[edw519]

I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier.

I have seen many great speakers in person (Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Steven Covey) and almost always come away underwhelmed. I struggle to understand why the audience gets so worked up with so little content transferred. I have trouble with comedy clubs because so many people howl at stuff I think is lame.

On the other hand, I find tech talks that would bore my friends to death incredibly interesting. I've seen pg speak several times and I really enjoyed his talks. I even like the "ums". They tell my subconscious to pay attention because I'm being treated to something real-time and genuine that has never happened before and may never happen again.

Oddly, my favorite tech speaker in the past few years was Reid Hoffman. He sure doesn't look like a professional speaker; he paced back and forth and mumbled with his head down. But I was afraid that if I dropped my pencil, I might miss something that could change my life. Now that's what I call a good speaker.

[jonnathanson]

"I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience."

I agree with most of your post. But I'd actually invert that relationship. A good speaker is someone who understands his audience, so that he can maximize both his connection to it and his impact upon it.

The intent of speaking, and the intent of writing, aren't altogether different. In either case, a typical goal is to convey information to an audience, and to maximize the audience's uptake of that information. Uptake naturally follows from conveyance, and successful conveyence depends upon successful connection (or "breakthrough"). So, it stands to reason, knowing one's audience is a necessary precondition to engaging one's audience. Some audiences are tougher to engage than others. And what necessarily breaks through for Audience A may fly right over the heads of Audience B, or piss off Audience C, or strike Audience D as a joke.

This distinction is important to make, because too many people write or speak primarily for themselves. They assume a hypothetical audience of likeminded people, and they blame the audience when their words don't hit their marks. This mindset is so prevalent that the exclamation "Tough crowd!" has become something of a cliche. It's true that some crowds are "tougher" than others, but the failure to engage a particular crowd usually lies mainly with the speaker or writer. (Even when it doesn't, it's best to assume it does; assumption of failure provides a useful lesson, whereas blame deferral offers no room for growth).

[Spearchucker]

Understanding the audience, as you suggest, is not, in my experience, what makes for a good speaker.

I've spoken in front of audiences - large and small - more times than I can remember. Some of my talks tanked. Badly.

Most go really, really well. And the difference between the tankers and the good ones is one thing - a belief in what I'm saying.

It can (and often has been) an openly hostile audience (I've had people unexpectedly sit in just because I was "the guy from Microsoft", and that presented them with a rare opportunity to heckle). And most times I win those over as easily as the ones that are open to what I have to say to begin with.

And it's quite simply that when you believe in your message, when you just know you're right/your approach is right/your message has integrity, that you appear authentic.

And authenticity is very compelling, as a speaker.

[jonnathanson]

What you're saying and what I'm saying are not mutually exclusive. Authenticity should always be a goal. Belief in one's own words, likewise, is a solid precondition to success. All of these things are factors in success, as is knowing the audience. It's possible to make a successful speech without achieving any or all of these factors, but achieving them makes success much more likely. It makes the delivery of the speech less of a dice roll.

I didn't mean to suggest a reductionism in favor of one factor over all others; I was simply replying to a statement in the grandparent comment about the relationship between audience and speaker. (Also, I'm not suggesting that one should pander to his audience).

[Spearchucker]

That's fair enough.

[wisty]

Or perhaps - a good speaker picks a good audience.

You can adapt your style to an audience - dumb down technical details to focus on the "big picture" capabilities and limitations, or get down to the nitty-gritty. But if you are talking to a crowd that just doesn't care about any of it, you've lost the minute you walk into the room.

[sks]

I work in an academic setting and most of us use writing to convey our ideas and use the speaking opportunity to advertise the things we have written about. So a good academic speech needs to have low idea density to serve its purpose. It should only present the core ideas to get the audience interested in reading what you have written. I am sure if pg starts to see his speeches performing a different function than the writings he will enjoy the speaking assignments more.

[jonstjohn]

When I heard PG speak at PyCon last weekend, I hardly even noticed any 'ums' - in fact, it wasn't until I saw it raised on HN that I remembered it. I was thoroughly engaged in his ideas, and my mind likely used those pauses to process what he was saying.

[pg]

The weird thing is, I've now started to notice the ums myself. I was talking to the founders at the last tuesday dinner and suddenly started catching myself every time I did it. I found that if I made a conscious effort to, I could suppress them. But when I was talking about something interesting, I'd forget and start umming again.

[patio11]

I will say this in the spirit of somebody who started competitive public speaking as therapy to overcome a speech disorder which would have been virtually disabling professionally: you can hack your way through hesitation noises. A lot of the HN comments suggesting practical ways to do so would be effective. ("Speak slower" and "Use the air gap for a dramatic pause" are my two favorites.) Practice plus directed effort will very quickly make this not a problem for you. It is totally not a given that you will revert to habit when not paying attention, when speaking off the cuff, or when saying interesting and important things. You just need to get into a new, successful habit, just like you long ago cultivated a habit of e.g. not spelling words wrongly.

(n.b. I have issues with hesitation noises myself occasionally. When I have the opportunity I watch / listen to tapes of myself, count influencies, and avoid things that cause that number to spike, because improving on this is a priority for me. For example, the worst I ever did last year -- TwilioConf -- had 1/20th the incidence of my typical performance in middle school, and on good days you wouldn't be able to tell I'd actually struggled with this.)

[P.S. This is going to sound a little fluffy but it is absolutely true: one of the first steps is to stop saying "I am not a good public speaker" and start saying "Some of the speeches I have delivered have had a lot of umms in them", because that identifies a specific issue which can be fixed by an identifiable behavioral change, rather than solidifying an identity around features of past speeches you may have made.]

[tobtoh]

I second this. I used to um and ahh very badly and I started debating in school partly to try and stop myself doing this. I had a teacher use one of the most amazingly effective techniques to help me - she filmed me once as I read my prepared debate 'speech' (filled with ums and ahhs), and then filmed me a second time, this time telling me to consciously be aware of the umming and pause before I did, gather my thoughts and then continue talking.

Watching the first video, I could see how distracting the ums and ahhs were. Watching the second video gave me a stunning insight. What felt like years standing silent as I struggled to suppress the um and continue my speech, actually came across as measured pauses. Not only did the pauses almost always appear 'normal', but they also made it easier to understand the points I was making.

In that one 15 minute session with my teacher, I became comfortable with pausing and that was the starting point for a dramatic decline in my umming.

[patio11]

This is about as close to a pure speech hack as I'm aware of, by the way. It makes you immediately, perceptibly better, and even if I told you "Here's a video of me talking. Hit a buzzer when I'm buffering" you'd miss most of them because they read as dramatic emphasis to the audience. (The umms, stammers, and verbal disfluencies, on the other hand, are instantly perceptible.)

As long as we're on the subject of hacks: pick three people in the audience: one on the left, one in the right, and one a bit off center in the middle. Always make eye contact with them when you are speaking. Rotate every couple of sentences. BAM, perceived confidence goes way up.

[pja]

[P.S. This is going to sound a little fluffy but it is absolutely true: one of the first steps is to stop saying "I am not a good public speaker" and start saying "Some of the speeches I have delivered have had a lot of umms in them", because that identifies a specific issue which can be fixed by an identifiable behavioral change, rather than solidifying an identity around features of past speeches you may have made.]

Not fluffy at all: this is a core part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) & it's very powerful.

[nodemaker]

>stop saying "I am not a good public speaker" and start saying "Some of the speeches I have delivered have had a lot of umms in them"

Totally agree.

One thing that I have observed in many social activities especially public speaking and sports is that how good you are heavily depends upon how good you think you are.

Interestingly perhaps the converse is true with respect to creative (non-social) activities like writing and programming.

[dennisgorelik]

I talk on Skype with my customers a lot (it has a phone number). Few months ago I installed MP3 Skype recorder plugin, so now all my conversations automatically recorded.

It definitely helps to listen to these conversations and fix umms/ehs, incorrect pronunciation (Russian accent) etc.

[mechanical_fish]

I believe I've heard of linguistic studies which demonstrate that the use of "filler" words like um is, in part, a form of "code switching". For example, when teenagers talk to their peers, or to people they don't particularly respect, their speech will tend to be peppered with ums and you knows and likes [1], as in: "I'd, um, you know, prefer to watch something, like, interesting.". But when talking to respected elders, or working as waitstaff in a restaurant, the same people suddenly prove capable of uttering perfectly fine sentences in formal English. The "reversion" to the broken-up speech pattern is not necessarily because the speakers are thinking too hard, or drinking too hard, and it's certainly not because they don't know how to speak: It's often a subconscious but deliberate technique for setting an informal mood.

Some languages actually have a syntactically-distinct informal mode; English has the word um.

Why do I tell this random anecdote? The usual reason: I love to ramble. But also because my point is: Stop worrying about the "ums". They're fine. Your listeners were probably already interpreting them as a sign that you've become really engaged in the conversation.

(Now, of course, the above comment will be added to the YC FAQ, and teams will be competing to see how quickly they can get PG to utter the first um of the entrance interview. ;)

---

[1] At least, this is what informal teen speech sounded like years ago. These days, it may be different. It usually is.

[bane]

This is a good point. One thing I always get when I've heard pg in an interview is that he seems comfortably informal, and also wonderfully excited about what he's doing. The uhms get kind of infectious and convey that excitement to some extent.

[supercanuck]

I've also heard somewhere, this is why Canadians say "Eh" a lot, because it leaves the sentence with a positive, softer connotation.

[Alex3917]

"It's often a subconscious but deliberate technique for setting an informal mood."

This is interesting, but I doubt it applies to when people do it when speaking in front of a large group of people. Public speaking tends to require a lot more cognitive resources than answering basic questions from supervisors.

[dennisgorelik]

Teenagers' speech still sounds exactly like that.

:-)

[bane]

My father grew up in a very rural, very uneducated part of the U.S. and had a deep "southern" accent (though "country" or "rural" is probably more apt). When he was 16 or so he ran away from home and landed in Chicago where his accent immediately marked him as a country bumpkin. This made him tremendously shy in the city and he spent most of his time in isolation.

He spent years retraining his accent, reading Webster's, practicing day in and day out. To this day he can't even successfully fake the accent of his youth. My best guess as to what he sounded like comes from his brothers, all of whom have a rich rural accent to this day.

As part of his effort to get over his shyness and his accent, he joined several public speaking clubs. While they helped with his accent and his shyness, they also taught him a great deal about hesitation noises and he's passed on two things to me (which of course I didn't truly appreciate until years later when I had to get out and start talking in front of groups).

1) Hesitation noises are usually just a way for our brain to catch up with our mouth, interestingly and helpfully, it's also a way for an audience's brain to catch up with their ears.

2) It's funny becoming aware of them, it's like suddenly becoming aware of breathing, it's very automatic, and when you start to think about it, the first thing you do is take a deep breath. The same with ums and ahhs, once you are aware of them, the first thing you should do is take a deep breath instead of saying them.

The audience will be glad for the pause, they'll have time to absorb the complex thought that you are in the process of putting together anyways. And you'll have time to put it together.

If the deep breaths aren't your thing he also recommended I turn my "ums" into "mmms" and then the next step is to turn the voiced "mmms" into a silent outbreath through my nose with my lips in the "mmm" position. It doesn't make a distracting noise and the effect is a thoughtful pause.

[tlammens]

Just trim the length of the ums and nobody notices them anymore. Fund a startup that can do um-filtering (speaking through a microphone) on the fly, problem solved. :)

You are in great company, just watched a couple of videos of Elon Musk and Donald Knuth. They are also expert um'ers but everyone keeps listening because the message they are broadcasting is interesting.

[ohashi]

I saw pg speak at YCNYC and I definitely noticed a lot of 'ums.' At first it was very surprising to me to hear someone who I've read nearly all of their essays speak so 'poorly.' The odd thing, looking back, I remember the content quite well compared to a lot of other 'good' speeches I've gone to in the past. I remember vague notions about some of them, don't remember anything about most. YCNYC was about new york as a hub and some of the factors that differentiate the two and why things are they way they are.

[j_baker]

I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier.

It's worth pointing out that the first sentence is very extraverted. In fact, if you read between the lines a bit, this is a very extraverted post. That's not bad. It's just that it's always interesting to note how extraverted introverts (myself included) can be without realizing it. Vice versa for extraverts.

[harold]

I think one can be a great communicator without being a great speaker. True passion for a subject comes through, even if a person says "ummm" a lot. It might be harder to be a good "listener" than a good speaker when it comes right down to it.