How to talk good
MakingLyst
by Asim Hussain · 20 September 2018
I give a lot of talks — 30-plus conferences in a good year — and the question I’m asked more than any other is some version of how do you do that, and how do I start? So I gave a talk about giving talks. This is the whole playbook: what to talk about, how to structure it, how to survive the nerves, and how to get yourself on a stage in the first place.
AI-generated summary of my talk
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What to talk about
Talk about what you love. It sounds like a cliché, but I watch people fall down here constantly — they pick a topic they think other people want, get on stage, and the passion just isn’t there. The audience feels it and fades out. If you’re genuinely excited about something, trust that someone else will be too.
And you do not need to be an expert. This is the single biggest thing that stops people, and the truth is the exact opposite. When I talk about something I’m an expert in, I skip the basics because they’re “obvious” to me — which is precisely where I lose the room. When you’re not an expert, you explain things in the language of the people who are also learning.
The best example I know: two guys built a wildly successful iOS course by backpacking around Europe with a camera, setting up in an Airbnb and filming themselves — and on day one they couldn’t write a single line of code. People who didn’t know how to program taught people how to program, and everyone loved it, because they were speaking to the rest of the room in a language it understood.
It’s called impostor syndrome, and everybody has it. I’ve stood in a green room with sixty professional speakers — every single one of us had it. So don’t fight it. Celebrate it.
Plan it backwards
However you like to plan, start at the end. The very last thing I write is the first sentence; the very first thing I write is the last one — the closing line, the call to action. Most talks fizzle out because the speaker runs low on time and the conclusion becomes a whimper. Write the ending first and work backwards, and you get to end with a bang.
Underneath all of it: tell a story. We taught each other with stories for thousands of years before we had schools — we’re hardwired for it, which is also why our stories need heroes and villains even when real life isn’t like that. Build a little tension, resolve it, land your point. I usually start from a mind-map and then, the moment I find a better narrative, I throw the structure away. The structure is scaffolding; the story is the building.
Surviving the stage
Public speaking beats death as people’s number-one fear — so if it terrifies you, you’re normal. Almost everything I know about the nerves comes down to a handful of things:
- Practice until you stop changing it. I rehearse until three or four run-throughs go by without me touching anything — then I know it’s done. (A colleague of mine practises every talk fifty times. I’m not that disciplined.)
- Arrive early and have a backup. Get your tech checked; carry a video backup of any live demo. Half my horror stories are someone holding up a VGA cable two minutes before I’m on.
- Time-box your Q&A. “I’ve got five minutes for questions” — and then you know the agonising part ends in five minutes.
- You look far calmer than you feel. In a training exercise we each privately rated our own nerves zero-to-ten, and the audience rated how nervous we looked. I put myself at eight; the room put me at two. Every speaker, same story. (The flip side: if a speaker does look nervous, they’re terrified — be extra kind to them.)
To project a bit of confidence I do vocal warm-ups before I go on — rolling my tongue into every corner of my mouth, then humming Jingle Bells with my mouth closed as if there’s a bee in my throat. I promise you sound clearer afterwards. Some colleagues swear by power poses; silence, used deliberately, is a genuinely powerful tool too.
And connect. Make real eye contact — when you actually look at someone, they put the phone down. Use speaker notes, but as bullet points, never a script (a full script just turns into you reading at the audience instead of talking to it). Keep slides minimal — the slide is an aide, not your notes. And remember the room is a mix of people: the evangelist wants the big exciting picture, the scientist wants the exact numbers, the army sergeant just wants it summarised clearly, and the therapist wants the personal story. Do a bit of all four.
Getting on a stage
Meetups are desperate for speakers — it’s the number-one thing every organiser I know complains about. So just ask. Two people walked up at our London meetup last week and said “I’d love to give a talk” — yes, yes, yes, every single time.
Then conferences. A video of yourself speaking at a conference is career gold — when I was contracting, sending one was game over; people fought over you. To get in you submit a CFP — a call for papers — and it’s far simpler than people fear. Mine are basically three lines:
- A hook — a provocative one-liner. “You thought hacking was hard? It’s not. It’s easy. I’ll show you how.”
- What the talk is — a sentence or two on what you’ll actually cover.
- What they walk away with — the concrete benefit to the audience.
That’s it. That’s the talk that’s been accepted at least ten times. Another of mine is Bot of the United States — “Trump’s tweets move markets… so what if you built a bot that traded on them?” — same three-part shape. (I’ve written a whole separate piece on how to write a CFP if you want the detail.)
Why bother
It’s brilliant for your career, it makes you a far better persuader — I can nudge a behemoth like Microsoft a little just by being able to make the case well — and there’s representation. I’m one of very few brown faces on a tech stage, and people come up afterwards precisely because of it. The more of you that are visible up there, the more the next person believes they can be too.
Next steps
Start with the end, remember? So here’s your call to action: write down three talk ideas. Just three, right now. Then submit one CFP somewhere. You’ll probably get in. But you have to start somewhere.