Chasing the perfect presentation – TED Talks and the World Championship of Public Speaking

 Perfection is something we can approach but never quite reach. But professionals certainly put a lot of effort into the chase.

On August 6 th I blogged about Don’t fear perfection. In that post I used a graph of a hyperbola, as is shown above, and the idea of an asymptote – the limit that a function approaches. I used perfection as the theme for our Toastmasters club meeting on Friday, since their World Championship of Public Speaking was held on Saturday. (It was won by Ramona J. Smith).

On July 30, 2018 at Inc Carmine Gallo had an article titled 5 key steps to rehearsing a presentation like the best TED speakers. His five rehearsal steps are:

1]  Start with presentation notes

2]  Practice under ‘mild stress’

3]  Ask for specific feedback

4]  Record it

5]  Practice until it’s effortless

Carmine suggested you rehearse at least 10 times, but also described how Jill Bolte-Taylor practiced her My Stroke of Insight TED talk 200 times.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example with a hyperbola, as shown above. The percent perfect, Y, depends on the number of rehearsals, X, by: Y = 100 (1 – [1/X])

Most of us nonprofessional speakers might instead stop at 5 rehearsals and get to 80% perfect or 20% below that asymptote. To reach 10% below it, we would need to double the amount of rehearsals to 10.  

For a TED talk, a pro might instead rehearse 100 times, and as is shown above, get to 1% below perfect.

Since a TED talk is just 18 minutes long, 100 rehearsals would take 30 hours. 200 would take 60 hours. Was 200 worth it for Jill Bolte-Taylor? In the past decade the YouTube video of her My Stroke of Insight talk has been viewed over 5.4 million times.

For the International Speech Contest leading to the World Championship of Public Speaking held by Toastmasters International, the maximum speech time is just 7-1/2 minutes, so as shown above, a hundred rehearsals would take just 12-1/2 hours.

At the Toastmasters District 15 Conference in May (here in Boise) Ed Tate, the World Champion in 2000, discussed coaching the 2016 winner, Darren Tay. Just 36 hours before the championship they concluded that Darren’s speech wasn’t good enough, and started over. So Darren wrote a whole new speech, and rehearsed it, as Ed described in a June 18, 2017 article, The wisdom of a champion comes through. That was an amazingly focused effort. You can watch a YouTube video of Darren's speech.