TEDx Talks’ Breakdown — What and Why
Hello! I’m Arihant
Last October I gave a TEDx Talk. It would be a lie to say the whole process was gruelling, because well, it wasn’t TED Global. It was a TEDx event organised by a bunch of final year engineering students (my juniors, my alma mater’s). So the stakes for ruining the talk weren’t as high. But it was TEDx and stakes were high nonetheless. These folks had worked hard to organise it after a couple of rejections from the TED team. I prepared the hell out for it.
The Whole Process
When I first came across the news, about TEDxNITH happening about 6 months before the event, I started thinking about what I’d want to talk about. I ended up talking about something completely different (Getting Out Of Lazy Hostel Beds) from what I’d initially imagined (Why We Tell Stories) —
This whole process— from the first sequins of writing, to the first draft of the talk, to re writing it, to chucking the initial idea completely, to then start from scratch with a new idea, writing it, re drafting it, completely re writing the whole of it, then practicing it all by myself for weeks, was a hell of a learning experience. It was daunting. Every time I’d forget from my script and on top of that fail at bridging the gap with my own words, it’d feel like bedraggled butterflies, drunken in the damp cold morning breeze of mountainous summer, going ever which-way in the stomach. Not to mention constant nags of consternation, that I’d wreck my talk.
What is this publication and why did I start it?
As many other TEDx speakers, I started with a simple google search—
“How to give a good TEDx Talk”
And ended stumbling upon and watching Chris Anderson’s video below.
And many other official and non-official content about the same. These pointers that I got from the links following this google search were very inspirational exact and directional. They weren’t very helpful though before I had an idea in mind. To put it in a metaphor, if an engineer is asked to complete a task without a problem statement, he might take forever. So, I started forming the idea, and started writing about it to clarify what I really wanted to share, what my core idea was. (more on this in another article).
When I didn’t seem to be going anywhere, I took a week’s break and devoured as many TEDx talks related to what I wanted to talk about as possible. During this time, I realised something —
People were so eager to give a TEDx talk, drawn from obvious lure that it offered — to get their video up on TEDx Youtube Channel — there were a lot of talks that, by the looks of them, hadn’t been given enough time to prepare and be clear about their idea.
I didn’t think much about it, until after my talk, when I came home and ordered Chris’s book (which was late on my part, but well, better late than never). I read the book and while doing so, simultaneously went over those talks that I’d bookmarked, thinking I would be able to use them to analyse them with Chris’s invaluable points in his book, and my own from experience of having prepared and delivered for a TEDx talk.
This Medium Publication is the result of the idea that I could produce analytical and subjective data points about what worked in a TEDx talk from the perspective of a listener and also from the point of view of a one time TEDx speaker.
Over the course of several weeks, gradually, I’ll pick up TEDx talks, starting with my own, and point out what could have worked better, and how.
Of course, like an examination, how you end up giving a talk, when you hadn’t given one before, depends on your state of health, confidence, whether you are so nervous that you are forced to pee every 3 minutes, who your audience is. But that is a state of time I’m familiar with. So I’ll do my best to keep these variant parameters for a successful talk as a constant background to my analysis.
See you soon with the first one!
