Nominate Speakers for TEDxDhaka 2023
Posted by Mohammad Tauheed on 12/16/22 in TEDxDhaka Blog
Highly likely TEDxDhaka will be back in the third or the fourth quarter of 2023. As we always try to start early, the first step is to start finding the speakers! Help us finding the best minds in the country (or beyond) who can talk about the most pressing matters of our time, that should include but of course not limited to economics, arts, journalism, photography, literature, science, technology, entrepreneurship, society, humanity, policy et al. You can nominate yourself or anyone potential that you know through this link: https://tedxdhaka.com.bd/nominate or https://cutt.ly/T0p6iRr
Think about the topic, the issue, the solutions, the hows and whys and the big ideas more than the person behind it. Remember that it is not about you! It is about the idea you deliver for the community. No, your personal story, the success story of your company or product is not an idea, it is called promotion; TEDx stage is not your platform for promo, please do not try to sneak in to doing that.
Think about all the TED talks you remember, yes, you remember the talk and the idea only, highly likely not the speakers. Because the key to a successful talk is removing yourself from it.
This time we will be on a hard-line about keeping self-promoting stories out of the stage. You can easily remove all the pride, glory, frills, branding, names, pitch, promotions and stories and focus on hows and whys to turn it into a brilliant idea that would help the local and global community to fill in the blank in their world-view.
Here are some examples that would help you clearly understand what we mean by that, for example,
1. You may be a successful farmer who saw massive profit from a special crop or a style of farming. We are only interested in that crop and the style; that is the big idea there, not about the success story of your company or you. Do not start with “My company Omuk Agro started with zero, then we planted a tree, now we make millions”—no don’t do that, we are not interested in that story.
2. You may be the CEO of a ride sharing company. We probably ask you to talk about completely a different thing, like how ride sharing companies helped with mining a crucial set of data that was missing from the research and urban planning of Dhaka, i.e: the live data of the traffic! Your talk can be about the unique opportunity of looking into the quantifiable data about how Dhaka traffic behaves, and why this data is crucial for the future of the urban planning of the city—see that is an idea, that’s what we want as a TEDx talk! Nobody is interested about your company’s success story, or your company or you, at least we are not.
3. You may be a scientist, focus on a specific research that has been published already in peer reviewed journals, and the research that is relevant for one or more of the pressing matters of our time. Make the complex easy and palatable for educated general audience, and focus only on delivering the core finding of your research. Remove yourself, your team, your institute, your story, everything, and focus only on explaining the new findings you found that probably can make a huge difference.
This video from TED Curator Chris Anderson is helpful