TED Talks — Book Review & Quotes
Review
Everyone who has seen this book on my shelf makes the same comment on the abstractedness of a book about TED Talks. What drew me to this book was not an undying need I have to be on a TED stage giving a talk; it’s the increasing importance of persuasion that I’ve seen in being successful. Everyone has ideas and perspectives, but to clearly articulate why your perspective should be heard and regarded is something else entirely.
While the broader theme I took from this book is developing the ability to effectively communicate my perspective, it also opened my eyes to the educational value of speaking in terms of the opportunity to really stop and understand what you think about something.
“You can use the opportunity of public speaking as motivation to dive more deeply into some topic. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser degree, from some form of procrastination or laziness. There’s a lot we’d like to get into principle, but, you know, that Internet thing just has so many damn distractions. The chance to speak in public may be just the kick you need to commit to a serious research project. Anyone with a computer or a smartphone has access to pretty much all the world’s information. It’s just a matter of digging in and seeing what you can uncover.”
Emerson used lectures to structure and present his thinking. John Quincy Adams talked about publishing anonymously and seeing how people react. “Try your hand at different forms — the oration, the sermon, the dissertation. Vary the style. Once you’re satisfied, publish it anonymously, and then learn from the reaction.” Ideas are put through true trial only when they are faced with reality; presenting your ideas to a group of people forces you to face that reality head on.
And the ability to think critically of the way you structure your ideas and opinions is going to become progressively more important. The more repetitive tasks are automated away, the more humans are left to the abstractions; and to build on abstractions requires the clearest of communication.
“However much public speaking skills matter today, they’re going to matter even more in the future. Driven by our growing connectedness, one of humankind’s most ancient abilities is being reinvented for the modern era. I’ve become convinced that tomorrow, even more than today, learning to present your ideas live to other humans will prove to be an absolutely essential skill.”
We’re entering an era where we all need to spend a lot more time learning from each other. And that means far more people than ever before can contribute to this collective learning process. Anyone who has a unique piece of work or a unique insight can productively participate.
“The revolution in public speaking is something that everyone can be part of. If we can find a way to truly listen to each other, and learn from each other, the future glitters with promise.”
The more well rounded we are as people, the more successful we will be in the changing economy of our globalized world.
“Is it really true that knowledge has to become ever more specialized? That the only way we can achieve success is by knowing more and more about less and less? The specialization of every field — medicine, science, art — seemed to suggest this. But Deutsch argued convincingly that we must distinguish knowledge from understanding. Yes, knowledge of specific facts inevitably became specialized. But understanding? No. Not at all. To understand something, he said, we had to move in the opposite direction. We had to pursue the unification of knowledge.
Finally, the thing that struck me the most about this book that I would have never thought going into it was the story of how Chris Anderson become the head of the TED Conference.
“When I heard that Ricky Wurman was looking to sell the TED conference, I became tantalized at the thought of taking it over. For my entire entrepreneurial life, my manta had been to follow the passion. Not my passion — other people’s. If I saw something that people were truly, deeply passionate about, that was the big clue that there was opportunity there. Passion was a proxy for potential. .”
There is an episode of The West Wing where the Deputy Chief of Staff, Josh Lyman, is working incredibly hard on a bill that the President and his staff know they’ve already lost. And the President points out something specific about Josh’s motivations.
In my own life, I think I feel the same as Josh. I’ve never thought of myself as the person who is going to lead the charge, define the vision, sit at the head. I’ve always found more satisfaction in being “the guy that the guy counts on,” the person who people turn to because they know I will find a way to support and bolster their vision, their passion. Chris Anderson is doing that with every idea that someone takes with them as they walk onto a TED stage.
Highlighted Quotes From The Book
“Ants shape each other’s behavior by exchanging chemicals. We do it by standing in front of each other, peering into each other’s eyes, waving our hands and emitting strange sounds from our mouths. Human-to-human communication is a true wonder of the world. We do it unconsciously every day. And it reaches its most intense form on the public stage.”
“There is no one way to give a great talk. The world of knowledge is far too big and the range of speakers and of audiences and of talk settings is far too varied for that. Any attempt to apply a single set formula is likely to backfire. Audiences see through it in an instant and feel manipulated.”
“Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.”
“This revolution has sparked a renaissance in public speaking. Many of us have suffered years of long, boring lectures at university; interminable sermons at church; or roll-your-eyes predictable political stump speeches. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“This matters. Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality. From the first time our ancestors teamed up to take down a mammoth to Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, people have turned spoken words into astonishing shared achievements.”
“Your number one mission as a speaker is to make something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners. We’ll call that something an idea. A mental construct that they can hold on to, walk away with, value, and in some sense be changed by.”
“If you’ve picked up this book just because you love the idea of strutting the stage and being a TED Talk star, inspiring audiences with your charisma, please, put it down right now. Instead, go and work on something that is worth sharing. Style without substance is awful.”
“You can use the opportunity of public speaking as motivation to dive more deeply into some topic. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser degree, from some form of procrastination or laziness. There’s a lot we’d like to get into principle, but, you know, that Internet thing just has so many damn distractions. The chance to speak in public may be just the kick you need to commit to a serious research project. Anyone with a computer or a smartphone has access to pretty much all the world’s information. It’s just a matter of digging in and seeing what you can uncover.” — Emerson used lectures. John Quincy Adams talked about publishing anonymously and seeing how people react.
“In fact, the same questions you ask as you do your research can help provide the blueprint for your talk. What are the issues that matter most? How are they related? How can they be easily explained? What are the riddles that people don’t yet have good answers for? What are the key controversies? You can use your own journey of discovery to suggest your talk’s key moments of revelation.”
“Reputation is everything. You want to build a reputation as a generous person, bringing something wonderful to your audiences, not as a tedious self-promoter. It’s boring and frustrating to be pitched to, especially when you’re expecting something else.”
“As my colleague Bruno Giussani puts it, ‘When people sit in a room to listen to a speaker, they are offering her something extremely precious, something that isn’t recoverable once given: a few minutes of their time and of their attention. Her task is to use that time as well as possible.’”
“Inspiration can’t be performed. It’s an audience response to authenticity, courage, selfless work, and genuine wisdom.”
“There’s a helpful word used to analyze plays, movies, and novels; it applies to talks too. It is throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Every talk should have one.”
“A good exercise is to try to encapsulate your throughline in no more than fifteen words. And those fifteen words need to provide robust content. It’s not enough to think of your goal as, ‘ I want to inspire the audience,’ or ‘I want to win support for my work.’ It has to be more focused than that. What is the precise idea you want to build inside your listeners? What is their takeaway?”
“Many speakers have fallen in love with their ideas and find it hard to imagine what is complicated about them to people who are not already immersed. The key is to present just one idea — as thoroughly and completely as you can in the limited time period. What is it that you want your audience to have an unambiguous understanding of after you’re done?” (Barry Schwartz)
“You can only gift an idea to minds that are ready to receive that type of idea.”
“President Woodrow Wilson was once asked about how long it took him to prepare for a speech. He replied: ‘That depends on the length of the speech. If it is a 10-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare for it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.’ It reminds me of a famous quote attributed to a variety of great thinkers and writers: ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.’”
“There’s an old formula for writing essays that says a good essay answers three questions: What? So what? Now what?” (Sir Ken Robinson)
“Hearing a talk is a completely different thing from reading an essay. It’s not just the words. Not at all. It’s the person delivering the words. To make an impact, there has to be a human connection. You can give the most brilliant talk, with crystal-clear explanations and laser-sharp logic, but if you don’t first connect with the audience, it just won’t land. Even if the content is, at some level, understood, it won’t be activated but simply filed away in some soon-to-be-forgotten mental archive.”
“The toxicity of our political (and religious) non-conversations is a true tragedy of the modern world. When people aren’t prepared or ready to listen, communication can’t happen.”
“Don’t pin your happiness on the future. If we can’t feel content here, today, no, on our journeys, amidst the mess and the string that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it.”
“Meanwhile, remember this: Stories resonate deeply in every human. By giving your talk as a story or a series of related stories, you can greatly increase your connection with your listeners. But, please: let it mean something.”
“We all suffer from a cognitive bias for which economist Robin Hogarth coined the term ‘the curse of knowledge.’ In a nutshell, we find it hard to remember what it feels like not to know something that we ourselves know well. A physicist lives and breathes subatomic particles and may assume that everyone else of course knows what a charm quark is. I was shocked in a recent cocktail-party discussion to hear a talented young novelist ask: ‘You keep using the term ‘natural selection.’ What exactly do you mean by that?’ I thought everyone with half an education understood the basic ideas of evolution. I was wrong.”
“I am not advocating that everything be explained on a level appropriate for sixth-graders. At TED we have a guideline based on Einstein’s dictum, ‘Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.’ You don’t want to insult your audience’s intelligence. Sometimes specialist terms are essential.”
“Persuasion means convincing an audience that the way they currently see the world isn’t quite right. And that means taking down the parts that aren’t working, as well as rebuilding something better. When this works, its thrilling for both speaker and audience.”
“Whatever its causes, the decline of violence, I think, has profound implications. It should force us to ask not just, why is there war? But also, why is there peace? Not just, what are we doing wrong? But also, what have we been doing right? Because we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out what it is.” (Steven Pinker)
“Most people are capable of being convinced by logic, but they aren’t always energized by it. And without being energized, they may quickly forget the argument and move on. So the language of reason they have to be bolstered by other tools that make the conclusions not just valid, but meaningful, exciting, desirable.”
“Humans have a skill that, so far as we know, no other species possesses. It is so important a skill that we have multiple words to label its different flavors: imagination, invention, innovation, design, vision. It is the ability to pattern the world in our minds and then re-pattern it to create a world that doesn’t actually exist but someday might. And occasionally, and even more miraculously, after several people share a vision among themselves, they are able to use it as a blueprint to actually make that world become real.”
“We need to encourage them to find their own path, even if it’s different from our own. We also need them to understand something that doesn’t seem adequately appreciated in our increasingly tech-dependent world, that art and design are not luxuries, not somehow incompatible with science and engineering. They are in fact essential to what makes us special.” (Brian Ferren)
“Harvard professor Dan Gilbert advises his students to speak their talks into a recorder first, then transcribe them, and use that as the initial draft of their talk. Why? ‘Because when people write, they tend to use word, phrases, sentence structures, and cadences that no one uses in natural speech. So when you start with written text and then try to adapt it for performance, you are basically trying to turn one form of communication into another, and odds are that your alchemy will fail.’”
“You can think of a talk opening the same way, except with different timings. First there is the 10-second war: can you do something in your first moments on stage to ensure people’s eager attention while you set up your talk topic. Second is the 1-minute war: can you then use that first minute to ensure that they’re committed to coming on the full talk journey with you?”
“Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.” (Rita Pierson)
“Focus on what you’re talking about. Monica’s suggestion to write THIS MATTERS on your notes is wonderful. This is the single biggest piece of advice I can give you. It’s not about you. It’s about the idea you’re passionate about. Your job is to be there in service of that idea, to offer it as a gift. If you can hold that in mind as you walk onto the stage, you’ll find it liberating.”
“Here’s a radical question: Why bother giving a talk? Why not instead simply email the text to every potential member of the audience? An 18-minute talk contains maybe 2,500 words. Many people can read 2,500 words in less than 9 minutes and retain good comprehension. So why not do that instead? Save the auditorium cost. Save everyone’s travel. Save the chance that you might flub your lines and look foolish. And get your talk across in less than half the time it takes to speak it. One of the reasons I was so captivated by TED was the discovery that talks really can offer something more than the printed word. But it’s not a given, and it’s not even true in every case. That something extra has to be thought about, invested in, developed. It has to be earned.”
“One of the surprises of TED’s success has been that a speaker on video has almost as much impact as a speaker in the room. So there’s no reason a hologram or telepresence bot can’t have full impact.”
“I think we can expect to see a lot more experiments like this going forward. Innovations that will allow gatherings of people that simply wouldn’t have been possible any other way. Indeed there may well soon be a day when real robots walk on stage and give talks, talks they helped to write.”
“This won’t replace the power of people coming together physically — there are far too many benefits from the ancient experience of real in-the-moment human contact. But direct-to-video talks will be a wonderful playground for rapid experimentation innovation, and learning.”
“I wish to persuade you of something: That however much public speaking skills matter today, they’re going to matter even more in the future. Driven by our growing connectedness, one of humankind’s most ancient abilities is being reinvented for the modern era. I’ve become convinced that tomorrow, even more than today, learning to present your ideas live to other humans will prove to be an absolutely essential skill.”
“When I heard that Ricky Wurman was looking to sell the TED conference, I became tantalized at the thought of taking it over. For my entire entrepreneurial life, my manta had been to follow the passion. Not my passion — other people’s. If I saw something that people were truly, deeply passionate about, that was the big clue that there was opportunity there. Passion was a proxy for potential. That was how I justified launching dozens of hobbyist magazines, covering everything from computing to mountain biking to cross-stitching. Those topics might be deeply boring to most people, but to those the magazines were targeted at, they were passion-driven gold.”
“What finally convinced me to go for it was, believe it or not, a passage in a book I happened to be reading at the time, namely David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. In it he asked a provocative question: Is it really true that knowledge has to become ever more specialized? That the only way we can achieve success is by knowing more and more about less and less? The specialization of every field — medicine, science, art — seemed to suggest this. But Deutsch argued convincingly that we must distinguish knowledge from understanding. Yes, knowledge of specific facts inevitably became specialized. But understanding? No. Not at all. To understand something, he said, we had to move in the opposite direction. We had to pursue the unification of knowledge. He gave lots of examples in which older scientific theories were replaced by deeper, broader theories that tied together more than one area of knowledge. For example, an elegant worldview based on the sun sitting at the center of the solar system replaced massively complex explanations of the whirling motions of individual planets around Earth. But more importantly still, Deutsch argued, the key to understanding anything was to understand the context in which is sat. If you imagine a vast spiderweb of knowledge, you can’t really understand the intricate knots in any small part of that web without pulling the camera back to see how the strands connect more broadly. It’s only by looking at that larger pattern that you can gain actual understanding.”
“At this point people start getting depressed. They begin asking questions such as, In a world in which machines are rapidly getting super-smart at any specialist knowledge task we can throw at them, what are humans even for? It’s an important question. And the answer to it is actually quite thrilling. What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other.”
“Our giant opportunity for tomorrow is to rise. To rise above our long history of using specialist knowledge to do repetitive tasks. Whether it’s the backbraking work of harvesting rice year after year or the mind-numbing work of assembling a product on a manufacturing line, most humans, for most of history, have made a living doing the same thing over and over again. Our future won’t be like that. Anything that can be automated or calculated ultimately will be. Now, we can be fearful of that, or we can embrace it and take the chance to discover a richer path to life fulfillment. What will that path look like? No one knows for sure. But it’s probably going to include:
- More system-level strategic thinking
- More innovation
- More creativity
- More utilization of uniquely human value
“And that fact, right there, is one of the main engines powering the renaissance in public speaking. We’re entering an era where we all need to spend a lot more time learning from each other. And that means far more people than ever before can contribute to this collective learning process. Anyone who has a unique piece of work or a unique insight can productively participate. And that includes you.”
“The revolution in public speaking is something that everyone can be part of. If we can find a way to truly listen to each other, and learn from each other, the future glitters with promise.”
“The secret of happiness is: find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.” (Dan Dennett)
“Dennett is a passionate advocate for the power of ideas. He was highlighting an extraordinary fact about humans, one that’s unique to our species: we are sometimes willing to subjugate our biological needs for the pursuit of ideas that matter.”
“We’re strange creatures, we humans. At one level, we just want to eat, drink, play, and acquire more stuff. But life on the hedonic treadmill is ultimately dissatisfying. A beautiful remedy is to hop off it and instead begin pursing an idea that’s bigger than you are.”
“A speaker has to go to where the listener is and say, Come, let’s build something together. The speaker must show why the idea is worth building. There is a reaching out. An appeal to shared values, desires, hopes, and dreams. In certain circumstances this process can be terribly abused. A crowd can be whipped up. Hatred inflamed. False views of the world can be propagated as real. But in history this has always happened when, at least to some degree, listeners are shut off from the rest of the world. The appeal that is being made by the speaker is not universal, it is tribal. It is us versus them. And crucial facts are hidden from these listeners.”
“But when we’re more closely connected — when people have full visibility of the world and each other — something different starts to happen. Then, the speakers who will have the most influence will be those who succeed in tapping into those values and dreams that are most widely shared. They will be those who use arguments based on facts that many people — not just a few — can see to be true.”
“Imagine two global political leaders, one of whom appeals only to the interests of one race, while the other reaches out to all members of humanity. Which one garners more support in the end? If it were the case that humans were irredeemably xenophobic, close-minded, racist, then to be sure the second politician would have no hope. But I don’t believe that to be the case. I believe that what we share is far more meaningful, more profound, than how we differ. We all hunger, yearn, suffer, laugh, weep, and love. We all bleed. We all dream. We are all capable of empathy, of putting ourselves in others’ shoes. And it is possible for visionary leaders — or anyone with the courage to stand up and say something — to tap into this shared humanity and to nurture it.”
“The power of reason, combined with the growing connectedness of the world, tilts the balance of influence in favor of speakers who are willing to put themselves in the shoes of all of us, not just the other members of their own tribe. The latter may have their moments of power, but it is the former who will win in the end.”
“That is why I deeply believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s shining statement: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’” There really is an arrow to history. There really is such a thing as moral progress. If we pull the camera back for a moment, away from whatever evil du jour is dominating the news, we can see that progress writ large in the history of the last few centuries, not least in the impact of MLK himself. And it has every chance of continuing.”
“The single greatest lesson I have learned from listening to TED Talks is this: The future is not yet written. We are all, collectively, in the process of writing it.”
