One of the greatest sources of inspiration that I’ve come across over the last year is TED Talks. TED is igniting some of the most thought-provoking discussions relevant to our world today.
The annual TED Conference is held in Long Beach, CA and other TED conferences are hosted world wide. TED draws together some of the most influential leaders in Technology, Entertainment, and Design in hopes of synergy for the future.
The TED Talks are talks given by influential leaders in these three arenas at the TED Conferences. They are the main reason why TED has quickly become the influential summit that it is. TED speakers have to be able to communicate one main idea in their message. One idea. Just one. It has to be focused. It has to be intentional. It’s one shot to share one specific idea worth spreading.
For communicators, pastors, and teachers in ministry, it can be difficult to boil your messages down to just one point. It’s something that I struggle with each time I go to speak. The temptation is to let the rabbit trails pull us away from being laser-focused in our message.
One of the best resources that I’ve found to help with the concept of communicating one main idea is Andy Stanley’s book, Communicating for a Change. Hardly any pastors can remember their own three-point outline, why should we expect our listeners to remember it as well? In Communicating for a Change, Stanley gives a fantastic layout for helping to communicate one main idea in your messages.
We can learn from TED by boiling our messages down to one idea at a time. If anybody should have ideas and a message worth spreading, it’s believers in Jesus Christ.
Jon: Thanks so much for the TED posting and for sharing the beautiful of TED with your readers. I was TED-inspired to create the website videotalks.org which gives readers dozens of links to websites like TED. I hope you will find the various sites to also be a joy to watch. Please keep up with periodic postings about TED! Thank you, Jim Melfi
Hi Jim! Thanks for sharing. I checked out the videotalks website and I can say that I’ll definitely be spending some time browsing through the topics. Great job with putting it all together.
Thanks Jon! Jim Melfi