Ideawork: How to find the idea in the heart of your life’s work to start of crafting the talk of your life.

None of this piece was written by AI. Forgive me for my imperfection. I’m human.

In December 2021, just as COVID-19 was beginning to recede and the bitter Chicago wind drifting off of Lake Michigan began to settle in, I was swaddled in a blanket with a hot coffee in hand staring at my computer screen. At this point I’d spent most of the day digging into Northwestern University faculty profiles in hopes that I’d find a handful of researchers and scientists whose work may be both publicly interesting and translatable enough that they’d make good candidates for a TEDx stage. Frankly, my eyes were glazed over and I think I may have been drooling, but regardless, I had collected dozens of profiles at this point. One, though, stuck out that afternoon: A social psychologist who had published a study that showed how young people’s motivation and academic outcomes are influenced by how adults speak to them. Professor Mesmin Destin would be come the first candidate I’d email in my new (volunteer) role as TEDxChicago’s incoming Director and Speaker Curator. Shortly afterwards, I scheduled my first Candidate Discovery Session.

Along my path of 15 years of guiding people on their journey of creating speeches and TEDx talks, I’ve had the rather concerning obsession of distilling techniques, frameworks, and processes that, when tailored to anyone, would give me and them a decent shot at finding an “idea”within their ocean of knowledge and from which to bloom a great talk. The curation process and “Discovery Session” that I was meandering through in the winter of 2021 is a part of this.

My goal with developing this guide, and hopefully more to come, is to be useful to anyone trying to figure out how to say something that means something to them to people they care about.

I’ll refer to this grab bag of jargon and business slop-speak (techniques, learnings, processes, frameworks…) as the “Art of Speaking.”

The journey of creating a talk of your life has many summits along the way, the first of which is discovering your idea at the heart of your life’s work. This sounds deceptively simple. It’s anything but. The first summit is “ideawork.”

Ideawork

Ideawork, as I define it, is “discovering your idea at the heart of your life’s work.” Let’s break this down by, well, being less succinct.

• Discovering… is a creative process of uncovering memories, content, patterns, stories, and work from which a throughline and a talk emerges.
• …your idea… requires to know first what an idea is. How would you define it? I’ve found that defining “idea” in the context of TED and TEDx has been a decade long journey. There are a few exercises to help us search for and sense when TEDx Talk idea is in our midst.
• …at the heart of your life’s work. While there are many ideas and versions of a talk one can give, I personally am passionate about talks that are, in some way, culminations of a person’s life at that moment. I believe everyone is on some point on their expert discovery journey and thus have a talk within them.

This post explores the first of the three parts of ideawork above. I will return to the fundamentals of talk ideas and the expert’s discovery journey in later posts.

Part 1: Discovering your throughline

What are we searching for? The throughline at the heart of your life’s work. In the world of TED and TEDx, this is called an “idea that changes everything.”

I’ll be writing a separate post about ideas and throughlines, but for now, some basics:

• An “idea that changes everything” is the smallest thing you can say that, said accessibly well, gives someone a new way of seeing themselves, others, or the world. They can carry it home, retell it tonight, and a year from now still live a little differently because of it. It’s a gift.
• It’s new, novel, and original to you. It’s relevant, important, and impactful at scale. The stakes are worth your audience caring about.
• It’s the key message a person remembers from listening to your talk that they’ll parrot to their friends at dinner when they want to sound worldly and generous with insight.
• The talk is the short narration that brings the audience on a journey of rebuilding the idea by its end, and doing so with all the wonders of great storytelling and visual immersion and delivery to pack in a punch right to your memory.
  • The Odyssey, yes the epic poem, is the “the talk” while the Trojan horse is the idea. Said another way, in the movie Inception, the talk is the Leonardo DeCaprio’s adventure through the levels of consciousness and the idea is enacted in the final scene.

With those basics out of the way, let’s return to the Discovery Session as one of the easiest “tools” I use to uncover the throughline in speaker’s life work.

Method: The Discovery Session

Returning to that cold Wrigleyville apartment a few years ago, some weeks later I noticed a meeting notification pop up. I’d be meeting with Professor Destin later that day.

Oh gosh, I think, what am I going to ask him? For this session to not be a waste of his valuable time and to make sure I can pitch this candidate to the broader TEDxChicago team, I would need to walk away with a sense for who he is, his story, his speaking style, what he’s passionate about, enough content to get a feel for what a talk might sound like, and, ultimately, what his idea worth spreading could be.

After reading thousands of speaker applications up to that point, there is a simple truth that underlies why I seek out speaker candidates and conduct Discovery Sessions: If asked directly, people are not natural at stating what their idea worth spreading is. This is not because they aren’t great speakers or brilliant or know their work in and out. They often struggle to express what their idea worth spreading is because it is not clear what, exactly, a “TEDx idea” or throughline is. What we get is 10 to 15 word phrases that are trite, generic, and meaningless. It’s my job to know that, as a curator, not the candidate. The candidate’s job is represent authentically their life’s work, themselves, and their passion.

Here is my Discovery Session Interview Guide that I’ve used with hundreds of people, and the same one I used with Professor Mesmin Destin. His interview ultimately got him onto the TEDxChicago stage, where he shared his Lab’s powerful work and his deeply personal and surprising story that, ultimately, has been viewed over 2 million times. It has been refined over many years. It is designed around the Hero’s Journey story arc, and somehow always gets me to finding the idea or throughline of someone’s work. After a Discovery Session, I’ve almost always had enough content to write a compelling Curator’s Pitch, my form of a 200 word elevator pitch, to the broader TEDx team to get a sense for a speaker, their work, and how their idea / throughline may change the world.

Discovery Session Interview Guide

The Setup: As a curator or speaker coach I’ll conduct this interview with the speaker candidate / client. I believe that these same questions can be asked by a friend, a colleague, a PR/media team, or a significant other. The key here is that whoever interviews you should know 1) what they are seeking (your throughline / idea) and 2) represent or have in mind the ears, hearts, and minds of your audience.

Do some research. Come prepared. If you are a curator or the interviewer, it’s important to do some research and review a bio on your interviewee. This will help you find a few themes in advance and especially focus your questions in the case your working with someone prolific.

Questions

• To get started: Tell me about growing up? What is your journey that led you to what you do today?
• What was the "genesis" / moment that sparked you to your idea and this work?
• As you’ve progressed, tell us about what you believe were the critical needs or issues that your work was trying to address? Why is that important? What does it do for our community / city and beyond?
• Choose a few of the projects / highlights / major accomplishments. For each, tell us the story / discovery / research journey. Visualize it for us. Tell me about those “aha” moments - discovery, big idea, surprise - that you felt nailed your mission, and made an impact and affected change. Tell me about the failures, the laughs, the crazy pivots.
  • Dig: What is the question you have been chasing your whole life / career?
  • Dig: When did your work most surprise you?
  • Seek patterns. Connect the dots from their upbringing to their passionate pursuit. Start to se the bigger picture of their lives.
• How does what you’ve learned inform where you are heading next? What is the philosophy / the tools / the major learnings that helps us move forward?
• If your work, idea, vision becomes a reality at scale, what does the future bring? What do you hope the next 5 or 10 years will look like, here and in the world?
• “What’s in it for them” / “stakes” check - do we feel we’ve pulled out the broad message that is widely applicable? If not, try to pull this through. Can you answer, truly, “So what? Why should I, or anyone, care?”