Talk Like TED
Carmine Gallo
Talk Like TED is Carmine Gallo's analysis of the most-watched TED talks, reduced to nine habits: unleash a passion you actually have, tell stories, hold a conversation rather than give a speech, teach something new, deliver a jaw-dropping moment, use humour, stay within eighteen minutes, engage more than one sense, and stay authentic. For a work presentation the usable core is smaller: open with a story, organise in threes, keep it short, use one image that lands, say the whole thing in one sentence, and rehearse out loud until it sounds unrehearsed.
Your next presentation opens with an agenda slide. The room decides in sixty seconds whether to listen. A coach who took apart the talks people actually watch explains what goes in those sixty seconds.
The book in essence
Gallo, a communication coach who had earlier written on Steve Jobs's presentations, watched hundreds of hours of TED talks and interviewed speakers and neuroscientists to find what the spreading ones shared. The pattern was consistent. They opened with a story, often personal, and the audience's brains, which run stories as simulations, were engaged before any argument arrived. They organised content in threes, the most a listener holds without a list. They stayed under eighteen minutes, the format's limit and roughly the limit of attention. They had a moment, an image or a demonstration, that the audience described afterwards instead of the argument. And, least glamorously, they had rehearsed enormously; the most natural-seeming talks were the most practised. Gallo frames it all as passion and authenticity, which is true for the stage; for a Tuesday meeting the transferable parts are the order, the count, the length and the rehearsal.
Published in 2014, it sits with Made to Stick as the practical half of a pair: the Heaths explain why stories and concreteness stick, Gallo shows the best speakers using them.
Who it's for
- Anyone who presents to a room and opens with an agenda slide
- Specialists who know their material and lose the room anyway
- Readers who want a short, usable rule set rather than a theory of rhetoric
Who it's not for
- — Readers who find the TED register grating; Gallo admires it without reservation
- — Anyone wanting the science in depth; it is cited to support the habits, not examined
Key lessons
01
Open with a story, not an agenda
A story is a simulation the listener runs; an agenda is a list they skip. The first sixty seconds decide whether the room listens, and one person's experience of the problem earns them.
A team lead opens the payments incident review with a customer in Antalya charged twice on a Saturday. The chief executive's first question is about the customer, not the charts.
02
Say three things, and say there are three
Three is the largest number an audience holds without writing it down. Organise the content in three parts, announce the count, and cut the fourth however much you like it.
What broke, what it cost, what changes. The engineer is approved before the evidence slides are reached.
03
Say the whole talk in one sentence
If you cannot say the talk in one sentence, you do not yet know what it is about. Write the sentence first, build the deck to serve it, and repeat it at the end.
'One weekend bug cost us forty support hours and one engineer for a month prevents the next one' is the talk; eleven charts were not.
04
Rehearse out loud until it sounds unrehearsed
The most natural-seeming speakers had practised the most. Say the talk out loud, start to finish, at least once before the room; you will hear the sentence that does not work.
A manager rehearses in the car on the way in and finds the opener is a warm-up and the ask is missing. Both are fixed before the meeting.
Try this today
For your next presentation, write the one sentence it is about and the sixty-second opening story before you touch a slide, then say both out loud once.
Quick check
Why do the best talks open with a story?
What did Gallo find about the most natural-seeming speakers?
Selected quotes
“Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century.”
“Stories are data with a soul.”