Ryan Hildebrandt

I’m ready to go. I’m happy to be here guys. Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Well, as you would imagine, it’s a complex world.

If you think about learning how to do a TED Talk a little like getting a job, there are things you can do to be a good speaker. You can go to Toastmasters, and you can do a lot of public speaking. You can work on your platform, on your Twitter following, and things like that, but that’s a little like being a good employee. You can be a great employee and not have a great resume and not have a great interview style.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Rather than purely focusing on being a great speaker, work on your pitch and make sure your pitches are good.

We can talk about that later. I’m sure we’ll dig into a ton of detail there on how to do a TED Talk.

Ryan Hildebrandt

This is probably going to surprise a lot of people. I’ve had students that have applied to TEDx Talks before and been rejected. Then, made a few tweaks to their pitch, and been accepted.

Ryan Hildebrandt

The applications I’ve seen, I’ve seen about 200 of them. People will say, “Hey. I’m a professional speaker.” “I’m this amazing speaker.” “I’m so qualified to have this book.” And they spent almost no time telling us what they’re going to say.

Ryan Hildebrandt

The biggest thing I can suggest people do is to spend most of your time in the application, clearly communicating what your real message is. Not your field but your actual message. Spend a little bit of time on why you’re qualified to speak on that message.

Maybe it’s the book you’ve got or your personal experience or you studied a field or if you have a podcast on that topic. Then, ideally, not so much time at all talking about how good of a speaker you are.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Maybe people know this but TED’s whole theme if you will, or tagline is “ideas worth spreading.” It’s not speakers worth listening to or speakers that have a significant Twitter following. It’s “ideas worth spreading.” That’s the biggest thing.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Yeah. It is tough because of course, you’ve been working in your field for a while, and you feel like it’s important and that it does hurt to get turned down.

Ryan Hildebrandt

The first thing I would say as an encouragement to people is that there’s no such thing as an inherently universally bad idea or universally good idea.

Even though I think I’ve got “okay” judgment on things, there are ideas that we turn down. And that those same speakers that we turn down, I saw they got invited to other TEDx events later.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Sometimes, it’s down to the themes. It just doesn’t a fit. Sometimes, one particular theme attracts a bunch of people to approach the theme from the same type of angle, and you get a lot of individuals that they kind of sound the same and it just the luck of the draw.

For example, if you’ve got a bunch of people that all want to talk about political things and they all sound similar, you probably, as an organizer, only going to select one because you want to have an event that’s varied and exciting.

Ryan Hildebrandt

I would encourage people not to get discouraged if they get turned down once or twice. It’s maybe your responsibility to go back and refine things, but it’s not like an ultimate judgment on your idea.

Every TEDx event is independently organized. That’s what the little “x” means and that means you can apply to as many events as you want to and if one rejects you, you can apply to 10 more. Somebody in those ten may think your idea is great.

Ryan Hildebrandt

It’s not that your idea is inherently bad, although there are things you can do to improve your ideas or improve your pitch or figure out if your idea is good or not or is appealing to an audience before you get rejected. I guess that’s all that aside.

Now, I can share some things about how I would recommend somebody evaluate their idea before risking getting rejected.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Yes.

Ryan Hildebrandt

I guess the mindset shift I advocate for is it’s not up to you to decide if you have a good idea or not, and that may be controversial because people think, “Oh. I’m an artist, and I’m in creative. The people just don’t get it.” Ultimately, it’s like marketing.

There are things you can do to test your idea out and see what it is other people respond to.

I’ll tell you a little story to demonstrate this.

Ryan Hildebrandt

When I first started this TEDx event, it’s in this small city in England. I would tell people that, “Hey. I’m starting a TEDx event.” People, we’re confused, and they don’t get it. They said, “Oh. What is that?”

Then, I had to explain like, “Well, it’s this conference every year, and it stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and they have it all over the world, and these big Thought Leader share their ideas in 18 minutes or less.”

After five minutes or something, people would say, “Oh! You mean TED Talks.” I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, TED Talks. That’s what I meant.”

This process repeated itself several times over until I finally realized that people didn’t understand TEDx or TED. They taught TED was like the movie with the teddy bear or a person named TED, but they did know TED Talks.

Ryan Hildebrandt

In the same way, I recommend you focus instead on making sure the audience understands your idea, and you can do that by not asking for feedback, not saying, “Hey. I have this idea about how we can learn from the sex lives of penguins. What do you think of my idea?” Somebody will naturally say, “Oh. That’s fantastic! I think it’s a lovely idea.”

Rather than asking for feedback like that, just introduce your idea and say, “Hey, Bob. What do you do?” and Bob says, “I’m an accountant.” and you say, “Oh. Fantastic. I’m working on a book right now about the sex lives of penguins.”

If Bob says, “Oh, that’s cool, want to play golf on Saturday?” that means Bob doesn’t care. He thinks your idea is interesting, but not fascinating.

Ryan Hildebrandt

I have a few different ways to test your idea out that I recommend in a course I just launched.

You can test your idea out and use other people to refine it, and make it clearer, and use other people’s reaction that calibrates for fascinations.

If you can get to a point where you can introduce your idea in a couple of sentences to other people, just walking around at the coffee shop or on a Facebook post, present to it in a way such that people respond with fascination or curiosity above and beyond what they normally should. Then, you know you can reliably pitch the same idea.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Rather than putting it in a Facebook post or introducing it verbally, you could put it in a pitch. You can be pretty sure that a TEDx organizer will also want to hear more about it, and will also think the audience will want to hear more about it.

Ryan Hildebrandt

I think there’s a lot, and some of it depends on who you are.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Some people just want to help the world. They want to help as many people as possible, and they’re planning on doing that by doing the TED Talk, spreading the video around. The more people see that, the more people can be touched by their message.

Maybe those people are a charity, and they want to shift people’s perspective about something. They have this message inside of them, and they feel like the more time that goes by that they can’t spread it to more people, it’s a painful thing. That’s one thing. It’s just feeling like you’re having a positive impact in the world.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Another one is generating opportunities. You touched this as well.

When you tell people you did a TED talk, and then you go on and ask for a paid speaking gig or a job opportunity or any other kind of opportunity, it’s a huge credibility marker, and it opens a lot of doors.

I’ve had people tell me they’ve received unsolicited job opportunities because their TED Talk is linked on their LinkedIn profile. It just happens to be there. They haven’t told this person about it. They found it on their own, and they were impressed, and said, “Hey. I’d like to work with you.”

Ryan Hildebrandt

People find it easier to get other immediate opportunities and paid speaking gigs. It’s a credibility marker in the same way that doing an MBA or going to Harvard, or something like that is a way that opens doors.

Not everybody can do a TED talk.

A lot of people could do public speaking, but not everybody can get accepted to do a TED talk. It’s a huge way to open doors and proves that you and your ideas are of a particular caliber.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Another one is, if you have a business or a product to sell like a book that is linked to your idea, people have told me they have increased book sales.

I’ve watched Brené Brown’s TED Talk, which is awesome, and immediately bought her book right after that, and I’m sure people like Simon Sinek have found the same thing. Anybody else who has a book, you can integrate that.

Ryan Hildebrandt

The main TED conference receives 25,000 applications to speak every year and takes about 100 of them. That’s one in 250 people get accepted. They reserve an entire session. TED has three sessions, and it’s a third of their event to past TEDx speakers.

If you to speak at TED, I don’t necessarily think it’s a better opportunity than TEDx based on what I’ve seen. But if you want to talk at TED and you tried in the past to apply to speak on ted.com, you probably are never going to be accepted if you speak on ted.com because the odds are small.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Because the way TED looks at it, you’ve already been vetted by somebody else who’s evaluated your idea on the same standard or using the same criteria they would use for vetting speakers.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Those are the big ones, and this is a bit maybe fuzzier, but this feeling that you’ve made it is one that people tell me they appreciate. It’s this big bucket list thing, and it’s now off the bucket list. They can think to themselves, “You know what? I did that, and that was hard, and I’m proud of myself.” That’s a big one.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Yeah.

Ryan Hildebrandt

I remember going through a bunch of applications. I remember going through with my team. There was one day where we went through probably the second or third stage of our applications. We went through something like 65 one-page summaries in a day. It was a nine hour day, and it was brutal.

But certain ones stuck out because we thought, “Man, this is going to be cool.” I’ve tried to distil this down into a strategy that anybody can find or follow.

Ryan Hildebrandt

It wasn’t about the specific words they used or that they wrapped their entire application up, and it was like a wine bottle wrapper, or they used the funky font or something like that. It was the quality and the idea.

The biggest things for me were looking at an idea, and I have a thinking of “Wow! The world needs to hear this, and this changes everything.” or, “This goes against what most people think is true.” That’s probably the biggest thing.

Then, in combination with the “This goes against everything” mind shift that the speaker was proposing, they were proposing something or a way of communicating the idea that was completely them.

Here’s the example of that because it’s hard to imagine what that would be.

We had a guy who is an artificial intelligence researcher from Cambridge University. The event was in the UK. Cambridge University, if people don’t know, is quite a prestigious university.

Ryan Hildebrandt

The interesting thing though about this guy was he was proposing not that “Hey. I was amazing.” or, “I’m going to change the world.” or something of that but that actually that the level of intelligence in AI right now is nowhere near the level that humans currently have. And so, that was cool.

I was like, “Okay. He’s talking about something we often don’t hear about or an angle on the topic that we don’t often hear about.”

Here’s the twist.

Ryan Hildebrandt

This guy is covered in tattoos, got long hippy hair, and a drummer in a rock band. He was going to demonstrate the discrepancy in intelligence from AI to humans with music. He was going to play a massive drum solo, and then kind of showboat around the audience a little bit.

The whole message was that “AI can’t do that. AI cannot compose music that makes people feel something or remember something, and get in touch or get connected to the performer.”

Those kinds of completely out of the box but also completely personal topics were the ones the stands out most to us.

A lot of people say, “You have to use stories when you present. You have to use body language. You have to be funny. You have to do all these things.” He had none of those things, but he was completely and utterly him, and nobody else could have possibly delivered that talk.

Ryan Hildebrandt

On contrast or the ones we got that made a shrug and thought, “Okay. That’s nice, but not something that was exciting,” were a lot of talks about being successful and they all use the same words. They all blended. I think it was because the speakers were trying to be what you’re supposed to be when you do public speaking.

They were all trying to be powerful and use certain words. By trying to be like everybody else, they’ve lumped themselves together.

Ryan Hildebrandt

When you have an audience like that, and you’ve got 12 talks, not just one. You have to have a lot of variety.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Honestly, the one thing I’d recommend is to take the first step.

I’ve got some stuff on my website that will show you how many TEDx events there is worldwide every year. I think there’s like 300 in The US every year.

Ryan Hildebrandt

If you’ve got this as a goal, and you want to do this, the last thing I would leave you with is, it’s a lot easier than you think if you just realize that there are a lot of opportunities out there. It’s not just one or two big ones every year in the main cities like New York or San Francisco or London or Amsterdam.

Over 14,000 events are happening in the next year worldwide in places like China, Australia, and all over the US. I would just encourage you to take a look and find some of those events, and try.

Ryan Hildebrandt

Thank you, guys. It’s been a pleasure.