TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Around the world, my students, my clients, whether it's in person or online, ask me one question fairly often, which is T.J. where do you get topics for speeches, presentations, online videos, online content? What's your source of creativity? Well, there's a lot of different sources, but one source is to simply not be creative and simply answer questions that people have about your industry. So, for example, it's pretty easy to go to a website like Quora and look at questions about your industry. So that's what I'm going to do right now. I've just pulled up questions from Quora, the online website that lets people post questions, typically write text answers. And I'm going to answer those questions in this video today to show you really how easy it is to do, because I know you answer questions about your business every day. It doesn't require sitting down and writing a speech till midnight. It's just you hear a question and you answer it based on your knowledge. That can be good for talking to someone over the phone, in person, in a training, in a client meeting, but also can be perfectly fine for content for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and every other social media platform. So here's a question from Pablo Heredia. What should your investor pitch deck never include? Investor pitch decks are decks. You put together slides where you're trying to raise money from investors. You should not include stuff that is irrelevant. That sounds like an obvious glib answer, but too many investor pitch decks have so many details about the process of the invention, the details of the invention, and the investor often doesn't care. They want to know what problem are you solving, what market are you reaching? Why is this a huge market? What solution do you have? Do you have anything unique, any technology, anything proprietary? Why you and specifically what in your own background suggests you and your team are set up for success? You need to put that in and really nothing else. Certainly if you have any tangible results, sales, any metrics that show you're really on to something, put that in. But the biggest thing to take out is just stuff that doesn't convince someone that you're a great investment and they should write you a check. Needs to have that singular focus. Alexander Maximus writes in and has a question, what is a topic that is not debatable. So sometimes you'll get questions on Quora where you might think that just seems odd, or I don't understand that, or that's not particularly interesting. My suggestion is just suspend disbelief, try to answer it at face value. I would say, Alexander, there really is no topic that shouldn't be debatable among people who value debate, free thinking, questioning. If you're within a particular organization that says you are going to be condemned to a fiery place for even questioning something that means you can't debate it, I'll let you figure out what I'm talking about there. But from my perspective, every topic can and should be debatable. Bikash Bhagati wants to know, how are people selected to give a TED Talk? Well, you can simply apply. You can go to the Ted.com Ted.org website and fill out an application. Not that simple though. The far bigger challenge for most people if they're trying to be a TED Talk speaker is they don't really have anything truly interesting to say. The tagline for TED is ideas worth spreading. If your biggest idea is why you're great at providing a particular service that has been around for a long time and you have hundreds or thousands of competitors, that's not going to be very compelling. You have to have a message that strikes people as interesting, novel in some way, and helpful to the world. So that is the biggest jump for most people. They just don't have that idea. The other big hang up people have is they think if I just come up with the right idea and the right pitch, I'll get accepted to ted. The most successful TED speakers typically have been speaking on that topic for years, if not decades. And, and they refine, they hone their speech, they get better and better. Anthony Robbins has been a successful TED talker. Al Gore gave one of the most successful TED talks ever on the environment. You may like him, dislike him, that's not the point. But he gave versions of that speech thousands of times for decades before he ever gave that TED Talk. So my advice to people who want to give a TED Talk is don't focus on a TED Talk. Focus on creating incredibly interesting, provocative ideas that help people. And then focus on how you can speak about that idea in a way that's truly captivating. And then speak anywhere and everywhere. And at some point TED will probably approach you. Leon Vladimirov wants to know, why should I learn public speaking? Leon, I'm trying to be polite here. It's kind of like asking, why should you teach your child how to write? I mean, if your child is going to be a singer or a brick mason, maybe they don't have to write for a living. Why learn how to write? Well, it's because there's just a huge part of the world that's going to be eliminated for you. A huge amount of opportunity in life if you don't know how to write. It's exactly the same thing when it comes to speaking. Now, people are taught to write in first grade, second grade, and in most countries. By law, you have to send your kid to school, but nobody has to get taught on public speaking. If you want to be more successful, more productive, I would argue happier in life and more fulfilled in life, you can't go wrong by learning how to express yourself. Because here's the thing, Leon. I guarantee you there are times when you are sitting in a classroom, a meeting, a conference, you see someone else speaking, you see someone else asking a question, you think, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. Or, I've got a better solution. Why aren't you standing up and speaking? Now, if you learn how to speak publicly, you don't have to hold yourself back. You don't have to lurk in the shadows. H. Wallace wants to know, how can a speaker ensure that an audience remembers the most important of a speech? Important message from a speech, important points. This is something I've spoken about repeatedly, thousands of times. I have thousands of videos on this subject. I have entire courses on this subject. It comes down to one word, story. You must tell a story involving a real conversation with a real person in a real place about a real problem. Dialogue how you felt and how it was resolved. If you want people to remember your point, I ask my students and clients all over the world, what do you remember from the best speaker you've ever seen? They remember the stories. They don't remember bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. They don't remember numbers. They remember stories. So that's the easiest one. If you want to know how to tell stories, I've got a gazillion free videos and online courses on that as well. Kenny Garcia wants to know, what is a VC pitch deck? Well, VC stands for venture capital. It's a deck you put together to send a venture capitalist in the hopes of raising money. So it's a tool, device to help you raise money. And if you are meeting with them, typically you go through this deck as well. Someone else writes on Quora. Again, all these questions are coming from Quora. I didn't have to sit down and think and be creative, but I know the answers are interesting to someone. This is a question about pitch decks. What kind of pitch decks exist? I am asking this question because I hear a good practice is to have different pitch decks for different audiences. Certainly you could. Venture capitalists have different interests. Some venture capitalists may be exclusively focused on things that involve, you know, cryptocurrencies and bitcoin. And if yours deals with that, and I'm not a fan, but if yours deals with that, you need to spell that out very clear. The other other venture capitalists may be more interested in just the proprietary aspect of technology. So if you've got some proprietary technology, you would put a bigger spotlight on that faster and sooner. I would caution you, don't try to say things that are inconsistent or contradictory in one pitch deck and another. It's about what do you spotlight and highlight? Certainly you can alter those. So these are all questions from real people on Quora. Now, what I have done in the past, and I may decide to do here, I don't even know yet, is the way to get maximum mileage out of this is to take what I'm saying on this video, turn it into text and post those comments in Quora. And people look at those, they respond, they rate those. I could also link this video to it, but what Quora doesn't seem to like is if you just post a video, just go post the link of this video and say, I answered the question here. They I've done that before. They don't like that. So this is a quick, simple, easy thing. I'm doing this in one take. As you can see, there's no special effects, there's no graphics, there's no animation, there's no music. So I'm actually making this whole newsletter, this video on YouTube, this post in less time than it would take me to type even a third of it, because I'm doing it in one take. So that's one area where you can find sources of ideas for your online video and your online content. By the way, if you want to get more comfortable doing this, some of you think I couldn't do that in one take. I'd want to get it just right and do it. I've made mistakes in this video already, but I didn't let it bother me. I didn't stop and edit it and redo it 10 times. I'm just treating it like a conversation with you. I stumble over a word, keep going. Because that's what you do in real life. If you're looking for help to become a better speaker, whether it's speaking online, in person, to the media or in any other situation, check out the links below and you'll see descriptions and information about my online courses and as well as in person workshops. Thanks.