How to Prepare a Talk Worth the World's Attention: Secrets From TED's Speakers | TED 2017 On-Site Report
More time, tighter control. Both easy to say.
More time, tighter control. Both easy to say.
Every speaker at the TED conference starts the same way.
He climbs the steps on the right side of the stage and stands alone on a round red carpet.
For the next 5 to 18 minutes he will talk — he may also sing or dance, and a few speakers bring out a robot for a demonstration. But until the talk ends he cannot step outside this perfect circle, three meters across. Twelve cameras are trained on it.
In front of him is a semicircular theater seating 1,200 people. The house lights are not dimmed much, so a speaker with good enough eyesight might recognize a few faces: Steven Spielberg, Sergey Brin, Al Gore.
This is probably the most polite audience he will ever face. No slip-up draws laughter, only applause and cheers to keep him going.
It is still hard. Over the five-day conference, one speaker stumbled walking onstage and nearly fell; one froze for two seconds and could not get out a word; one shook so badly he folded his arms across his chest; one walked out of the circle.
Everyone fears public speaking. Asked in surveys, a sizeable share of people say they fear it more than death.
And the TED conference is the most frightening kind of public speaking there is.
Beyond the thousand-odd rich people in front of him who can afford a US$8,500 ticket, the talk will be cut into a TED Talk video and posted online, where millions will watch it. The most popular one has more than 40 million views.
On this stage a speaker has almost nothing to lean on. There is no teleprompter at the edge of the stage, the fixture of most conferences. All he can see are two screens far off in front of him, and neither carries his script. One is about 100 inches, showing the same slides he prepared in advance as the big screen behind him. The other is much smaller, white text on black, showing how many minutes he has left.
"A teleprompter cuts the speaker off from the audience. Experienced speakers can pretend they aren't reading the screen, but it still comes out unnatural," Tom Reilly, TED's community director, who runs several of its programs, told QDaily at the conference.
There are exceptions: the occasional speaker who truly cannot do without a teleprompter but is too compelling to turn away. In Reilly's 13 years at TED, across nearly a thousand live talks, there have been only four or five.
A speaker who genuinely cannot hold the words in his head, but is important enough, may carry a stack of printed pages or set a laptop on the stage. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, had a stack of paper in front of him this year, though he barely glanced at it.
The vast majority of TED speakers work entirely without a script.
Beyond the difficulty of the thing itself, speaking at TED can carry outside pressure. Family and friends aside, the Israeli prime minister once called a speaker personally to wish him well the day before he went onstage. This year the Dutch ambassador to the United States came to the conference on Wednesday to watch the Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde.
Onstage, Speakers Are More Like Actors
"If I get too nervous up there, I picture everyone in the room naked. It relaxes me a bit," Roosegaarde told QDaily the day before his talk, describing how he copes. He said he does not memorize a script, because it would turn him into a robot.
The next day he was nothing like a robot. Across the whole conference, perhaps only a few stand-up comedians had more expressive faces.
He took the host's introduction and opened with a joke: "People introducing me often say, you're an artist, you're an architect. But recently someone said, 'No no no, you're just a hippie with a business plan.'"
A clever joke and a bit of self-mockery are both popular ways to open a TED talk.
On Thursday, Dalio played a clip of an interview he gave during the bond bubble of the 1980s, then turned to face the screen and said, one word at a time, "What an arrogant jerk."
Audiences appreciate that spirit, and speakers can read their reaction clearly. TED once tried dimming the house lights; speakers generally did worse than in previous years, so the lights went back up.
But TED is not a stand-up stage, and a speaker has to bring something solid. After the joke, Roosegaarde showed several of his design projects.
He finished by declaring war on the people who hear a new idea and say "Yes, but," and closed with the line from the Canadian futurist Marshall McLuhan: "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
At a conference whose slogan is "Ideas Worth Sharing," the whole room stood and applauded.
No Talk Here Is Really Improvised
The writer William Zinsser once put it this way: the first sentence of a good piece has to catch the reader's interest, the next few paragraphs have to deliver information that gives him a reason to read on, and the ending has to leave a mark.
Watch the whole conference and you notice most talks follow that structure — including the Pope's pre-recorded video, which opened with "Good afternoon... or good morning, I always get the time zones wrong."
But reading Zinsser's On Writing Well does not guarantee anyone will write a decent piece, and knowing the TED formula does not guarantee a good talk. Behind every good TED talk is preparation done over and over.
Roosegaarde may not memorize his script outright, but he starts from a rough frame for the talk and then spends a great deal of time committing every detail he might use to memory. In the last few days he tries to forget all of it before walking onstage.
In fact every interview is a rehearsal for him: the expressions, the rise and fall of his voice. He is like a comedian.
Here, every speaker is an actor. Designers, scientists, activists, entrepreneurs, engineers, writers, journalists — they all share their ideas through talks that are performances.
Tim Urban, a TED speaker and the blogger behind waitbutwhy.com, has said a TED talk is less a speech than "a short film, where the only actor is my face, the only plot is what I say, and the only direction is me pacing back and forth."
Of the videos uploaded after last year's conference, the most-watched has already been played 12.35 million times. It is Urban's talk on procrastination.
Urban told QDaily at this year's conference that before his TED talk he had spoken in public only six times. "Every time I went to give a bigger talk, I was extremely nervous. But since TED, I'm never nervous anymore."
That success made Urban a coach for other TED speakers. He splits preparing a TED talk into three stages: reading the script, having just memorized it, and knowing it cold.
Which is not really different from the "improvisation" Roosegaarde described.
A talk read off a script rarely goes wrong, but it bores the audience. The stage right after you put the script down is the easiest one to blow.
Urban says a good TED talk has to be lodged in your memory the way "Happy Birthday" is — down in the subconscious, so your brain does not have to think while your mouth is moving. "Like when you're sitting in a restaurant and the whole table sings happy birthday, and you can take photos and help the waiter clear the table at the same time..."
TED invites the people who speak at TED. They have generally done something interesting, so the subject itself is rarely the problem.
Chris Anderson, who runs TED, laid out in a video last year how to organize a subject: stay on one point; give people a reason to care; describe things vividly; make your idea worth sharing.
It does not sound complicated. The problem is fitting it into so little time.
Anab Jain spoke at TED for the first time this year. Like Roosegaarde, she runs her own design studio. Unlike him, she comes across as neither a hippie nor a business-plan person; almost all her projects are done with scientists.
Jain got the invitation last summer. Then she started procrastinating and left it alone.
"For a long time afterwards I didn't think about it — it was still far off. Then for a while I completely panicked. Then I started writing the script, and I wrote draft after draft after draft," Jain said, recalling the ordeal to QDaily on a sofa in the conference's second-floor work area on Thursday at noon.
When the script was done she sent it to TED, and found that what she had written was unusable.
The trouble with her first draft was that it was too abstract. She had assumed all along that TED wanted a fairly abstract talk about her ideas, and that she should not dig too far into her own work.
The answer came back: "No no no, we know you make very visual things. You should find some examples to put onstage."
On her coach's advice, she switched to four concrete examples.
Jain's work is a real-world Black Mirror: she takes what she imagines about the future and builds it as a physical thing. Going by the rate at which air pollution is getting worse, she made a can of 2030 air. Anticipating insurance companies pushing for laws to demand ordinary people's DNA data, she invented a lawsuit in which a man who could not afford his premiums got an underground gene implant on the black market and was sued by a genetics company.
The projects themselves are gripping; the coach's changes were mostly about how she used images and how the talk was paced.
"TED won't tell you what you can't say. But they'll say this point goes too fast, slow down. They adjust the length to the content of the talk," Jain said.
The preparation moves as it goes. This year's TED talks ran from 5 minutes to 18. Jain was given 12 minutes at first, then 16, then 12 again. It ended at 16.
Then comes rehearsal. In late March, a month before this year's conference, every speaker has to deliver the talk once for the TED team, either over a video call or in person at TED's New York office.
On the weekend before the conference there is one more full dress rehearsal. Speakers wear the clothes they will wear onstage and say exactly the same words, and the whole thing is filmed.
That last rehearsal doubles as insurance. If something goes wrong during the real talk, editing can repair it.
Every year a few talks are simply not good enough, and editing cannot save them. Those never make it onto ted.com — last year nearly one in ten did not.
For the Conference's Youngest Speakers, TED Prepares Even More
For the past several years, every TED conference has opened with talks from the TED Fellows program.
Tom Reilly started the program in 2008. Fellows apply on their own; those accepted get to speak onstage at that year's conference, and most of the videos go up on TED's site too.
TED Fellows are the youngest group of speakers — the program requires applicants to be under 40. Probably because of the ticket price, at the conference itself anyone in their 30s who is not staff or a volunteer already looks young in the crowd.
They are scientists, entrepreneurs, journalists, directors, activists. They generally have less speaking experience than the main-stage speakers, so to protect the quality TED requires each of them to submit the full text of the talk.
Matilda Ho, an entrepreneur based in Shanghai, applied to be a TED Fellow this year. TED began training her as soon as it announced her selection in January. Her first class on how to prepare a TED talk was on January 26, about three months before she would go onstage.
After that came a round of script revisions every two weeks. Any word the general public might have trouble understanding had to come out.
The timing is controlled precisely. First-year Fellows generally get five minutes. Every rehearsal with TED is clocked, then sentences are cut and rewritten to control the pace and the length. Ho's talk was finally set at 5 minutes and 2 seconds.
Ho's subject was patience: slowing down to run a more patient food business in a place where food-safety problems keep recurring. She has founded two companies — Bits x Bites, a food-technology incubator set up not long ago, and Yimishiji, a fresh-food e-commerce business.
Five minutes is not much. Her talk went from learning a pigeon magic trick as a child, which taught her patience, to China's breakneck growth and the food-safety problems that came with it, to the two companies she started to fix them.
The talk itself flowed well, but anyone with a basic grasp of the situation in China would want to know more.
Many speakers raised the time problem with me. The Singaporean marine biologist Mei Lin Neo said she was not used to a talk that mentions only her own work and leaves out what her peers are doing. Within five minutes, she genuinely could not cover that much.
Diego Bohorquez, a neurobiologist who studies the connection between the gut and the brain, also said a TED talk is much harder than his usual ones, because in the time he has he must also explain things he would not need to spell out for an audience of scientists.
But the time limit is one reason TED spreads so far. By capping the clock, TED holds the audience's attention and makes sure every talk stays on a single point.
Pronunciation is another detail TED watches. Apart from one small segment in Spanish, every talk at the conference currently has to be given in English.
Many speakers have accents. Ho grew up in Taiwan, went to the United States to study and work after starting her career, and settled in Shanghai seven years ago. By the standard of talking with Americans, her spoken English is fluent enough. By TED's standard, her pronunciation still needed fixing.
"For instance, when I say 'good food,' the coach corrects me that the first 'd' isn't clear enough," Ho said. In the final two weeks, a lot of time went into her pronunciation.
To make sure the audience hears every word, TED asks speakers not to use hard-to-pronounce words back to back, and has them start slowly after taking the stage, speeding up once the audience has adjusted.
After several rounds of revisions, Reilly edits everyone's script himself at the end.
"We're basically like magazine editors," Reilly said.
By April 15 the Fellows' scripts were final. On the 17th they did a formal rehearsal with TED over video. On the 21st they flew to Vancouver and settled their onstage clothes — some had to go out and buy new ones because the colors would have hurt the filming. On the 22nd everyone wore those clothes to a rehearsal on the actual stage. On the 23rd, the day before the conference, TED arranged some easy activities: cooking, a dinner.
"Are you speaking this year?" someone asked Andrew Pelling, the Canadian biohacker who spoke last year, at the dinner.
"Thankfully, no," he answered.
Cover image source: TED
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.