book-notes

Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds

by Carmine Gallo

Introduction: Ideas Are the Currency of the Twenty-first Century

If you can’t inspire anyone with your ideas, it won’t matter how great those ideas are.

Part 1: Emotional

Chapter 1: Unleash the Master Within

Dig deep to identify your unique and meaningful connection to your presentation topic. Your presentation is nothing without passion.
Our levels of desire, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers.
Asking yourself “What’s my product?” isn’t as productive as asking “What business am I really in? What am I passionate about?”
If your goal of speaking is altruistic, namely giving them information to better their lives, then you’ll make a deeper connection and feel more comfortable in your role.
If you’re not having a great time at a great career, it will be harder for you to generate enthusiasm through your presentations.
Happiness is a choice, an attitude that is contagious, and your state of mind will positively affect the way your listeners perceive you.
Entrepreneurial passion is a positive, intense feeling that you experience for something that is profoundly meaningful to you as an individual.
Passionate business leaders are more creative, set higher goals, exhibit greater persistence, and record better company performance.
Positive emotions, such as passion, enthusiasm, excitement, and optimism, are contagious, lifting the moods of others.
Positive leaders are perceived as more effective, and are therefore more likely to persuade their followers to do what they want their followers to do.

Chapter 2: Master the Art of Storytelling

Stories stimulate and engage the brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it more likely they will agree with the speaker’s point of view.
A narrative is one of the most powerful ways to break down resistance.
Data, facts, and analysis challenge people. But narrative gets people comfortable enough to care about the community that you are advocating for.
Aristotle believed that persuasion occurs when three components are represented: ethos, legos, and pathos.
Ethos is credibility; logos is the means of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics; pathos is the act of appealing to emotions.
A story activates language, sensory, visual, and motor areas of the brain; a Powerpoint slide activates only the language-processing center.
There is always a story to tell, but sometimes you must look hard to find it.
The first type of story is a personal story. They are an essential trait of authentic leadership, or those who inspire uncommon effort.
Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge, and so a personal experience that leads to an unexpected result makes for a compelling story.
The second type of story is that of other people. Such stories can still generate empathy, or recognition and feeling of emotions experienced by someone else.
The third type of story is about brand success. Successful brands leverage personal stories or characters for success.
Audiences want to be inspired; they need a hero. Captivate them with stories about yourself, other people, or successful brands.
A powerful narrative can persuade others that your company, product, or idea can help them achieve the success that they desire.
When telling a story, use metaphors, analogies, and vivid language, and eliminate cliches, buzzwords, and jargon. Audiences tune out familiar phrases.
Introduce a hero, or someone that people can root for, and a villain. Cast the villain as a challenge, but not as an actual person or competitor.

Chapter 3: Have a Conversation

Practice relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a conversation with a close friend.
True persuasion happens only when you gain your listeners’ trust. Voice, gestures, and body language incongruent with your words betrays that trust.
An authentic presentation takes practice. It requires that your nonverbal communication is consistent with your message.
To craft and deliver a presentation, get help with planning, receive early feedback, and rehearse in front of others.
To improve body language and delivery, identify what you are passionate about, and practice until true presence comes to the surface.
The four elements of verbal delivery are rate, volume, pitch, and pauses.
Most people slow down their rate of speech when giving a presentation, making them sound unnatural. Talk like you’re having a conversation instead.
The problem with most technical or scientific discussions is that the presenters fail to make the content visual, interesting, or entertaining.
Truthful and confident people have command presence; their look of authority begins with what they wear and how they carry themselves.
Great leaders convey a feeling of control despite the circumstances, even if there is no immediate solution.
Complex thinkers use complex gestures and gestures actually give the audience confidence in the speaker.
So use gestures, but use the sparingly and only at key moments to reinforce key messages.
Keep your gestures between your eyes and your belly button. Hands that hang below your navel lack energy and confidence.
An “eager nonverbal” style has animated, broad, open movements; hand movements openly projected outward; and forward-leaning body positions.
If you fidget, tap, or jingle, watch a recording of yourself presenting; this makes you better equipped to eliminate useless movements and gestures.
If you stand still, walk and work the room. Again, record yourself presenting, and ensure that you walk out of frame several times.
“Power posing” increases testosterone and lowers cortisol levels in the brain, which will make you feel more confident and commanding.
Fake it until you make it. And then fake it until you become it.
Delivery and gestures, mastered through practice, will enhance your overall message, but without passion and practice, your presence will be severely diminished.

Part 2: Novel

Chapter 4: Teach Me Something New

Reveal information that’s completely new to your audience, packaged differently, or offers a fresh and novel way to solve a problem.
The human brain loves novelty, and so an unfamiliar, unusual, or unexpected element intrigues us and jolts us out of preconceived notions.
As long as you relate your topic to the audience by teaching them something new they can use in their daily lives, you’ll hook them, too.
Making information new and exciting releases dopamine in the listener; this in turn makes the information memorable.
Sometimes the data you present might not be earthshaking or entirely unfamiliar, but that doesn’t mean you can’t deliver it in a fresh way.
The smarter someone is, the more likely they are to be persuaded if you give them a new lens through which to see the world.
You’ll become more interesting if you’re interested in learning and sharing ideas from other fields that are much different from your own.
Great conversations or presentations take you to ideas you’d never considered, instead of ideas that are cliché or overused.
In order to force the brain to see things differently, you must find new and novel ways for it to perceive information differently.
Pay attention to the stories in your life; if they teach you something new and valuable, chances are other people will want to hear about it.
The Flynn Effect shows that the average IQ scores have increased for each generation wherever such IQ data is available.
If you can’t explain your big idea, or the one thing you want your audience to know, in 140 characters or less, keep working on your message.
The “Twitter headline” brings clarity to your message and makes it easier for your audience to process the content.
Cognitive research shows that our brains need to see the big picture before the details.
The headline should identify what the product, service, or cause is as well as what makes it unique. Do not create a tagline instead.

Chapter 5: Deliver Jaw-Dropping Moments

A jaw-dropping moment delivers a shocking, impressive, or surprising moment that is so moving or memorable that is remembered long afterward.
Such moments create a heightened state of emotion, which increases the chance your audience will remember your message and act on it.
Identify the most important points you need to make, and then find a novel and memorable way to communicate those messages.
When you need to create a presentation, do not start by opening the application; instead start by creating the story.
An emotionally charged event releases dopamine, which aids memory and information processing.
How vividly we perceive something in the first place predicts how vividly we will remember it later on.
The brain is wired to recall emotionally vivid events, whether positive or negative, and avoid the mundane.
A “holy smokes” moment is the one moment when you drive a point home; it’s the first thing you tell someone else who wants to know about your presentation.
To create such a moment, use a prop or demo, unexpected or shocking statistics, pictures or video, memorable headlines, and personal stories.
When presenting statistics, make numbers meaningful by placing them in a context that the audience can relate to.
A succinct message that conveys your idea is easily shared via social media; it is the digital equivalent of the sound bite.
Great communicators are great storytellers; stories create impact moments.
End with a “showstopper” moment, or a high note. It seals the deal and permanently brands the message in our minds.

Chapter 6: Lighten Up

Don’t take yourself or your topic too seriously; the brain loves humor, so give your audience something to smile about.
Humor lowers defenses and makes you more likable, making your audience more receptive to your message and more willing to support you.
Unless you are a professional comedian, jokes are not authentic; but a humorous observation is appropriate and very effective.
Humor is one of those tools the brain is hardwired to react to and is key to making a message new and novel.
We use humor as an “ingratiation tactic,” making it easier to be accepted into a group. It’s a form of interpersonal communication.
Laughter induces or accentuates positive emotion in others, in order to influence their behavior and promote a more favorable attitude.
When we meet people who have a good sense of humor, we are more likely to attribute other desirable traits to their personalities.
In management, humor reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages.
Anecdotes, observations, and personal stories are not intended to elicit a huge laugh but to put a smile on people’s faces and endear the speaker.
Start a presentation with observational humor; if you try to draw a big laugh right out the gate and bomb, you may not recover.
An analogy, or a comparison which points out similarities between two different things, can bring a smile to your listener.
An easy way to get a laugh without being a comedian or telling a joke is to quote someone else who said something funny.
Quotes break up your slides nicely and provide a mental break. Avoid quotes that are common and overused, and ensure that they are relevant.
Most PowerPoint presentations have no emotional impact, so include photos or a video to lighten the mood.
Blend humor, shock, and statistics: Statistics alone are boring, shock alone is a turn off, and humor alone would take away from any serious implications.
Laughter also lowers blood pressure, strengthens the immune system, improves breathing, and just makes you feel good.

Part 3: Memorable

Chapter 7: Stick to the 18-Minute Rule

If you must create a presentation that’s longer than 18 minutes, build in soft breaks like stories, videos, and demonstrations every 10 minutes.
The longer the presentation, the more the listener has to organize, comprehend, and remember, creating a “cognitive backlog” and anxiety.
Tasks that demand willpower reduce your glucose levels. Glucose provides energy, and your brain cells need twice as much energy as other cells.
Creativity thrives under intelligent constraints. A time limit provides a focus and a framework for creativity to flourish.
It takes courage to keep things simple. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, so keep your pitches simple.
The rule of three means people remember three things really well; add more items and retention falls of considerably.
The rule of three is a more contemporary and accurate formulation of “the magical number seven, plus or minus two.”
A message map is a tool for a pitch or presentation that helps keep your content clear and concise, and which uses the rule of three.
It is: Create a Twitter-friendly headline, support it with three key messages, and reinforce each message with stories, statistics, and examples.

Chapter 8: Paint a Mental Picture with Multisensory Experiences

Deliver presentations that touch more than one of the senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
The brain does not pay attention to boring things, but it craves multisensory experiences.
When the brain is allowed to build a visual model in addition to a verbal one, the mental connections are much stronger.
Vision trumps all other senses, so deliver information as a combination of pictures and text rather than just text alone.
When paying attention to a lecture, conversation, or presentation, the brain cannot pay equal attention to multiple items; it cannot multitask.
Concepts presented as pictures instead of words are six times more likely to be recalled.
Pictures are processed in several channels instead of one, giving the brain a far deeper and meaningful encoding experience.
The “dual coding” theory suggests that pictures are encoded as both visual and verbal, while words are encoded only verbally.
Use visuals to enhance words, not duplicate.
Each slide should have only one theme or statistic; do not bombard the audience with an avalanche of numbers and charts all in one view.
Don’t just think about what you want people to know, think about how you want them to feel.
Strive for no more than 40 words on the first ten slides, and work on eliminating bullet points from your slides.
Metaphors, analogies, and rich imagery work because the same brain areas are activated as if you were actually seeing the event.
Use concrete examples as much as possible; the brain is not designed to grasp abstractions.
An anaphora is a speaking device where you repeat the same words at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences.
Props and demonstrations are useful multisensory tools to help the audience tangibly grasp your idea and the problem it solves.
Courage gets noticed; courage wins hearts and minds; courage is what you need to deliver the talk of your life.

Chapter 9: Stay in Your Lane

Most people can spot a phony, so if you try to be something you’re not, you’ll fail to gain your audience’s trust.
Successful people identify their life’s core purpose and relentlessly follow that purpose to become the best representation of themselves.
Your goal should not be to “deliver a presentation,” but to inspire your audience, to move them, and to have them dream bigger.
Be real, be yourself; you’ll never convince your audience of anything if they don’t trust, admire, and genuinely like you.
Identify your lane and why you’re so passionate about that lane. Stay there, hold the space, and be your true authentic self.