'Ted talk' books: read them with much scepticism
(In this email, you see a Ted talk that breaks so many of the 'Ted talk' rules - and you see how this emboldens us.)
Ted talks have amassed hundreds of millions of YouTube views. We can buy dozens of books on how to ‘Talk Like Ted’. Some schools cruelly force-feed their kids one Ted talk a week. The talks even change our vocabulary. “Recently when presenting at work,” someone told me, “I tried something new – I did a ‘Ted-type’ talk… no slides!” “Wow,” I replied breathlessly, “we used to call that ‘talking’." It’s what we did before PowerPoint. And what we do with mates (do you show slides when chatting in the pub...?).
Then again, after 25 years of mind-numbingly dull PowerPoint slides, Ted talks seem like a breath of fresh air. According to experts, they epitomise the great ‘new’ way forward, e.g. avoid bullets, etc, etc. Really…? Let’s analyse one.
What made Milwaukee famous: try this one on civic flags(!) by someone called Roman Mars. Over 3m views. Laugh-out-loud funny. It just keeps building until it reaches wonderful conclusions - hold your head high, Amsterdam; hang your heads low, Milwaukee and Pocatello (this last one appears near the end... don't miss it).
Notice the talk has many slides... but that’s fair game. Roman shows flags. However, as we see, his talk embodies the opposite of most Ted talks – and below, “items in quotes" are ‘rules’ for Ted talks, and numbers are the talk's timings in minutes and seconds.
“Avoid bullets” Really? Study 8.35 to 8.42. Bullets. Achingly ugly ones too - just black and white. Plus they unnecessarily word-wrap over two rows.
“Avoid small fonts” Yet 4.01 to 4.22 has fonts that are surely illegible to those at the talk.
“Involve people – early on, maybe ask for a show of hands… or ask for two shows to highlight contrasting results!!!” Roman never does this.
“Don’t read a speech or stare at a script” Roman does.
“Tell a Story" One with good guys and bad guys. Roadblocks. A hero that emerges transformed, blah, blah. Nah.... they're all absent from Roman’s talk. In fact, he doesn't even tell 'normal' stories (“I met this person last week etc, etc”).
“Use pace, posture, gesture” Odd… Roman stays rooted to his chair throughout.
There’s more. He uses racy phrases - see 1.36 to 1.55 (I couldn’t say that on a training day). Also, he eschews the Ted trick of 'deep' numbers ("3.5bn - think about that"...)
Finally he somewhat bizarrely dices with disaster. His talk is more tightly orchestrated than a West End show, with multiple voiceovers, plus weird rinky-dink background music (16.25 on – would you include that in your lunch-and-learn?!). The talk is so tightly orchestrated, it’s an IT malfunction waiting to happen.
OK. It does follow one Ted ‘rule’. It's 18 minutes long.
|