if you're going to speak about something you need to know a lot about it you need to know three or four times as much as you're going to speak about at minimum so first of all you have to do your background research you have to have multiple stories at hand that you can use to illustrate your point and you have to have a point you have to organize what you're talking about around a problem so before i go on stage to speak on my tour i always sit for half an hour some of which involves
usually about five minutes of anxiety and i think okay there's a problem i'm trying to address tonight a central problem or a theme what is it might be courage it might be responsibility it might be meaning that serves as an organizing principle so that would be the point and then basically i organized say a dozen stories around that and i can kind of arrange them as a journey and it's a journey that circles the main point and so i'm trying to explore it to say what i think about courage let's say but to take what
i'm thinking farther than i've taken it already and so that i can plot out you know little five-minute stories that i have that are associated with courage and then i can talk to the audience and i would say talk about what you know use your personal experience because that's that's something that you're actually a master of you can bring in other material but it has to be tied to the real world through your own experience otherwise it's not real it's also very good to speak directly to the audience to the individuals in the audience because
i'm always looking at a single person one after another and focusing on them and talking to them just like you'd have a conversation with someone and that way i can see if they're following along and i'm always listening to the audience what i really like to hear from the audience is no noise at all silence because if the audience especially you know if it's a couple hundred or a couple of thousand people if the audience is dead silent then i know that i'm on the right track and the other thing i would say is you're
telling stories so every fact that you relate or every set of facts has to be tied to a story there has to be a meaningful output which is something like why is it important to your life that you know this fact how is it related to how you're going to conduct yourself moving forward or how you're going to see the world because that's kind of the essence of meaning how does this fact change the way you perceive the world or act in the world that's the meaning of the fact and facts without meaning are dull
so you need to know that you need to tell the truth that's for sure and i mean for me my talks are really they're an attempt to explore a set of ideas in the most truthful way that i can manage and that's also an adventure because letting yourself speak freely about a topic you don't always know where it's going to go and so but that also hooks in the audience because they're not they're along for the ride right and there's a risk the risk is you might forget where you are you might lose the thread
you might say something you regret you might get confused the talk should be a process of exploration like a journey that you're taking the audience along on it's the same when you're reading a novel like a great novel isn't exactly plotted out from beginning to end to begin with the author is taking himself or herself and you on an intellectual adventure through the through the character development and the characters have to be allowed to live and to express themselves and the novel needs to unfold it's like a colloquy between the conscious mind and the unconscious
source of inspiration and the novel is actually a journey through a characterological landscape and the author shouldn't know where he or she's going to end up at the beginning same with an artist who's writing a song or a piece of music or a piece of visual art there has to be play and exploration along the way and so you also don't want to deliver an over prepared talk in my estimation or at least that's not how i do it you want to have a theme you want to have a body of knowledge from which you
can draw on and then you want to be actively exploring the idea in front of the audience and that's very gripping for everyone including you and you should learn something from the talk it's an opportunity to think on your feet anyways that's my style of lecturing it's a trapeze act without a safety net i would say and that's part of what makes it gripping is that there's a high probability of failure and i would say with any performance that's going to be gripping there has to be a high probability of failure and that's why i
don't speak with notes if you speak with notes which you might have to if you're a beginning speaker then you cannot fail because you can always read the notes and so there's a there's a net you'll fall in the net but you won't die but you'll never do anything spectacular so that's the thing is if you're going to do something spectacular you have to take the risk and if you're going to take the risk you have to think on your feet and then you also have to have something to think about you have to be
working on this material you know i've been working on the stuff i talk about for 30 years for tens of thousands of hours and so i have that reservoir of knowledge i suppose whenever i read something new i'm slotting it into the knowledge structure that i use to generate my talks and i'm reading all the time and lots of the things i read i forget they're not relevant to my central mission whatever that happens to be it looks something like the delineation of the relationship between responsibility and meaning and and maybe responsibility meaning and perception
something like that and so i have a central concern or deeper than that in some sense my central concern was how to ensure personally that if i was tempted in a situation like the situations that arose in the soviet union and nazi germany that i wouldn't fall prey to those totalitarian systems and act in the reprehensible manner that so many people acted in that's really been a driving concern of mine and that's bleeds over into the relationship between meaning and responsibility and perception so there's a core set of problems that i'm working on and every
talk is an attempt to further develop those so you also have to have a problem you know you think well you don't want to have a problem it's like yeah you do you want it you've got problems anyways if you're alive you've got problems pick one of them it can be your problem and that can be the problem you try to address whatever that happens to be and then you have something to talk about how am i going to address this problem how can this problem be addressed so you need to have a problem too
if you're going to talk just like you need to have a problem if you're going to write because the writing is an attempt to solve the problem and so is there talking if you're not trying to solve a problem what the hell are you doing talking why should anyone care it's got to be a real problem too like a you know a nail biter of a problem a dragon of a problem and if it's a problem that everyone else shares so much the better and then you grapple with it you
