4 Communication Lessons From the Most Ever Watched Ted Talk

If you go to the official Ted Talks channel on YouTube, you’ll find out that the most ever watched talk was neither Bill Gate’s discourse telling us, in 2015, that we should better prepare for a global pandemic (Guess what? We didn’t!) or astronaut Chris Hadfield’s speech on the lessons he learned after becoming blind in a spacewalk. Instead, the most ever watched Ted Talk — with more than 34 million views — is from Tim Urban, a blogger.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I do respect bloggers (I’m even applying to work for one). But how could this man impact more people through his talk than well-known personalities like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and the ones I’ve mentioned above? What are the secrets behind his speech? This article will show you four communication lessons you can learn from Tim Urban’s talk and how to use them to improve your public speaking skills.

If you haven’t watched the video yet, I highly recommend it. It’s called Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator.

1. Tell a good story

Humans love stories. It’s part of who we are, and that’s not a secret to anyone. From the prehistoric era, with elders narrating tales around fire pits, to post-modernity, with Japanese kids watching Hollywood productions from home, storytelling has always been one of the most powerful skills any person could develop to engage others.

Steve Jobs once said that “The most powerful man in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come…”

Gary Vaynerchuk — an 8.3 million followers content creator and businessman — once said that “Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business” and also “No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story”.

As a writer, Tim Urban understood that very well. It was a little hard to calculate this number correctly, but I’ve estimated that about 40.6% of his 14-minute talk consisted of directly telling some story. That undoubtedly helped him to connect with the audience. Isn’t that the primary purpose of a speech?

However, quantity isn’t all. So how are memorable stories produced?

If you’ve never heard about something called the hero’s journey, you should, it’s mind-blowing. The hero’s journey — AKA the monomyth — is basically a standard template for almost every great story ever told by humans, either real or fictional ones.

Even thousands of years before the first person described it; we were already using the monomyth, its versions and adaptations. The hero’s journey is much more an identification, a discovery of a natural phenomenon (like what Newton did to gravity) than a human creation.

So why in the world are you telling me this, Rúver?

Because if you learn how the hero’s journey works, you’ll learn how to create stories that will most likely resonate with your audience.

I’m not saying that this is the only possible way to produce a great story. Tim himself did not use most of this template. However, this is probably the most natural, human format ever described. Not accidentally, famous movies like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), The Matrix (1999), Spider-Man (2002), The Lion King (1994), and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) were all based on the hero’s journey.

Teaching the monomyth and its nuances would take much more than a 1500-word article can offer. Besides, that’s not my purpose here. If you want to learn more about this incredible tool, these are two of the most well-known books on the subject: The Hero of a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell (1949), and The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, by Christopher Vogler (2007). Enjoy!

2. Be funny

Tim’s sense of humour was probably the main reason why his talk went so viral. The whole speech was hilarious. Although doing what he did is not easy, you can still learn the basics and improve your skills with practice.

Even if you don’t intend to produce discourses in that same informal tone, (e.g. you plan to give academic lectures), you must still sharpen some of your humour tools. That’s because using them once in a while can make the difference between impressing people with the information you have to share and putting them to sleep.

One instrument you can use — as The Speaker Lab noticed in their analysis of Urban’s talk — is building up tension and then releasing it with the right timing and a great punch line.

Tim did that numerous times during his talk. One example is how he introduced the fact that he would show a couple of “MRI images” to the public. He said something like “I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference. I know that if you’re not a trained brain expert, it’s not that obvious, but just take a look, ok?”

And boom! His shows this image:

That’s building up tension and breaking it in the best way possible. This a great type of humour to aim for.

Yet, you must be careful. Despite the importance of humour to many remarkable talks, you should have in mind that it’s better not to try to be funny than doing that and sounding annoying. If you’re going to use any joke, verbal or non-verbal, you should test it with a couple of people before bringing it to a real stage.

3. Use slides the right way

Have you noticed how Urban uses his visual resources? It’s perfect.

Firstly, every slide of his presentation is clear and concise, delivering only one message each. You can’t find a single page containing more than two sentences. Even the charts displayed are simple enough to the point that any child could understand.

That helps Tim and his audience in different ways. The speaker doesn’t have to compete for attention against his own keynotes; the viewers don’t get lost on what Tim’s saying whenever he changes slides.

One advice that Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, gives in his book TED Talks — The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking is: If you’re going to use images, use only one per slide; and each image should fill an entire page. That’s what Tim did with his drawings. If you want to learn more about creating excellent presentations, I highly suggest reading Anderson’s book.

Secondly, he doesn’t read the slides. Always have in mind that, generally, your audience is perfectly capable of reading. (If it’s not, you’ve got to find a way to make your speech accessible, of course.) Therefore, let them do it. The slides should not be the leading subject of your address, that must be you. Don’t forget: most of the time, visual resources should complement what you’re saying, not the opposite.

If you do these two simple things, you’ll be ahead of most speakers in the world. From there, you’ll be ready to dive deeper on how to produce good-quality presentations, improving your public speaking skills.

4. Connect to your audience

As I’ve mentioned before, this is the most valuable purpose you should have when preparing a speech. That’s because connecting to the public is the best way to achieve any pragmatical goals you may have. Do you want to amuse people? Connect. Do you want to teach them something? Connect. Do you want to engage, convince, and sell? Connect to your audience.

There are many different forms to create a connection with whoever’s watching you. Storytelling and humour are both excellent examples of tools that help you chase this objective. In this topic, however, I’ll focus on a different one: empathy.

Google defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. That’s precisely what you want the public to have for you. Did you notice how Urban did that in different ways?

One of them was knowing his audience and some of their shared pains very well. Even with his talk reaching 34 million people, you still can’t say that his speech targeted “everybody”. There are 7 billion people on our planet; most of them don’t even know what a TED talk is. Even if they did, not everyone likes these conferences.

If not everyone watches TED talks? Who does?

I don’t have a scientific paper on that. Still, I would say that the typical TED persona (which, in this case, means the people who watch multiple speeches in different themes) is mostly looking for three things: motivation, inspiration and personal development.

Doesn’t it sound like the people who would hate themselves because of how much they procrastinate? Or do you think that an old countryside farmer gets stressed because he watches dozens of Instagram Reels a day? Urban choose this topic because he knew that it would resonate with his audience.

If you deeply understand who you’re talking to and what are their fears, pains, and greeds; you can apply this knowledge to cause empathy in every aspect of your speech. You can choose a topic that generates empathy, arguments that cause this feeling, and examples that do the same. When you make every person in the room think you’re specifically talking about their situation, they’ll feel like protagonists of your own story, and that’s a sign you’ve achieved your purpose.

Remember, empathy leads to connection; connection leads to the fulfilment of your goals.

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Many are the methods and tools you can use to create satisfactory discourses. Yet, telling good stories, being funny, using good-quality slides, and connecting to your audience are some of the first steps you’ll take to start changing people’s lives with remarkable speeches. Why not start today?