Book Review: TED Talks - The Official Ted Guide to Public Speaking

I do a lot of speaking at conferences, user groups, online, and other sorts of events. It’s important to constantly improve, so I take notice of any books released on the topic. I recently listened (via Audible) to TED Talks - The Official Ted Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson.

I’ve been a fan of TED and their conference talks for a long time. The overall quality of the talks is very high, and some (like Ken Robinson’s talk on schools killing creativity) set a really high bar.

TEDx talks are the extension talks. They are local events and the quality isn’t quite at the same level, but still often very, very good.

So I was fascinated to see this book was by Chris Anderson. Chris is basically the guy who runs TED nowadays. He took it over from the original founder many years back, and has seen it go to great heights. I was keen to hear Chris’ thoughts. If anyone has listened to a lot of presentations, it’s Chris.

A real bonus was that he narrated the audio book that I listened to.

The book was a little slow getting started, almost to the point where I was going to give up, but I’m so glad I persisted. It’s a truly wonderful book. If you don’t gain insights from Chris’ thoughts, you aren’t trying.

I was also quite fascinated in some of the background info about TED, and how involved Chris and the team are with each presentation. They really help to improve the final product that you see. Not surprisingly too, there are sessions that just don’t make it out the door.

The Financial Times review of the book said “Excellent; easily the best public speaking guide I have read”.

Chris describes his five key techniques: Connection, Narration, Explanation, Persuasion and Revelation. He then goes on with additional ones to avoid. The book is really well constructed, and Chris is the ideal person to have written it.

Bottom line?

I really enjoyed this book. If you don’t find the start of it all that compelling, I’d encourage you to keep at it. It’s worth it. If you have any interest at all in public speaking, this is a wonderful book.

Greg’s rating: 8 out of 10

2020-01-07