 authors are, their favorite authors are. They immerse themselves in the world of writing, of words, of authors. Great speakers also immerse themselves in the world of speaking. And let's face it, it's a lot easier during a lunch break to watch eight minutes of a TED Talk than it is to fly to a different part of the country or go to a convention or even going in your same town to the other end of town to hear a speaker. It could take up your whole day. That's the beauty of the modern world we live in with technology. You can watch great speakers any time of day or night. You've got insomnia, it's three in the morning. You can. Rather than just watch an infomercial or an old sitcom, you can watch a great speech, a world class speech. So I urge you and folks, I'm not affiliated with ted, other than I do have clients of mine who hire me to train them before they give their TED talks. But ted's not giving me any commission. I urge you, go to Ted.com, look at the categories and make it a habit. Make sure. Maybe it's only five minutes a week, but if you want to be a great speaker, you need to watch great speakers on a regular basis.
