Five Things I Learnt from Giving a TED talk–aka a Masterclass in Storytelling
Earlier this year, I was on holiday in India, and noticed a last minute an open call for TED@BCG on my LinkedIn feed. The deadline was only two days away (!), but I had an idea, based on the unique model of Newman’s Own Foundation, which owns the eponymous food company. 100% of the profits made from the sale of Newman’s Own products go to the Foundation, in service of our mission. People are always surprised to hear that and want to know how it’s done and how other companies can do this too.
I won't give too much of the TED talk away before it comes out, but let’s just say the talk is about what salad dressing can teach us about doing business, philanthropy, and capitalism differently. Literally and metaphorically. We went all in on salad dressing as a through-line.
I thought I knew about public speaking given my experience putting on social impact events at the Clinton Global Initiative writing speeches and moderator questions, giving countless speeches during my time at MIT Solve in front of hundreds of attendees, and interviewing luminaries such as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Yuval Noah Harari, and Liev Schreiber. Turns out I knew far less than I thought.
I learnt more in three months of prep for this talk than the prior 10+ years of public speaking combined. My five key takeaways, with a particular thank you to Briar Golberg for coaching me through it all:
1. Prepare, prepare, prepare: Giving a TED-level quality talk is hours and hours of preparation over several months. They said you should plan to devote about 50 hours to it. I think I probably gave it 80-100 hours in the end. I have never put in so much effort per word. Drafting. Cutting. Editing. Fact-checking. Visuals. Learning. Rehearsing. Choosing among 5 shoe options. Good news is I did not waste a lot of time on the rest of the outfit as they recommended: no white, no black, no sparkles, and no stripes. Everything I own except this one blue MMLaFleur dress is white, black, sparkly, or stripey.
2. Get the hook right. All good talks, just like any good film or TV series, have a strong opening, which hook you in so that you want to hear more. For a talk, it can be starting with a personal story or a controversial cold open where the audience is puzzled and asks… wait what? Within the first minute, you also want to establish your credentials whether that is your lived experience or expertise, demonstrating why you are giving this talk, versus anyone else in the world.
3. Find the through-line. You should be able to state the throughline of your talk in one sentence. That’s not the title, but the core of your idea, which should be new and innovative and at least a bit contrarian to orthodoxy. Fun side note on titles: TED has several people on staff who are on charge of A-B testing the best titles for your TED talk. Unfortunately, their job title is not ‘Head of Titles’. I have not met them, so I do not know if they are disappointed about that, but I am.
4. Kill your darlings. Be prepared to write broadly and cut deeply as your talk evolves. I probably wrote three times more than what ended up in the actual talk, and it was stronger for first writing expansively and then editing down to a concise 12 minutes (again, thank you to Briar there!).
5. Memorize directionally. No notes and no teleprompter! That does panic a lot of people. This is where my high school years as a drama nerd did come in handy: I can still recite the key passage of Shakespeare’s As You Like It as a party trick when needed. There are different techniques to learn your talk for different learners: visual, listening, experiential. Overall, you want to know the content so well but also so naturally and authentically that you can say it in a slightly different way each time. Why? If it’s memorized word for word and you mess up, then the chatter in your head might be: “Oh no no no! I said the wrong word” or “Who is that annoying person who dropped their phone?”, and then you’ve lost your train of thought and your talk in the process…
Overall, the experience was a true masterclass for me in public speaking and storytelling, and I am deeply grateful for the Boston Consulting Group and TED for giving me this opportunity. The TED staff are some of the, if not the, best speaker coaches, curators, editors, and humans out there. They spend countless hours helping you hone your talk until it’s the best it can be.
My talk is not yet out (post-editing takes time too!), but in the meantime, do check out some great TEDx talks from our grantee partners (links in comments):
Photo at TED@BCG - by Gilberto Tadday / TED 2024
