7 Resources for KA Connect speakers

Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering. (4:08)

What’s your Elevator Pitch?

Imagine you are on an elevator with a person who could change your life overnight if they heard the idea for your talk. You will hit the lobby in three floors.

Can you summarize your talk in 20 seconds or less?

Write your talk as a tweet

Distilling your talk down to a tweet is even tougher than preparing an elevator pitch. (Tweets are limited to 140 characters.) This paragraph is 148 characters.

Give it a shot. Got it down? Good.

Empathize with your audience

Here’s an old trick. Make a video of your presentation and then watch it. You can get a flip video camera for about $100 these days.

Imagine you are in the audience at KA Connect and you have watched several short talks in a row. Are you interested in your talk? Do you follow it? What’s your tempo like? Are you trying to cram the State of the Union into one talk or have you built up one idea and supported it?

Read “Made to Stick”

If you are giving a KA Connect talk and haven’t read “Made to Stick,” please hit the library,  your local bookstore, or Amazon and get a copy.

Made to Stick will provide you with a framework for communicating your ideas in a way that people will remember.

Watch more short talks

You can filter talks by length on the talks section of TED.com. Watch several of them.

Got a couple favorites? Great. Think about what you liked. Borrow from them. We all learn by imitating.

Review the TED Commandments

TED.com has put together a site to help folks put on local TED conferences. One of the resources is the TED Commandments – 10 tips are given to all TED Conference speakers as they prepare their TED Talks.

Check out the TED Commandments.

Have fun

If you aren’t having fun, your talk is either too serious or too complicated or both. Remember that you are supposed to be talking about one big idea that you feel passionately about. If you have gone off the reservation, bring yourself back home.

Take your one big idea. Tell a story. Support your idea. Say less. Mean it more. Have fun. Relax.