Free How to Deliver a Great TED Talk: Presentation Secrets of the World's Best Speakers (How to Give a TED Talk) by Akash Karia

audience that’s influenced by our nonverbals, and that’s ourselves”
    ARGUE AGAINST CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
    Thousands of talks are available on the Internet about the power of goal setting. It’s conventional wisdom that goal setting helps you achieve more success. However, what if that’s not true? What if, as Leo Babauta argues in this article , the best goal is no goal?
    Arguing against conventional wisdom is a great way of keeping your audience hooked into your speech. Because you’re taking an unexpected stand, your audience members will be interested in what you have to say and curious to find out why you are saying it. Of course, you should only argue against conventional wisdom if you think it’s wrong.
    Consider another example. It’s conventional wisdom that more choices result in more happiness. The more choices you have about what to eat, the more satisfied you will be when you make your decision. The more choices you have about how to invest your money, the happier you will be. Right?
    In this fascinating TED talk , Barry Schwartz argues that having too many choices leads to the consumer feeling bewildered when making a choice and less satisfied even after choosing. His argument was backed up by research studies and examples. It was a very captivating TED talk because it changed the audience’s view on the topic and gave them a new way to look at an old topic.
    Now, you may be thinking, “Akash, what if I don’t have anything new to talk about? What if I haven’t invented anything revolutionary? What if the issue I want to address is something that lots of other speakers have already talked about before? What if I can’t argue against conventional wisdom because the conventional wisdom is correct?” Again, don’t worry. There are two other ways that you can avoid your presentation being entirely predictable.
    DIG OUT STORIES FROM ACADEMIC RESEARCH
    There are a lot of great stories hidden in academic research. However, most of these stories are known only within the academic circle. If you’re willing to wade through the tomes of academic research, you can unearth great stories and statistics that you can use in your speeches and presentations to offer your audience something new.
    Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell is an expert at breathing life into academic research. My two favorite books by Gladwell, “ Blink” and “ Tipping Point,” bring to life stories from academic research.
    In his TED talk on “Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce,” Gladwell brings to life the story of Dr. Howard Moskowitz. This story was quite well known in the field of psychophysics, but wasn’t well known to the general population. In his TED talk, Gladwell shares the story with his audience members. Here is a short excerpt from Gladwell’s speech:
“…I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years. A man who is a great personal hero of mine. Someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.
Howard’s about this high, and he’s round, and he’s in his sixties, and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he’s a great aficionado of medieval history. And by profession, he’s a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter)
As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. He graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. One of his first clients was — this is many years ago, back in the early ‘70s — one of his first