Review: Carmine Gallo – Talk like TED (S)

Talk Like TED
The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
Carmine Gallo

“In his book, Carmine Gallo has broken down hundreds of TED talks and interviewed the most popular TED presenters, as well as the top researchers in the fields of psychology, communications, and neuroscience to reveal the nine secrets of all successful TED presentations. Gallo’s step-by-step method makes it possible for anyone to deliver a presentation that is engaging, persuasive, and memorable.”

This book was actually pretty good, but I still have mixed feelings about it. I thought it would be dry and boring, but it really wasn’t. I learnt quite a few new things. It’s not endorsed by TED conferences in any way, it’s fully the author’s opinions. In saying that, it’s obviously still based on real TED talks which he refers to and analyzes comprehensively.

The contents are broken up into 3 parts; Emotional, Novel and Memorable. Under each of these 3 areas there are 3 of the public speaking secrets that you are promised from the front of the book. I felt that these were pretty obvious, like being passionate about your topic. They weren’t exactly secrets or anything different from other public speaking books.

The good thing about this book though was it gave a range of examples for each. My only issue is within each chapter you seem to get “lost” and not know which secret it was you’re learning about. There seemed to be multiple sub ideas within the one secret/chapter. They were all good though, but at the end of the chapter I’d forgotten what the author’s main point of that chapter was.

Overall it was pretty good. 3.5 – 4 stars from me. I would recommend it to anyone who is public speaking in any shape or form.