Note: If you are not familiar with TED talks, please click HERE.
It’s hard to get up in front of an audience and to claim that we have something to say that is worth hearing. We know this because we pay small fortunes to anyone who can do it while keeping the audience in their seats. It happens at business conferences all the time. Outside speakers are summoned, at great expense, because nobody in the group wants to take the microphone, or if they do, they are not recognized for their abilities.
You don’t necessarily have to be a good speaker to keep audiences in their seats, however, because the audience may have been promised lunch in exchange for being cooperative. You don’t have to be good to be invited to the podium, but you have to be more confident than the average person.
This raises the question of what we might say if we had 18 minutes to make a point to a highly attentive group of people who had paid money and traveled some distance to be exposed to a new point of view on something that matters to them.
I would talk about my favorite subject: showing respect for your life experience by recording it and passing it on to those who follow you. I would talk about how technology makes this so easy. I would touch on matters of soul, and how incidental details of life nourish it. I would talk about how we lose our bearings when we don’t know what parents and grandparents thought, feared, gave themselves to.
I would touch on how we place value on the biographies of famous people, yet we dismiss our own experience. I would suggest that we all ought to be famous in our own context for the benefit of people we nurture and who look to us as landmarks in their lives.
What would you share about yourself in a TED talk? What are you passionate about? What’s real enough for you that you can’t keep it to yourself?
