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

This Ideawork Guide shares methods for discovering your talk idea

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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 particular ways in which 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, Speaker Curator, and Speaker Coach. Shortly afterwards, I scheduled my first TEDx 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 I believed, when tailored to anyone, would give us a consistent shot at finding the “idea” within their ocean of knowledge and from which we'd bloom their great talk. The curation process and “Discovery Session” that I was meandering through in the winter of 2021 is a part of this. For simplicity, let's call this mashup of business jargon 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: Discovery. I will return to the fundamentals of talk ideas and the expert discovery journeys in later posts.

What is a "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 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.
• An idea is new, novel, and original to you. It’s relevant, important, and impactful at scale. The stakes are worth your audience caring about.
• An idea is 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.
• A talk, on the other hand, is the short oration that brings the audience on a journey of rebuilding the idea within their minds. A great talk is packed with all the wonders of great storytelling and visual immersion and delivery to deliver a punch right into their 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. This method is my easiest “tool” I use to uncover the throughline in speaker’s life work.

Method: The Discovery Session

A few weeks later in that cold Wrigleyville apartment I noticed a meeting notification pop up. I’d be meeting with Professor Destin later that day.

"Oh no, what am I going to talk about?!" I felt some trepedation, because 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.

Am I maybe stressing myself out a bit and spinning up pressure-packed anxiety over a Zoom call? I'm fine (haha).

Why Discovery Sessions and not just reading and choosing speakers from applications alone? After reading thousands of speaker applications up to that point, here is my honest belief: If asked directly, people are not naturally strong 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, quite the contrary. Rather, they often struggle because it is not clear what, exactly, a “TEDx idea” or throughline is.

The TEDx format itself is nebulous and confusing. What I often see is 10 to 15 word phrases that are trite, generic, and meaningless, and yet applicants probably have spent a million hours getting to those words. I believe it’s my job as a curator and coach to review someone's life work and craft it into the TEDx idea format. The candidate’s job is represent authentically their life’s work, themselves, and their passion and be able to speak to it well. This is why Discovery Sessions are so useful (and also why later I'll post my proposal of a new way to ask applicants to share their idea).

Discovery Session Interview Guide

I've used this distilled Discovery Session Interview Guide with hundreds of people over the years, including with Professor Mesmin Destin on that winter day. His interview was the first step towards ultimately taking the TEDxChicago stage in 2022, where he shared his Lab’s powerful work and his personal, surprising, and moving story. His talk was reposted on TED.com, and as of now, has been viewed over 2 million times.

The Discovery Session Interview Guide is inspired by the Hero’s Journey story arc, and somehow I always get a good sense of the speaker candidate's idea / throughline by the end of a session.

After a Discovery Session, I usually have enough content to write a compelling Curator’s Pitch, a 200 word elevator pitch (maybe I'll share a template later?), to the broader TEDx team so they can get a sense for a speaker, their work, and how their idea / throughline may change the world.

Select the Interviewer: As a curator or speaker coach I’ll conduct this interview with the speaker candidate or a client before doing any storycraft, outlining, or script development. These questions can be asked by a friend, a colleague, a PR/media team, or a significant other. The interviewer should should know:

1. What they are seeking (your throughline / idea)
2. Represent or have in mind the ears, hearts, and minds of your audience
3. Care about who they are interviewing

Do some research. Come prepared. If you are a curator or the interviewer, do some research. Review the interviewees biography, recent media or news/media coverage, podcast appearances, published research or writings, or portfolio / exhibition updates. Look for a few relevant themes in advance and especially focus the scope to specific projects or recent work in the case your working with someone prolific.

Interview Guide

Make sure to set the tone, be kind, curious, and open. Introduce yourself and appropriately set expectations. Be sure to disclose any recording, transcription, or AI tools. Ask these questions in order.

• To get started: Tell me about growing up? What is your journey that led you to what you do today and where we are now?
• What was the "genesis" or sparking moment that led 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, made an impact, and created change. Tell me about the failures, the laughs, and the crazy pivots.
  • Dig: What is the question you have been chasing your whole life / career?
  • Dig: When did your work most surprise you?
  • (Note) 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 all of 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 throughout the world?
• (CHECK) “What’s in it for the audience?” / “stakes” check - do we feel we’ve pulled out the broad message that is widely applicable and important? If not, try to pull this through. Can you answer, truly, “So what? Why should I, or anyone, care?”