Communication
by Carmine Gallo
What makes a talk stick?
Carmine Gallo watched hundreds of TED talks and interviewed the speakers behind some of the most popular. He boiled what they do down to nine secrets. The best talks, he found, are emotional, novel and memorable, and each secret serves one of those three.
Hear a sample · read by Laura
Gallo's first secret is passion. Audiences pick up on a speaker's enthusiasm before they've taken in a single fact, and it spreads. So find the part of your subject you genuinely can't stop talking about, and build the talk around that.
The brain loves novelty. Gallo says the most popular talks reveal something the audience didn't know, or show a familiar subject from an angle they hadn't considered. A surprising fact wakes a room up faster than a good slide.
Talking about malaria, Bill Gates opened a jar of mosquitoes on stage and said there was no reason only poor people should have the experience. That was the line everyone repeated afterwards. Gallo says to plan one such moment, a shock or a surprise that people will retell.
TED caps talks at 18 minutes, and Gallo thinks that's about right for any presentation. Listening is hard work, and the longer you go, the more people forget. He calls the overload cognitive backlog. A tight limit also forces you to cut.
Passion
Speak about what you care about most. Your enthusiasm is what the audience catches.
Stories
Tell stories. They reach people in a way that data on its own can't.
Conversation
Practise until you sound relaxed, as if you're chatting with a friend.
Something new
Teach the audience something they didn't know before they walked in.
A big moment
Give them a moment they'll remember, like Bill Gates letting mosquitoes loose in the room.
A story from the book
Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson got one of the longest standing ovations TED had seen. Gallo breaks the talk down using Aristotle's three kinds of persuasion. Most of it is pathos, the appeal to feeling, told through stories about his grandmother and his clients. Only a small part is data.
Hot take · true or myth?
Slides packed with bullet points help people remember your talk.
Myth. Gallo says pictures beat text. People remember much more of what they see as an image than what they read in a list. The best TED slides have a photo and very few words.
One thing to try
Before your next presentation, write its main idea in one line that would fit in an old 140-character tweet. Gallo says if you can't, you haven't worked out your message yet. Then plan the one moment you want people to remember.
Knotd has the key ideas from 250+ non-fiction books, each in a few minutes, in plain words. Talk Like TED comes with a Hot Take round to make it stick.
Get the whole book on KnotdOpen in the appWhat makes a talk stick? Carmine Gallo watched hundreds of TED talks and interviewed the speakers behind some of the most popular. He boiled what they do down to nine secrets. The best talks, he found, are emotional, novel and memorable, and each secret serves one of those three.
Start from what excites you; Teach them something new; Plan a jaw-dropping moment; Keep it to 18 minutes.
Before your next presentation, write its main idea in one line that would fit in an old 140-character tweet. Gallo says if you can't, you haven't worked out your message yet. Then plan the one moment you want people to remember.
Yes. Knotd has the key ideas from Talk Like TED in a few minutes, in plain words, plus a Hot Take round to test them. It's one of 250+ non-fiction books in the app.
