Still Listening? Good.

“Story-telling is joke-telling.” – Andrew Stanton, Pixar

Here’s Andrew Stanton’s TED talk on stories, and I think it’s pretty much spot-on (warning, there’s a rude word a couple of minutes in).

It describes the way to tell a good story, which is a great way to deliver really engaging public speaking (see also my post ‘Don’t Tell Them Everything First‘).

Stories are a huge hook when doing public speaking, whether it’s to one person or a thousand.

Use them if you can.

N.B. As regards public speaking  you’ll notice that Mr. Stanton looks down at his cues a lot, which for me greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the talk. While I think the richness of his material helps outweigh this, I can’t help feeling that he would have absolutely ‘smashed it’ (so to speak) by learning his material. And I mean really smashed it, into several billion glittering fragments of awesomeness.