How to Give A Great Public Talk The number one task is to transfer into listeners’ minds【T1】________. Confine your talk

How to Give A Great Public Talk
    Good morning, everyone. In today’s lecture, I’m going to talk about how to give a great public talk.
    Over the past 12 years, I’ve listened to many hundreds of amazing speakers. I’ve helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them their secrets of what makes for a great talk. And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it’s this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift—a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.
    But what is an idea? Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.
    So if you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task:
    One, limit your talk to just one major idea. Ideas are complex things; you need to cut back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you’re most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the through-line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way.
    Two, give your listeners a reason to care. Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience’s curiosity. Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn’t make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone’s worldview, they’ll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. And once you’ve sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.
    Three, build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands. You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listeners’ minds—but not your language, their language. You start where they are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands.
    For example, when TED speaker Jennifer Kahn wanted to explain the incredible new biotechnology called CRISPR, she said, "It’s as if, for the first time, you had a word processor to edit DNA. CRISPR allows you to cut and paste genetic information really easily." Now, a vivid explanation like that delivers a satisfying aha moment as it snaps into place in our minds.
    Four, here’s the final tip: Make your idea worth sharing. Ask yourself the question: "Who does this idea benefit?" And I need you to be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, I’m sorry to say, it’s probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else’s day or change someone else’s perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.
    OK, today we talked about four tips to give a great public speak. In our next lecture, we will concentrate on what speakers should do before a public speak.