How I start Cooking up a Talk
Gathering ingredients for your talk
Around 12 months ago I started preparing for the talk I’m going to give in a few weeks time. That is not to say I’ve only been building a talk, far from it! I’ve been a busy bee. But I’ve also been collating, collecting, curating notes, ideas, references, experiments and results … an entire heap of the raw stuff that might go into that talk.
I call that collating a compost heap. Fertile soil for a new talk, series of articles or even a book to grow from.
The following content has been serialised from my book “How to Speak: |Tips for people who want to tell their story”.
"Build a compost heap of story ideas" - Neil Gaiman
It's time to go shopping! Now that you've got a grip on your audience and realised you will grow and evolve your talk's overall story, it's time to pull together all the source ideas, anecdotes, quotes, jokes and, hopefully, actual topics that you could talk about.
Picking topics and other ideas for your talk is one of the most fun and creative parts of this whole process, so try to enjoy it!
My process of topic generation and filtering is like a cross between being a window-shopaholic, a kleptomania, and a completist. I'm pulling together everything I've had my eye on in the past to speak about, I'm stealing great points and ideas from anywhere I can find them1, and I'm collecting it all together like an obsessed Pokemon fan.
No source is too high-brow, or low-brow, for me. Everything from popular cultural references to academic papers are fair game to be added to the mix I'm going to use to cook up my talk.
“But I don't think I have anything to say...”
Thinking you don't have anything to say on a topic is a very common lament but it is entirely wrong and let me tell you why. Think that the overall topic you're thinking about speaking about is nothing new? Think again. Assuming that everyone has heard it all before? Stop assuming that now!
Here's the skinny: Your talk is unique, and that is its super power!
It doesn't matter whether the topic you are pondering has been heard a thousand or a million times before, your take on it is unique, it's your own. While there may be some common points to your talk and the multitude of talks that preceded it, this one is coming from you, and so it is like no other.
Or at least it will be like no other, when you realise that your audience is there to hear your take, your perspective, your story on the topic.
No one else's, just yours. It's personal, and that's a good thing. Sure, you'll collect anecdotes, quotes, snippets, facts and all the other ingredients for your talks from everywhere you can, but when you compose it all together it is your take and that is valuably and importantly your own.
So don't worry if you're not the objective expert, you are always the expert at your own perspective on a topic and your way of explaining it, the story you cook up to take your audience on, will be unique and powerful if you collect the right ingredients and keep to the story that you want to tell. You are always the expert on your own authentic story.
Starting to collect your ingredients
It's fair to say that I don't care too much if I have original thought as a core ingredient in my talk. Original thoughts are those incredibly hard to come by, sought after ingredients and, to a certain degree, are overrated. I'm happy with just having an original take on something, often Bourne of a synthesis of takes, and if I discover I have an original thought then that's just a fortunate surprise.
What this means is you don't have to worry about gathering an original thought every time you pull together the ingredients for your own talks. It’s good enough to bring your own, unique stories and perspective.
For starters, I recommend you source your talk's ingredients from:
Objective—ideally evidenced and referenced—facts2
Stories
Anecdotes
Academic papers
Jokes
Snarky remarks
Blurily remembered overheard conversation from the bar
Moments of despair
Moments of joy (for balance with the above)
Moments of schadenfreude
Confessions
Your list will go on and it should. Pretty much anything is fair game at this point—go nuts and “Collect 'em All”. Remember that this is a private list, you can include things that are unlikely *ever* to make it into any final talk. I've collected together elements such as rude jokes and personal stories that should never see the light of day, but you never know when you might be able to play with those elements a little to inform something you can add to your talk. This is the raw stuff of your compost heap, and it’s all, potential, gold.
Get it all down and don’t pre-filter
Write everything down, in a list or a mind map, your choice. Put it on cards, scraps of paper, anything at all. Have fun and use colours if you like. I've gone as far as using a quill and dipping ink, just for variety:
Do whatever it takes to not all your elements down to construct a "Compost heap" of ideas for this, and any future, talk. At any moment in time I have just such a heap of ideas composting away in a growing collection of index cards, digital notes (sometimes with hashtags if helpful to find again), scrawled notes in notebooks, deep and heartfelt thoughts in my daily journal. Anywhere is good! You will find those things again if they are worth including into something, don’t worry too much about having a beautiful system (although if you do create one, feel free to share it!).
When it's time to plan a talk I take that compost heap and sort through it, searching for a gem that might relate to the talk I have in mind. Sometimes I even throw the whole lot in the air and see what catches my eye when it lands.
Once you've collected together all this raw material it's time to begin to relate it to your talk's audience and what they might want to hear.
Mixing it up
No topic is an island in a great talk. The journey you want to take your audience on is ideally a continuous, seamless thread (on the surface anyway), happily jumping from one memorable take-away point to another courtesy of the scenic by-ways of "What happens next?", “so that”, and “which leads to”3.
Your current compost heap of ideas is just the starting point. Now it's time to start to merge things together by looking for the connections. What is the connective tissue that propels your audience from one piece of the compost heap to another?
This is where you can start to look for stumbling blocks in your narrative. Places where you are having to use the weak connective tissue of “and then” between your points and topics. An example:
“Here is an idea, and then here is another one, and then here is the conclusion” = Yaaaawn!
Contrast that with:
“Here is an idea and that leads us to this next idea so that we get to this conclusion!"“ = Much better!
“and then” is an indication that you either don’t know (yet) how to glue the parts together, which can be ok for now, or you are loading up the audience’s mind with a bunch of context before you dive into a compelling narrative. Be very wary of front-loading too much context, you’re dancing within the constraints of audience brain cognitive load and you can lose people if you ask them to gold too much in mind before you get into a story flow4.
You're looking for connections between the elements as well as any obvious connections to the audience's perspective. You build up this web of possibilities and, with this raw mixture, it's then time to be ruthless to anything that doesn't fit. Before I get into exactly how you filter and reduce your elements down, I'm going to share a little confession that will hopefully explain, in painful detail, how important it is.
It's not about you...
The eyes of my audience were wide, mouth's agape. I felt I'd won!
The talk had been 45 minutes long and I'd delivered Very Important Point (VIP) after VIP, spitting them out like bullets from an old-style tommy gun. Beaten to a pulp with this relentless barrage of high-quality arguments, all delivered at a a pace that Road Runner would have admired, my audience numbly stumbled out of the auditorium where a stocked bar of required, medicinal recovery drinks were waiting for them.
In a haze of beautifully satisfied ego I wandered to the bar myself, ready to bask in my glory.
It did not last long.
The first attendee I spoke to could only mumble at me when I asked what he took from the talk. Deciding he was simply on the odd side, I tried another. And Another. And ANOTHER. My panic grew as I spoke to attendee after attendee. The message I got was polite but damning. Each conversation took on a very clean pattern:
Me: "How was the talk?"
Attendee, stunned: "Well, you really know your stuff..."
Me, probing: "What one thing do you think you might take away from the talk?"
Attendee, becoming wary: "Oh, I'm not sure..."
Me, pleading: "Anything at all?"
Attendee, looking for an exit: "I'm not sure, umm, I'm glad these drinks are free, eh!?"
I'd failed, utterly. My one job was to connect and communicate with my audience effectively and in my rush to impart as much information as possible I'd passed on exactly the sum total of nothing.
In my efforts to impress my audience, I'd impressed no one.
Say less and kick the ego out
My mistake was two-fold. I'd said way too much, that much was obvious. The journey I'd taken my audience on was a confusing maze rather than a pleasant, and enlivening, stroll. They'd gotten, understandably, completely lost and so my goal of "communicate" was immediately flushed down the pan.
Worse than that I'd tried to appear clever by delivering such a deluge of useful information—I thought—that I'd forgotten a key tip for any speaker:
It's not about you.
A great talk is all about the audience. Their perspective, their journey, their enjoyment, their learning. I'd been so focussed on pushing points out at 10 per second that the crap filter in my audience's brains had dropped back into place just to save them from the overload!
Simmer and Reduce to Taste: Less really is more
The brain is a pretty limited place. Your audience can take away between 3 and 7 key points from your talk and I tend to aim for the lower bounds of that. In fact, I tend to focus on my audience taking one key point away with them, and really putting the effort in to make sure it's the point I want them to take away.
Right now it might seem daunting to look down at your compost heap of ideas and know you've got to somehow find the 3-5 main points that you're going to focus on getting across but it's usually easier than you think. First and foremost you're looking for the points that mean the most to your audience, that deliver the most valuer and work together into a theme, or even title, for your talk. Your strongest point likely becomes the basis of your talk's title, with some creative twisting to make it as enticing as possible5.
Once I have my 3-5, and possibly my title contender, I then select any other elements that I think might bring something useful to my core points. My core points need a thread between them, something to move my audience from one to another, and that's where the elements such as short stories, even jokes, come in. These between elements are the spice to the nutritional backbone of the talk's intellectual meal that is my key 3-5 points.
You now have the right material for your talk, or at least you have a first pass at it. It will, like everything else, evolve, and you must be ruthless in adding and removing both core topics and spicy elements as you search for your talk's narrative. This is one of the reasons that my talks change right up until the very last minute—this can be challenging when you have to submit a talk proposal to a Call for Papers weeks, and sometimes months, in advance.
For now you have your initial pass at your core topics and you have options for how you might navigate from one point to the other. It's a start! You might also have some title options based on the main point you currently believe you're trying to make. It can all change, and usually does, but you do now have at least your talk's islands and some loose bridges between them.
TL; DRs
Capture ideas, topics etc. at all times to build a compost heap of possibilities for your talk.
The most important person in the room for your talk is not you, it is your audience. Kick your ego out of your story.
Down select from your compost heap ruthlessly. You audience can only take a few things away at a time as those messages take time to settle in their brain, so make sure you know exactly what you are packaging for them to take away and that those points are the ones you really want to communicate.
The measure of success for a talk is how many of your points your audiences remembers after your talk.
(There are) No Dumb Questions
Question: I'm not the expert, should I give a talk on the subject?
Answer: You are *always* the expert when it comes to your experience with a given topic. You need to believe your story is worth telling, because it *is*! Your experiences, feelings, triumphs and failures are worth sharing, and likely others will emphasize with more than one of them, so you can do this. Often it's better *not* to be the expert, as the expert will not have half as many interesting stories to convey than the learner.
Question: Can I talk about anything then?
Answer: There's one foundational rule: You must be the expert in the story you are going to tell. That might sound contrary to the previous question, but it's not quite the same. You don't have to be the expert in the topic are you choose, but you should be an expert in the story you are going to tell. That's easy when it's your story anyway, but if it was a story you haven't personally experienced then there's danger of coming across as a fraud. Tell *your* stories, they're valuable enough.
Always with attribution, it's the law and, besides, nothing is more annoying than coming up with something original and then watching someone else use it with no nod at all to you. It's a small thing, except it's also a *massive* thing and you should always attribute!
This is apparently unnecessary for modern political speakers.
More on testing the connective tissue of your narrative as if it’s a screenplay (because it kinda is) in a future article and chapter of the book.
More on the nature of cognitive load and stories in a future article.
Your talk's titles are an opportunity to introduce and reinforce what you want your audience to take away and they are important to promoting your talk to gather the largest audience you can get, especially if you're speaking at a large event where multiple talks are happening at the same time.