navigation

miete ("thought") + lause ("phrase")

count: 141

filter: title = TED Talks clear

TED Talks (Chris Anderson)

Public speaking is the literal alignment of multiple minds into a shared consciousness.
Your goal is not to be Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. It's to be you.
page: 10
Ideas are always provisional. But once an idea is formed in our minds, no one can take it from us without our consent.
page: 11
tags: ideas
Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners.
page: 12
tags: speaking mind
Yesterday you saw a sequence of things and experienced a sequence of emotions that is, quite literally, unique. You are the only human among 7 billion who had that exact experience.
page: 14
tags: experience emotions unique
Language causes us to link concepts we already know in a new pattern. Speaking allows us to cause this to happen in other people's brains.
page: 18
tags: patterns schema speaking language
You can only use the tools your audience has access to. If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It's only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.
page: 18
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. The key principle is to remember that the speaker's job is to give to the audience, not take from them.
page: 23
tags: atag
Inspiration has to be earned. Someone is inspiring not because they look at you with big eyes and ask you to find it in your heart to believe in their dream, but because they have a dream worth getting excited about.
page: 28
A throughline should be encapsulated in no more than fifteen words, and those fifteen words need to provide robust content.
page: 31
tags: throughline lead
What is it that you want your audience to have an unambiguous understanding of after you're done?
page: 32
When your audience knows where you're headed, it's much easier for them to follow.
page: 33
You can only gift an idea to minds that are ready to receive that type of idea.
page: 34
Overstuffed equals underexplained. Don't try to summarize important concepts just to fit them into the timeframe.
page: 35
"Great writing is all about the power of the deleted word." - Richard Bach. The secret of successful talks often lies in what is left out, too. Leave space and say less.
page: 36
What aspect of me should I focus on for a little more depth? (2 minute speech introducing myself)
page: 39
Throughline checklist.
page: 42
If you speak to a demographic, you will not sound like you are speaking to a human being.
page: 43
Knowledge can't be pushed into a brain. It has to be pulled in.
page: 47
People have evolved weapons to protect against dangerous knowledge polluting the worldview they depend on: skepticism, mistrust, dislike, boredom, incomprehension.
page: 47
At the start of a talk, before you speak, make eye contact with a couple people, smile, then begin.
page: 50
Is sharing done in service of the work or is it a way to work through our own stuff? The former is powerful, the latter damages the confidence people have in us. Don't share parts yourself that you haven't yet worked through. A story is only ready to share when the presenter's healing and growth is not dependent on the audience's response to it.
page: 53
Laughter blows open someone's defenses, and suddenly you have a chance to truly communicate with them.
page: 54
Humor is a skilled art, and not everyone can do it. Ineffective humor is worse than no humor at all. What you're looking for instead are hilarious-but-true stories that are directly relevant to your topic or are an endearing, humorous use of language.
page: 55
Be yourself. The worst talks are the ones where someone is trying to be someone they aren't. If you are generally goofy, then be goofy. If you are emotional, then be emotional. The one exception to that is if you are arrogant and self-centered. Then you should definitely pretend to be someone else.
page: 57
Ego emerges in a lot of ways: name-dropping, stories that seem designed only to show off, boasting about your company or your company's achievements, making the talk all about you rather than an idea others can use
page: 58
Stories are instant generators of interest, empathy, emotion, and intrigue. They can brilliantly establish the context of a talk and make people care about a topic.
page: 59
The test for authenticity is whether you would tell this story to a group of old friends. You're a human. Your listeners are human. Think of them as friends. And just reach out.
page: 61
Stories expand people's ability to imagine and dream and understand the minds of others.
page: 65
If you're going to tell a story, make sure you know __why__ you're telling it, and try to edit out all the details that are not needed to make your point, while still leaving enough in for people to vividly imagine what happened.
page: 67
A good personal story without a wraparound of an idea is an opportunity missed.
page: 67
tags: story idea
Don't pin your happiness on the future. "If we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys, amidst the mess and the striving 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." Ben Saunders
page: 69
tags: happiness contentment
Gaining or losing something has far less impact, intensity, and duration than people expect them to have. If it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. This is because humans have a system of (largely nonconscious) cognitive processes that help them change their views of the world so they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves.
page: 75
For an explanation to be satisfying it has to take puzzling facts and build a connection from them to someone's existing mental model of the world.
page: 76
Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement to becoming a clear writer.
page: 78
Long-term memory depends on coherent hierarchical organization of content--chunks within chunks within chunks.
page: 79
If you imagine the structure of an explanatory talk as a central throughline with other parts connected to it--anecdotes, examples, amplifications, digressions, clarifications, etc--then overall the structure may look like a tree. For understanding to take place, it's crucial the listener knows where she is on that tree.
page: 80
Make everything as simple as it can be, but no simpler.
page: 82
tags: simplicity
Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it __isn't__.
page: 82
If explanation is building a brand-new idea inside someone's mind, persuasion is a little more radical. Before construction, it first requires some demolition.
page: 87
Modern media have an incentive to lead with stories of drama and violence, regardless of whether those events are representative of real life as a whole. By this mechanism, we plausibly overestimate the actual levels of violence present in the world.
page: 87
Instead of imagining that genius is part of some people's makeup and you either have it or you don't, think of it as something that you may __receive__ from time to time as a gift, if you make yourself ready for it.
page: 88
Many of the most revered passages of philosophical writing are not reasoned arguments, but powerful intuition pumps like Plato's cave or Descartes' demon.
page: 90
When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. In the case of nonprofits, if you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue, then you can't grow, then you can't possibly solve large social problems.
page: 91
To make something persuasive, help your audience feel like they've gone on the same learning journey as you have. Instead of just telling them facts, invite them to join the process of discovery. This will naturally lead to greater engagement of their minds.
page: 93
To make a talk truly persuasive, it is not enough to build it out of watertight logical steps. Most people are capable of being convinced by logic, but they aren't always energized by it, and without that, they might quickly forget the argument and move on.
page: 94
tags: logic argument speaking
A robust argument, even if it is not immediately accepted by everyone, will gradually gather new adherents until it becomes unstoppable. Reason is not a fast-growing weed, but a slow-growing oak tree.
page: 96
Dreamscape section indirectly talks about remembering the future. Kennedy speech, MLK jr speech.
page: 106
Paradigm and dialectic are not technical terms like DNA that specialists can't avoid. They're metaconcepts--concepts about other concepts, rather than concepts about things in the world. Academese, bizspeak, corporate boilerplate, and art-critic bafflegab are tedious and incomprehensible because they are filled with metaconcepts like approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency, and variable.
page: 100
Don't just show the finished works. Show the mistakes and dead ends and how you got from there to the final product. That allows everyone in the room to learn something from it. Lifting the lid on your process is one of the key gifts of any creative talk.
page: 100
Humans have the ability to pattern the world in their minds and then re-pattern it to create a world that doesn't actually exist but someday might.
page: 105
If you can turn an endeavor fraught with peril and uncertainty into a dream of future heroism, you can give your listeners a trip into the future to read the narrative that will eventually be told about that endeavor.
page: 107
There are two keys to sharing a dream effectively: 1) paint a bold picture of the alternative future you desire, and 2) Do so in such a way that others will also desire that future.
page: 107
"Art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering. They are in fact essential to what makes us special."
page: 109
Slides move at least a little bit of attention away from the speaker and onto the screen. If the whole power of a talk is in the personal connection between speaker and audience, slides may actually get in the way of that.
page: 113
Having no slides at all is better than having bad slides.
page: 114
Limit each slide to a single core idea. Some speakers seem to have the unconscious operating assumption that they should minimize the number of slides, therefore cramming a ton of data onto each one.
page: 115
When slides are complex, the audience member's brain has to decide whether to focus on your words, your slides, or both, and it's mostly involuntary. So you must design where attention is going and make sure a high cognitive load on a slide doesn't fight with what you're saying.
page: 116
Those classic PowerPoint slide decks with a headline followed by multiple bullet points of long phrases are the surest single way to lose an audience's attention altogether. This is because the audience reads ahead of the speaker, and by the time the speaker covers a specific point, it feels old hat.
page: 116
The main purpose of visuals can't be to communicate words; your mouth is perfectly good at doing that. It's to share things your mouth can't do so well: photographs, video, animations, key data.
page: 118
Don't use built-in templates of bullets, letters, and dashes for your slides. Your presentation will look the same as everyone else's. Start with a totally blank slide. If using photos, use a black background.
page: 120
tags: presentations
Use medium-weight sans-serif fonts like Helvetica or Arial. Don't use excessively thin fonts as they are hard to read, especially on a dark background. Use 24 pt or higher. Use __at most__ three sizes of your chosen typeface per presentation, and there should be a reason for each size. Large: headlines, medium: main ideas, small: supporting ideas.
page: 120
Simple and contrast. Black on white, dark color on white, white or yellow on black. One color of font per presentation.
page: 121
tags: contrast
What not to do. Bullets belong in the Godfather, avoid them at all costs. Dashes belong in the Olympics, not at the beginning of text. Don't underline or italicize. Bold is OK.
page: 122
Use slide builds, don't show all the elements at once. This focuses people's attention on one idea at a time.
page: 122
Pictures of your team matter to you but not to your audience. If you must have one, depict your team in context during the presentation.
page: 123
tags: teams audience
A badly produced video will have your audience thinking more about its poor quality than about its content. Video should only be used to explain something that can't be explained by images.
page: 124
Avoid transitions like the plague. If there is no reason for one, don't use one. Your transition should never call attention to itself. (Dissolve and cut might be OK, but that's it).
page: 124
Try your talk and slides out on family and friends who are not in your field. Ask them afterward what they understood, what they didn't, and what further questions they have.
page: 126
Never give a presentation unless you've walked through your slides, especially videos, on the equipment that will actually be used to show them.
page: 126
In all things with graphics, less is more.
page: 128
One of the first key decisions you need to make is whether you will: write out the talk in full as a complete script (to be read, memorized, or a combination of the two), or have a clearly worked-out structure and speak in the moment to each of your points.
page: 132
tags: speaking
Being read to and being spoken to are two very different experiences. In general, audiences respond far more powerfully to the latter.
page: 134
Human-to-human communication is a dynamic process, unfolding in real time. We can sense that someone truly means what they're saying in the moment, and that helps give us permission to embrace that meaning.
page: 133
When the words are read, they may feel impersonal and distanced. It's a bit like watching recorded sportscast with voiceover sportscasters.
page: 134
Uncanny valley - where the technology of animating human-like characters is super-close to seeming real but is not __quite__ there, and the effect is creepy. (this is the point in memorization where you know what to say, but you sound like a robot, because you're so busy pulling the sentences out of your data store that you aren't able to add meaning to them.)
page: 137
If you can give a talk while the cognitive load is high on your system, like making brownies, you can give it well while focused on stage.
page: 138
Practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes imperfection livable.
page: 138
Spoken language is best, because it sounds real, like it comes from the heart, and has meaning for you. One technique of speechwriting is to talk into a recorder first, then transcribe it, and use that as an initial draft of your speech.
page: 139
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it is purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning.
page: 140
It is important to distinguish unscripted from unprepared. There's no excuse for the latter. They result in half-baked explanations, non sequiturs, key elements missed, and rambling overruns.
page: 141
Pitfalls of unscripted: Suddenly you can't, in the moment, find the words to explain a key concept; you leave out something crucial.
page: 142
Every word you speak that someone has already seen on a slide is a word that carries zero punch. It's not news anymore.
page: 142
Aim to tease the arrival of a slide before revealing it. "And that brings us to the future of cities [click]", is much more powerful than "[click] Ah, yes. Next I want to talk about the future of cities."
page: 143
Memorization is something like a soldier's combat training; when the moment of battle comes, you want to be operating by instinct, not by conscious thought.
page: 144
tags: elizabeth gilbert memorization
"You know how when you give a talk, you like certain parts more than others? You have to love every single sentence. You actually have to go through your script and your slides and ask the question, 'Is this essential to advancing my message, and is this interesting, really interesting? Do I love saying this line?' and put every single sentence and slide through the test. If anything lands in the maybe pile...it's out."
page: 144
tags: pam meyer memorization message meaning
Don't memorize your talks, precisely because the audience can hear memorized text very clearly, and it takes away from the spontaneous, engaged nature of speaking to a live audience. Also, when memorized speech fails, it fails catastrophically.
page: 145
tags: steven johnson memorization speaking
"When I walk on stage, I always know what I want to have said before I walk off again. But I also want to connect with these people in this room today. It doesn't matter how many rooms I've spoken in before, today's audience is always new and different."
page: 145
tags: sir ken robinson audience speaking
A great talk is both scripted AND improvisational. It is precisely like a great jazz performance: First, the opening and closing are always completely scripted; second, the general structure is fully determined before the first horn blows; but third, what makes jazz interesting and captivating is that in the middle of a tune there is always some point in which the player can go off script and spontaneously create something that captures the mood of that particular audience in that particular room at that particular moment in time.
page: 146
tags: dan gilbert memorization improvisation
Practice your speech in front of someone who knows nothing about your work. The best feedback will be from people who can tell you where there are gaps in your narrative or where you are making assumptions that people will know x, y, z.
page: 149
tags: rachel botsman rehearsing
Deliver the speech at least 5 times in your bedroom, paraphrasing the core ideas. Finish even if you mess up. The value of practice is less about memorization than about making you comfortable and less stressed. If you are confident and at ease, everyone will have a better time.
page: 150
tags: salman khan rehearsal
There's a kind of unintentional memorization that develops naturally from repetition. Memorization feels safer, but a little risk is good. Fear is energy, and you want some of that running through your wires.
page: 150
tags: mary roach rehearsal memorization
Prepare for a talk by talking. I start with a basic idea, figure out an introductory sentence or two, and then just imagine myself explaining it to people who care about the idea.
page: 150
tags: clay shirky memorization rehearsal
When people think a talk sounds rehearsed, the problem is not too much rehearsal, it's too little rehearsal. The speaker is stuck in the Uncanny Valley.
page: 152
Saying it out loud, you come up with phrases that work well. Memorize those, then use them as anchors, or landing pads to touch down on. Don't memorize the whole talk--that can sound pretty fake--but memorize the structure and those few landing pad phrases, and that will make the talk tighter and better.
page: 152
tags: tracy chevalier memorization
Things to ask your audience during or after rehearsals. It's a big list.
page: 153
It's very important to rehearse multiple times, preferably in front of people you trust. Work on it until it's comfortably under your allocated time limit and insist on honest feedback from your rehearsal audience. Your goal is to end up with a talk whose structure is second nature to you so that you can concentrate on meaning what you say.
page: 155
tags: speaking rehearsal
By the end of the first paragraph of your talk, something needs to land.
page: 158
I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.
page: 162
tags: v. s. ramachandran brain neuroscience
Start a talk by saying: "Let me show you something."
page: 164
In the opening sentences your sole goal is to give your audience a reason to stop away from their comfort zone and accompany you on an amazing journey of discovery.
page: 166
It's very important to indicate where you're going and why. You don't have to show the shark, but we do need to know it's coming.
page: 166
People may remember an event very differently from how they experienced it, and when it comes to remembering, your final experience is really important. In short, if the ending isn't memorable, the thing itself may not be.
page: 168
The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to the voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. Let's not do that.
page: 171
tags: public shaming jon ronson
Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would out 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 they can possibly be.
page: 172
tags: rita pierson education learning joy champions self-actualization
Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create the second one together?
page: 173
tags: esther perel marriage relationships growth
To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee...to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, 'Can I love you this much? Can I believe in you this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?' just to be able to stop...and say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, I'm enough, then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.
page: 174
tags: brene brown vulnerability
Many of us understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. That we cannot be fully evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion, and justice. And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
page: 174
tags: bryan stevenson hope compassion justice humanity technology holding on
If you are going to be standing on a stage, addressing an audience, it means someone, somewhere decided you had something of import to impart to others.
page: 184
tags: anxiety
When faced with self-doubt, focus as much as you can on the message to deliver, instead of the messenger. When you feel nervous or unsure, simply steel yourself and try to self-reason that all you can do is your best...and that if you can reach one person with your message and help just one person feel less alone in their experience of shame and humiliation, it will be worth it.
page: 185
tags: self-doubt nervousness shame
Use your fear as motivation. That's what it's there for. It will make it easier for you to truly commit to practicing your talk as many times as it takes. In doing that, your confidence will rise, your fear will ebb, and your talk will be better than it otherwise would have been.
page: 185
Find "friends" in the audience. Early on in the talk, look out for faces that seems sympathetic. If you can find three or four in different parts of the audience, give the talk to them, moving your gaze from one to the next in turn. Everyone in the audience will see you connecting, and the encouragement you get from those faces will bring you calm and confidence. (Speaking with friends will help you find the right tone of voice, too.)
page: 187
tags: speaking audience
Nerves are not a curse. They can be turned to great effect. Make friends with your nervousness, pluck up your courage--and go!
page: 188
When someone's looking at a screen, we unconsciously associate that with their being disconnected from us.
page: 193
They want your mind there with them. A written speech can be emailed. (on teleprompters)
page: 194
"[The teleprompter is] negative because it's a sign of inauthenticity. It's a sign that you can't speak on your own two feet. It's a sign that you have handlers behind you telling you what to say."
page: 196
tags: fred davis public speaking authenticity
Think of a talk as two streams of input running parallel. Words are processed by your brain's language engine, which operates in much the same way when you're listening as when you're reading. But layered on top is a stream of metadata that allows you to (largely unconsciously) evaluate every piece of language you're hearing, determines what you should do with it, and how you should prioritize it. There's no analog to this in reading. It can only happen when you're watching a speaker and hearing their voice. Included: connection, engagement, curiosity, understanding, empathy, excitement, conviction, action.
page: 199
Somewhere inside you there is an algorithm for trust. An algorithm for credibility. And algorithm for how emotions are spread from one brain to another. They break down into two categories: what you do with your voice, and what you do with your body.
page: 199
If your talk is scripted, try this: Find the two or three words in each sentence that carry the most significance, and underline them. Then look for the one word in each paragraph that __really__ matters and underline it twice more. Find the sentence that is lightest in tone in the whole script and run a light wavy pencil line under it. Look for every question mark and highlight them with a yellow highlighter. Find the biggest single aha moment of the talk and inject a great big black blob right before it is revealed. If there's a funny anecdote somewhere, put little pink dots above it. Then read your speech again. Smile at the pink dots, pause for the big black blob, speed up a little for the wavy pencil line.
page: 201
The point is to start thinking of your tone of voice as giving you a whole new set of tools to get inside your listeners' heads. In addition to wanting them to understand you, you want them to feel your passion. And you do that by showing them your passion.
page: 202
tags: tone voice presenting
For great examples of the right use of voice, check out talks by Kelly McGonigal, Jon Ronson, Amy Cuddy, Hans Rosling, and Sir Ken Robinson.
page: 203
I ask people to imagine they've met up with friends they went to school with and are updating them on what they've been up to. It's that kind of voice you're looking for. Real, natural, but unafraid to let it rip if what you're saying demands it.
page: 203
In general, understanding outpaces articulation. In other words, it usually takes the speaker's brain circuits more time to compose than the listener's to comprehend (except for complex explanation moments, where you __should__ slow down). Don't go much slower than your normal conversational voice.
page: 203
Oration is capable of conveying passion and urgency and outrage, but it struggles with the many more subtle emotions. If you were speaking to a single person, you would not orate. You could not build a day-long conference program around oration.
page: 205
tags: passion speaking emotion
Constant pacing can be tiring to watch. Pacing punctuated by stillness can be powerful.
page: 207
As with your wardrobe choice, once you've found a presentation style that works for you, don't overthink it. Don't try to be someone else. Focus on your content and your passion for it... and don't be afraid to let your own personality shine through.
page: 208
"Say it like yourself. Don't mimic someone else's style or conform to what you think is a particular "TED way" of presenting. That's boring, banal, and backward. Don't try to be the next Ken Robinson or the next Jill Bolte Taylor. Be the first you.
page: 208
tags: dan pink voice style
Substance matters more than style. Ultimately, it's all about the idea.
page: 223
That it was possible to own your future. No matter what life had served you, you could find a way to shape it, and in so ding make a difference for others too.
page: 230
For my entire entrepreneurial life, my mantra 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.
page: 231
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 the larger pattern that you can gain actual understanding.
page: 232
Many of our assumptions about the value and purpose of knowledge and how to acquire it--including the structure of our entire educational system--are leftovers from the industrial age. In that era, the key to success was for a company, or country, to develop massive expertise in production of physical goods. This required deep specialist knowledge.
page: 233
Instead of ever-greater amounts of ever-more-specialized knowledge, we're going to need contextual knowledge, creative knowledge, and a deeper understanding of our own humanity.
page: 235
A deeper understanding of our own humanity comes not from listening to your parents or your friends, nor to psychologists, neuroscientists, historians, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, or spiritual teachers. It comes from listening to __all__ of them. This knowledge can only be assembled from a massive variety of sources.
page: 236
Public speaking is entering a renaissance, because we're entering an era where we all need to spend a lot more time learning from each other.
page: 237
Almost every human born at almost every place and moment in history has had their potential capped by a single fact over which they had almost no control, namely, the quality of the teachers and mentors they had access to.
page: 242
Youtube is a shining example of crowd-accelerated innovation. By far, the most exciting application of this type of innovation is the world of ideas.
page: 244
Halfway through a riveting talk on the power of memes, Dennett said this: "The secret of happiness is: find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it."
page: 246
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 pursuing an idea that's bigger than you are.
page: 247
"[A talk is] not about being right, or safe--it seems to me--so much as about having a staggering opportunity to create something that will breed further ideas."
page: 248
tags: bruno guissani ideas talks
When we say "Be reasonable," we're saying, "Please look at the issue from a broader perspective."
page: 251