How to Explain Complicated Things

You may remem­ber a time when it was dif­fi­cult to make it through the day with­out hear­ing some­one cite a TED Talk. A major tech­no­log­i­cal rea­son for that was stream­ing video’s new acces­si­bil­i­ty on prac­ti­cal­ly every­one’s com­put­er (espe­cial­ly those of peo­ple bored at work). A major cul­tur­al rea­son was there was a con­sid­er­able demo­graph­ic over­lap between those who knew their way around the new video-shar­ing realms of the inter­net and those like­ly to want to hear a “thought leader” speak for eigh­teen min­utes or less. Whether schools kill cre­ativ­i­ty, the mechan­ics of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, what hap­pens when you reply to spam e‑mail: these are just a few of the sub­jects that most aggres­sive­ly cap­ti­vat­ed the minds of the sud­den­ly large and chat­ty TED Talk audi­ence of the late two-thou­sands and ear­ly twen­ty-tens.

Since those days, some of the most pop­u­lar TED Talks ever giv­en have under­gone rep­u­ta­tion­al re-eval­u­a­tion. The robust­ness of the sci­ence under­gird­ing Amy Cud­dy’s “Your Body Lan­guage May Shape Who You Are” has been called into ques­tion, while Bill Gates’ “The Next Out­break? We’re Not Ready,” from 2015, start­ed to look a whole lot more pre­scient four or five years after it was uploaded.

But what makes a lec­ture peo­ple enjoy — and desire to get oth­ers watch­ing — has less to do with its con­tent than with its form and deliv­ery. That’s one les­son we can take from the new ani­mat­ed video above, “How to Explain Some­thing Com­pli­cat­ed,” the eighth and most recent in TED-Ed’s series “Pub­lic Speak­ing 101”: some­thing most of us, even if we’ve nev­er dreamed of step­ping onto TED’s (or mere­ly TEDx’s) stage, have to face doing soon­er or lat­er.

When explain­ing any com­plex mat­ter, from your star­tup’s mis­sion to just how your broth­er met his bride, it helps to draw on famil­iar exam­ples. This les­son does that using, nat­u­ral­ly, a TED Talk, iden­ti­fy­ing and break­ing down the ways in which social psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gilbert’s “The Sur­pris­ing Sci­ence of Hap­pi­ness” exem­pli­fies a suite of tech­niques in the pub­lic speak­er’s arse­nal. These include spark­ing your lis­ten­er’s curios­i­ty right away; intro­duc­ing them to the first con­cept you’ll be dis­cussing while doing so, as the base of a “tow­er” to be built one by one with sub­se­quent con­cepts; and lead­ing the audi­ence to a “knowl­edge gap” that you lat­er fill in with the “big idea” at the cen­ter of your talk. Sur­prise is impor­tant, and so are metaphors, the more vivid the bet­ter. In our age con­sumed with visions of smart­phone addic­tion, glob­al pan­demics, and the AI apoc­a­lypse, TED Talks may seem a quaint arti­fact of a more naïve­ly tech­no-opti­mistic time. But the day will nev­er come when we need no longer explain things — least of all our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Speak: Watch the Lec­ture on Effec­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tion That Became an MIT Tra­di­tion for Over 40 Years

How to Get Over the Anx­i­ety of Pub­lic Speak­ing?: Watch the Stan­ford Video, “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” Viewed Already 15 Mil­lion Times

Make Body Lan­guage Your Super­pow­er: A 15-Minute Primer on Body Lan­guage & Pub­lic Speak­ing from Stan­ford Busi­ness School

How to Tell a Good Sto­ry, as Explained by George Saun­ders, Ira Glass, Ken Burns, Scott Simon, Cather­ine Burns & Oth­ers

Lit­er­ary The­o­rist Stan­ley Fish Offers a Free Course on Rhetoric, or the Pow­er of Argu­ments

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.