5 Secret Lessons from TEDxMidAtlantic

If you’ve ever seen video of a TED talk before, you know the basics: smart people, big stage, big ideas.  That routine remained unbroken at TEDxMidAtlantic, which — except for a few Power Point snafus and a herdlike approach to managing the coffee line — conducted its business of inspiration quite efficiently.

Instead of recapping the high points of the speeches themselves — all of which (including Will Noel’s enthralling saga of the reconstruction of a long-lost text by Archimedes) are now immortalized in video — let me share with you five other lessons I took home from TEDxMidAtlantic; ones that weren’t exactly articulated in the speakers’ presentations.

1. Live by the speech, die by the speech. No one gets asked to give a TED talk without the presumption that some kind of magic will happen as a result of their shared wisdom.  But whether their presentation style is overly-rehearsed, Power Point-dependent or mostly improvisatory, even TED speakers walk a line between imparting moments of clarity and falling apart at the seams.  Some were so tethered to their Power Point presentations that they were incapable of presenting an idea without them.  Others had delivered the same speech a dozen times before, a familiarity with the material that allowed them to build a nearly evangelical fervor… until they lost their train of thought and derailed the magic while grasping for their next metaphor.  So the next time you’re speaking in front of a crowd, relax; even TED presenters occasionally stumble.
2. Speeches from the heart top speeches from the monitor. While it’s impossible to state broadly that one style of speech was resoundingly more powerful than another, I will say that the presenters who spoke about ideas, concepts or convictions that fueled them on a daily basis were far more compelling than those who relied on numbers or platitudes to make their cases for them.  No amount of name-dropping, scare tactics or well-oiled talking points could replace John Forte‘s disarming candor when admitting his own life-altering mistakes or Naomi Natale‘s unbound passion for eradicating injustice.
3. A roomful of people who like to think is not the same as a roomful of people who like to talk. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to be the opposite: small groups of people who’ve been lucky enough to recognize one another from previous encounters, surrounded by floating islands of socially awkward individuals.  If someone doesn’t break the ice, those islands will become glaciers, and no one will ever meet anyone — which is half the point of an event about ideas.  Getting a flock of interesting people together in a room is impressive, but the transfer of electricity can’t happen if those people don’t engage.
4. Despite TED’s format, actions still speak louder than words. Granted, the event is called “Ideas that matter,” not “Actions that matter.”  It’s up to the audience to consider the ideas presented and then decide how (or whether) they can implement those concepts in their own lives.  But when you spend a full day being inundated with life-affirming (and potentially life-changing) stories, brain overload is almost inevitable.  One way to mitigate that collapse would be to suggest potential actions, either within the speeches themselves or as ancillary materials online or in print, so that attendees can follow through once their brains have caught up.
5. Your laptop is not an amphitheater. Yes, you can watch any TED talk from the privacy of your own home, or on your iPod while commuting.  But it’s not the same thing.  Like movies, plays, political debates or any other public exchange of information, just seeing it is different from actually being there.  When you’re at home, you have a million distractions fighting for your attention, as well as the ability to pause the information flow.  When you’re witnessing the exchange live, you’re forced to pay attention and absorb it in real time, surrounded by others who are doing the same.  The information is identical in either format, but the difference in the way you experience it matters.

That said, absorbing genius on your laptop is still far preferable to never absorbing genius at all.  So, by all means, take 20 minutes (an eternity in Internet scale, I know) and watch any of the TEdxMidAtlantic speeches.

And then do something about it.

Tags: audience, events, ideas, inspiration, networking, Social Media, Sociology, video