How Not to Prep for a TEDx Talk in 9 Days
What happens when two brothers take on a TEDx talk with less than two weeks to prepare? Chaos.
I got the email on April 30, it simply said, “Can you connect me to Dave please?”
That’s simple enough, he’s my brother so it was easy to forward along the message.
Two days later there was a follow-up, this time with me cc’d (like I was his boss), “We’re on a tight timeline, what are your thoughts?”
I had to read through the previous messages to see what was going on. It turns out, my brother was being offered the chance to do a TEDx talk… that was taking place on May 11 (now only 9 days away).
For context, I had submitted Dave to do a talk at TEDxGreenhouse Road on the Rhetoric of Humor. It’s about the use of humor for persuasion and is a course Dave teaches at Texas A&M University. It explores how humor connects to each of Aristotle’s appeals in the rhetorical triangle: ethos, pathos, and logos.
The original submission came in past the deadline after they had selected their speakers, but one of the speakers dropped out so the organizer was wondering if Dave wanted to jump in… in 9 days.
Dave, deep in the midst of the end of the semester at university with submitting grades, attending ceremonies, and winning awards for his teaching and mentorship (ugh), didn’t think he’d have the time necessary to create a 10-minute version of his semester long course.
For better or worse, I didn’t have any such hesitations.
Confidence is a weird thing. I have it in spades when it comes to things like presenting or preparation. I also vastly overestimate my ability in any and all sports (I recently guaranteed a friend that I could make 10 free throws in only 20 attempts; I tried it and I went 10 for 36).
But put me in a room full of strangers where I have to network with them? I become a timid, introverted fly on the wall. I’ll stick to the edges of the room, check my phone 1,372 times, and leave after 10 minutes.
So naturally I told the organizer I could do a talk on the 7 different humor personas and how they can help improve the quality of one’s personal and professional life. Programming note: you can find out your humor persona by taking this free assessment.
Perhaps because my pitch was that good, or that he was 9 days away from the event and needed a speaker, he said yes.
So, I reached out to Dave with a proposal. We do the talk together, I script most of it, and we see what happens…?
Foolishly, after a day of deliberating, Dave agreed. The organizer signed off, and we now had 8 days to put together a 10-minute talk for the TEDx stage.
Now the thing to know about my brother is that he and I are pretty different.
As we share in the talk, he’s more extroverted, I’m more introverted. He’s more creative, I’m more analytical. He looks like hipster Jesus, I was recently told I look like Harry Potter… if he was an accountant.
It’s not just our humor styles that are very different, but our speaking style as well.
He prefers to do more extemporaneous speaking - a term public speaking professors have made up to justify why they don’t practice… For many people, it leads to a more engaging presentation style because it’s about being present in the room and talking like a human, rather than getting a script perfectly correct.
Unfortunately for Dave, I am not many people. I do extemporaneous speaking for some talks (our monthly happy hours, for example) but not for keynotes and certainly not for a TEDx talk. For both of my previous TEDx talks (TEDxOhioStateUniversity and TEDxTAMU), I had 3 months to prepare. And for both, I probably ran the talk over 100 times before I stepped on stage to deliver it.
We only had 8 days.
So while Dave started “to create an outline,” I wrote an entire script detailing exactly what each of us was going to say and when, and then revised it 3 times before we decided to meet the next day (T-7 days from the event).
It was at this point that Dave began regretting saying yes to doing the talk…
Over the next few days, Dave and I spent our time fulfilling any obligations we had and working on the talk. That meant joining zoom calls, revising the script, and doing practice sessions with pretty much anyone who would listen to us (shout out to all the people who heard a draft of the talk!).
By Thursday, we were both in Houston so we could run through it together, in person, and by Friday afternoon we were feeling pretty good. We had a nice rhythm, we remembered (most of) the lines, and we started playing with the performance.
Then we ran the talk in front of our mom and it went great… except that she laughed… a lot. That’s normally a good thing, but it threw us off. We had rehearsed the script so many times with no laughter (or the silence of Zoom), that hearing chuckles made us forget what we were supposed to say next.
So we re-assessed, did a bit more practice, and did the talk again for our mom.
This time with no laughter (because she had heard all of the jokes literally 20 minutes before). So then I had a brilliant idea: we’ll give mom a soundboard of different laughter files and she can hit them at random after we say a joke.
This was a… disaster. It got to the point where we seriously considered telling the audience not to laugh (which is not great for a talk on humor).
Luckily, after a few more run-throughs with the soundboard of laughter chaos, we found our new rhythm and were more confident than ever.
Finally, the day we had been waiting for not that long came around.
We grabbed breakfast and then went for a walk in the park (hoping that metaphorically the talk would be a walk in the park). Then it was time to get ready, arrive for a tech check, and do the talk.
And it went…
Well, the talk will be out within the next few months, so you’ll have to wait and see.
Just know that we did get laughs, my mom was proud, and the organizer was happy he invited us. I’m still not entirely sure that Dave was happy he said yes. We’ll see how the video does to decide if I was happy that he did…
THE END
Just kidding, it was fun to present with my brother. Plus my first two TEDx talks were successful, so if this one bombs, I’ll know who to blame :)
PS. Our next virtual happy hour is going to feature a special guest: my brother, Dave! We’ll be talking about how to properly prep for a presentation. I’ll share insights from the world of keynotes and stand-up comedy, and he’ll share what he’s learned as a 10+ year professor of public speaking. Join us here.