Review: TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris J. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Because I’ve read Talk like TED before this, I’ll use that book as a comparison throughout this review. Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
Coming as the official TED guide to TED talks, just based on that you can tell the ideas in here are good. Although TED talks are arguably the epitome of public speaking events, the ideas in this book are actually at the beginner to intermediate level of public speaking.
Technically speaking, public speaking skills and the things done on stage are simple actions but are difficult to pull off due to things like stress on the stage. This book aims to get all the basics down so that the reader can be competent enough to be a public speaker.
Where Talk like TED analysed hundreds of TED talks to find the secret as to what makes a great TED talk. It presents a lot of advanced level ideas and skills. Conversely, Ted Talks: the official guide, presents all the basics that every TED speaker has. Don’t get me wrong. This book is only really about the basics, but these are good basics that all speakers should have. The idea here is that being great in only the basics is enough for anyone to give a good TED talk.
Lastly, regarding new or unique ideas, this book has one: The 5 step approach to explaining anything. Since TED talks are mostly experts explaining concepts, this 5 step approach will make even the most complex rocket science become explainable to the layman.
Overall, the ideas in this book can be found in any other book about public speaking. So, it’s nothing much that’s new. That said, this book is good and I will recommend it to anyone who has a TED talk like speech up-coming.
(However, I will never rate any book on public speaking as 5 stars unless it talks about the number 1 problem with learning public speaking: practice.)
Score Breakdown:
Value/freshness of ideas (33%): 3.5/5
Applicability & practicality (33%): 4/5
Explanation of ideas (33%): 4/5
Total : 3.83/5
Disclaimers:
– I read this entire book in 15mins as an audio book summary on Blinkist -> learn more about that here