Presenting in front of a crowd usually gives me the shakes. I compensate by talking quickly through slides stuffed with facts. I rarely rehearse. Instead, I’ll usually keep a few main points in my head and improvise the rest of a 15- to 20–minute talk.
In my experience, my approach to public speaking was never great to begin with. In addition, while longer, formal talks are important, I still wanted to make an impact out of much briefer chances to say a few words.
That’s why Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis founded Ignite Talks in 2006, after being barred from participating in another speaking community. Ignite is based around what it calls the “short story talk,” a format designed to make the most of really strict time constraints: five minutes max, with up to 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds. Every sentence counts.“Figure out what the essence of your message is. And deliver it fast.”
In the 10 years since its founding, Ignite has hosted over 300 speaking events worldwide, at venues as diverse as schools in Africa to the White House. This year I was invited to participate in Ignite’s first-ever event at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, as part of an eclectic lineup of 40 speakers.
When I accepted Ignite’s invitation to speak, I knew I would have to invest the time to properly prepare a “short story” talk. “Figure out what the essence of your message is,” Forrest insists. “And deliver it fast.” Here’s how I learned to do that.
LESS TIME MEANS MORE FORETHOUGHT
“If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter,” the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote in 1657. What he found is still true today: Concision usually takes more upfront work and strategic thinking than long-windedness.
But the benefits of keeping it short are often long lasting. “Ignite helped me create Startup Metrics for Pirates in 2007,” Dave McClure tells me. “I put together all the disparate pieces of my startup advice in one coherent philosophy.” McClure’s five-minute talks are peppered with profanity, and emojis grace his slides. But he founded the renowned incubator 500 Startups in 2010 based partly on his Ignite talk, which distilled McClure’s philosophy to its essence.
Ondi Timoner, the only two-time recipient of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for documentaries, mentions that “speaking at TedxKC and my Masterclass allowed me to reflect on my journey behind a camera. However, Ignite’s five-minute limit forced me to identify the most vital stepping stones in the narrative of my work.”
