Public speaking is an ancient art wired deeply into our minds. In every culture on Earth, as language developed, people learned to share their stories, hopes, and dreams. Imagine a typical scene: It's after nightfall, the campfire is ablaze, an elder rises, eyes lock onto the wise, wrinkled face, and as the storyteller speaks, each listener imagines the events that are being described.
What happens next is astounding: The brains inside the heads of independent individuals start to behave very strangely. They begin to sync up— they gasp together, laugh together, weep together— and as they do so, something else happens. Rich neurologically encoded patterns of information inside the woman's brain are somehow copied and transferred to the brains in the audience.
These patterns will remain in those brains for the rest of their lives, potentially impacting their behavior years into the future. Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality. From the first time our ancestors teamed up to take down a mammoth, to Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon, people have turned spoken words into astonishing shared achievements The same is true today— as a leader or as an advocate, public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.
Indeed the spoken word has actually gained new powers. Our campfire is now the whole world. Thanks to the internet, a single talk can end up being seen by millions of people.
Just as the printing press massively amplified the power of authors, so the web is massively amplifying the impact of speakers. What is more, we can enhance these skills in ways the ancients could never have imagined: the ability to show right there in beautiful, high resolution, any image that a human can photograph or imagine; the ability to weave in video and music; the ability to draw on research tools that present the entire body of human knowledge to anyone in reach of a smart phone. Suddenly, an ancient art has global reach.
We need that now more than ever. Ideas that could solve our toughest problems often remain invisible because the brilliant people inside whose minds they reside lack the confidence or the know-how to share those ideas effectively. At a time when the right idea presented the right way can ripple across the world at the speed of light, there's huge benefit to figuring out how best to set it on its way, both for you, the speaker in waiting, and for the rest of us, who need to know what you have to say.
The good news is these skills are teachable. They absolutely are. And that means that there is a new superpower that anyone, young or old, can benefit from.
It's called presentation literacy. I've become convinced that tomorrow, even more than today, learning to present your ideas to other humans will prove to be an absolutely essential skill for any child who wants to build confidence, anyone who wants to progress at work, anyone who wants to leave a legacy, anyone period. The campfires of old have spawned a new kind of fire— a fire that spreads from mind to mind, screen to screen, the ignition of ideas whose time has come.
This matters. Let's go light a fire.
