"Your time is limited, so don't waste time living in other people's lives. Don't be fooled by the creed, blindly following the creed is to live in the results of other people's thinking. Don't let other people's opinions drown out your inner voice. Above all, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Your heart and intuition already know what you really want to be. Everything else is secondary. "

This passage is taken from the speech delivered by Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, at the graduation ceremony of Stanford University in 2005. Now 14 years have passed, and we can still feel excited and thoughtful after listening to Jobs' speech again.

As the CEO of the most valuable company in the world, Jobs is proficient in public speaking. No matter what occasion, his speech can always firmly attract the audience and bring them inspiration and thinking. Over the years, his speech has been quoted many times and regarded as a model of successful speech. Through this speech, we not only learned his unknown life story, but also let people feel the ideological light of this technology giant who leads the world trend. In this speech, Jobs left us with too many thoughts about life.

As ordinary people, maybe we don't need to give speeches in various large public places like Jobs, but we will meet some occasions that need public speeches from time to time.

On these occasions, sometimes we have made careful preparations in advance, but the response is mediocre. Even many listeners are playing with their mobile phones below, and the effect of the speech is far from what we originally imagined.

So, how to improve your speaking skills in a short time and hold the audience's attention like Jobs?

Here is a book that can answer these questions.

The Power of TED Speech is a new work by Adache P. Caria, a professional speech trainer.

As one of the top 10 speakers in the Asia-Pacific region, Caria has won more than 40 public speeches and trained more than 50,000 people, including many senior managers from all walks of life.

Caria's works have been translated into many languages, and he himself has been rated as the most popular business bestseller by Amazon KINDLE twice. It is worth mentioning that all his works are based on hundreds of hours of intensive scientific research.

The book The Power of TED Speech is no exception.

This book collects more than 200 of the most inspiring TED talks studied by Caria, analyzes them word by word, and summarizes their success factors. In this book, Caria puts forward six principles of successful speech and tells us how to complete a successful speech through these six principles.

Next, we will take Jobs' speech at Stanford University in 2005 as an example to tell how he used these principles to complete a wonderful speech.

The speech seems to be tall, but it is actually a kind of information transmission. If you want to make your information easier to be accepted and remembered by the audience, you need to be simple, familiar and easy to understand.

To do this, we need to condense the content of the speech into the simplest core information, which should be summarized in one sentence.

For example, in his speech, Jobs wanted to convey his suggestions and expectations to Stanford graduates through three short stories. Before each story begins, he will use a short sentence to summarize the core information of each story.

"The first story is about how the dots in life are connected."

"My second story is about love and loss."

"My third story is about death."

By summarizing the core of the story, it is easier for the audience to remember the core information of the speech and make their speech concise and not simple.

In addition, the principle of conciseness also requires that the speech should have a clear structure and follow the ABC-C formula, that is, opening remarks-text-conclusion-clear call to action.

Let's extract the entrepreneurial story in Jobs's speech and understand how this formula is applied.

"I am very lucky. When I was young, I found out what I liked to do. When I was 20 years old, Woz and I started my Apple career in my parents' garage ... I just turned 30, and then I was fired ... I didn't find it at that time. Now it seems that being fired from Apple is the best thing in my life ... "

In this story, Jobs shared his frustration and persistence since he started his business. As the founder of the company, he was kicked out of the house. Although he is disheartened, he is unwilling to give up the career he loves.

He said, "I am very lucky. When I was young, I found out what I liked to do. " First, then, in chronological order, the subject tells his own entrepreneurial process. Then use a sentence, "Being fired from Apple Computer is the best thing in my life." As a summary of this experience.

Finally, he used his personal experience to appeal to college students to bravely find their favorite career. "You must find what you like ... if you haven't found these yet, keep looking and don't stop. Do your best, you know you will find it. "

The stories of Jobs' speeches basically follow such a clear structure. After listening to an interesting story, the audience can gain something and think from it.

Speech is not only a speech, but also a way to show yourself to the world and share your views and experiences. Making good use of the principle of conciseness will help convey our message to the audience and help them better remember and understand our speech.

In a speech, if the content of our speech is completely predictable and the audience already knows exactly what we are going to say next, then they will inevitably be distracted in the speech.

In order to ensure that our speech will not be completely predicted by the audience, we need to add something new to the speech, including telling the audience something new, looking at old topics from a new perspective and putting forward some anti-traditional views. In addition, it is necessary to create a moment that surprises the audience. These are unexpected principles.

Let's take a look at how Jobs used this principle in his speech.

"My biological mother is a graduate student, a young unmarried mother, and she decided to let others adopt me. She strongly felt that I should be adopted by a college graduate, so when I was born, she was ready to let me be adopted by a lawyer and couple. "

Hearing this, we have outlined the image of an unmarried mother carefully selecting adoptive parents for her son. The adoptive parents are a pair of lawyers with college diplomas. Do we think that under the careful selection of his biological mother, he will be successfully adopted by this lawyer and his wife?

At this point, Jobs changed the subject. But the couple went back on their word at the last minute. They want to adopt a girl. Because of this accident, Jobs was adopted by another couple on the waiting list. "Later, my biological mother found out that my adoptive mother didn't graduate from college and my adoptive father didn't even graduate from high school."

Originally, the biological mother wanted the college graduates to adopt their own children, but in the end, it was a couple with poor educational level. This huge contrast suddenly attracted the attention of the audience, and the unexpected ending also made the speech receive unexpected results.

Caria pointed out in the book that the best information should be shocking and unexpected. Applying unexpected principles is the best way to attract the audience's attention. It can make a boring speech interesting and unforgettable in a lot of information.

When we recall this wonderful speech by Jobs, we may not remember how he expressed his views, but we will remember that a mother struggled and finally chose a couple who were not so good. This is the magic of the unexpected principle in the speech.

Different from movies or videos, speeches can have dynamic visual effects, which can simultaneously mobilize the audience's multiple senses. It transmits information more through sound, but this does not prevent us from using more descriptive language.

Compared with abstract expression, descriptive language can arouse the audience's multiple sensory experiences, including vision, hearing, perception and smell. With more tangible details, the audience can establish a vivid image in their minds.

For example, when Jobs talked about the difficulties of his life when he dropped out of school, he did not use the abstract expression "My life is very difficult", but provided many specific details.

"I don't have a dormitory, so I sleep on the floor of a friend's house. I'm going to pick up a coke can, and I can use 5 cents for food to fill my stomach. On Sunday night, I had to walk seven miles across half the city to the Crisu Temple, just to have a decent charity meal, which was the only decent meal this week. "

These clear and meticulous language left a lot of imagination for the audience, which helped them to draw a picture of a figure who was financially strapped and made a living by picking up coke cans and giving alms from others, and also vividly depicted a picture of a college student who had dropped out of school.

Although Jobs is only telling this story, the audience receives information by hearing. But with these detailed descriptions, the audience can associate relevant scenes in their minds.

Compared with boring and easily forgotten abstract expressions, the application of concreteness principle in speech can inject fresh life into the role and leave a deeper impression on the audience. This can not only make the audience at that time involved in the speaker's story, but also help to spread the speaker's story and arouse the audience's enthusiasm.

I believe many people will feel this way when listening to the speech. It is always difficult for us to concentrate if the speaker follows the script. Many times, we obviously want to listen carefully, but we always unconsciously look at our mobile phones and do other things. But if the speaker is telling a story, we will always be unconsciously attracted and listen with relish.

In fact, this involves another important speaking principle-the story principle.

At any time, stories are always more touching and attractive than dry data and arguments. Patricia Fripp, a famous speech trainer, once said, "No one can resist a good story."

So, as a speaker, what methods can make your story more exciting? Caria pointed out that we can use five C rules, that is, the story should have characters, conflicts, solutions, character changes and convey information.

Let's go back to Jobs's speech and see how he used these five C rules to make his story sound more exciting when he told his death experience.

"A year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. At 7: 30 in the morning, a CT scan was performed, and a tumor obviously appeared in the pancreas. I don't even know what a pancreas is. The doctor told me that it is almost certainly an incurable disease and can only live for three to six months. "

These two short sentences have clearly contained two elements of "character" and "conflict"-Jobs (character) was diagnosed with tumor a year ago and was judged less than half a year ago (conflict).

"I made a slice that night ... took out some tumor cells ... when the doctors looked at those cells with a microscope, they all cried, because this is a very rare pancreatic cancer that can be cured by surgery. So I underwent surgery and recovered. "

Faced with the diagnosis of cancer, Jobs made a slice and found that it could be cured by surgery. So he underwent surgery (solution) and finally recovered (personality change).

What message does he want to send us through such a death experience?

"Nobody wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven want to go to heaven alive. But death is our destination ... your time is limited, don't waste it on living other people's lives. "

It turned out that he wanted to warn young people through this story that life is limited, so he should listen to his inner voice and not live in other people's opinions.

It is because of the foreshadowing of the previous story that the audience can have a deeper understanding and understanding of the final truth. And these are the effects brought by applying the five C rules in the story principle.

In the power of TED talk, besides the principles of simplicity, story, concreteness and surprise mentioned above, there are two principles: credibility and emotion. In the book, Caria tells us how to use these principles to achieve a wonderful speech with a large number of cases.

In fact, speech is also a kind of communication. The principles and skills summarized in the book are not only applicable to speeches, but also to any occasion where effective communication is needed. It can be said that the power of TED talk is a good book not to be missed for those who want to improve their effective communication skills.