Speaking to Inspire: My Journey Through 100 Talks

Recently, I reached the milestone of delivering 100 invited talks in my professional career. This is a short reflection on my journey through these 100 public talks. Trained around 11000+ people which include teachers, students, and corporate and government audiences on recent technologies.

The Start

Since 2012, Of more than 200+ requests as keynote speaker, resource person for webinars, Faculty Development Programs, workshops, conferences. I completed 100 public talks officially by Feb, 2025.

Thanks to Ravindra Dastikop for kindling the hidden potential in me. Yes, he is the same man, whom I wrote about Golden Kidney. It took around five years and 50+ talks to get the good grip on delivering content. Content representation, creativity, body language, delivery tone. As I see every small thing matters.

Flopping First, Flipping Finally

My first every tech talk for an large audience was mediocre. Too much content in presentations, no analogies neither humor. Few audience members just dozed off in noon session as it got too technical. But it was an alarm for me how a talk should not be.

People say, I have improved a lot. Now audience and location do not matter. You just have to specify session duration and topic. I’ll triumph it.

Why Public Speaking?

The simplest answer is “I speak to listen myself”.

Although I’m invited speak for audience but in turn I had more insights on the subject matter. Also being introduced as expert speaker, deep inside you know how much you don’t know.

Mind is like balloon. You have keep inflating by accumulating information, experiences from the world around you. Once certain threshold is reached. You cant just hold more information. Now only solution you have to piercing some holes to empty the balloon. Sharing your knowledge by piercing some holes is the way. Some call this as unlearning.

You have to keep unlearning to keep learning.

The Preparation:

Though most of my talks are technical but my draft starts with pen and paper. I recap things I read about the topic in books, snippets of YouTube videos, TED talks, blogs of experts, and hinting few research articles here and there. Then it is time to fire my neurons and my learnings to make meaningful connections.

Mindful Mind Mapping:

All start within the head imagining myself delivering and listening as novice listener at the same time. Then I drafting in Sublime Editor or in Google keep while travelling. All the 1000 of bookmarks, articles, notes taken, screenshots captured, memes saved will have to be put together to pick the right ones for a particular talk.

The whole dig is about “What is simplest way to convey the idea?”

Connecting the Dots

Everything is out there. Books, presentations, articles, research papers. The question is about How well you can connect the dots from psychology to philosophy to programming. Everything is out there and connected. We just have to see it. Sometime we just have to go out of scope to get things done. It’s all about seeing what others don’t look.

The Execution:

Now execution is all about delivering a tech talk in a stand up comedy way. Story telling is the basis of human connectivity. Humor helps to break the ice and connects you to audience. You can say a lot about people about how fast and what they laugh upon. Using juxtaposition, irony, metaphors leaves the audience intrigued questioning their existing thought process. The idea is to disturb theirs and plant yours.

Less is More:

In early days of speaking experience I use to feel to bombard with all the information I have gathered towards audience. Later found it to be opposite. Less with clarity is better than more with absurdity.

Now, I always try yo keep it simple. Simplicity have always won over Complexity.

Design matters:

I’m a firm believer if good design matters. 1000s of hours spent just for best slide design, font type and representation of content in best possible way. It takes hours to find the right picture and right opacity. Just to get it right.

The Analogies:

People appreciate appropriate analogies with sense of humor. It is better to explain traits of a tiger with cats behavior. Finding fail proof analogies is always hard but if found, you will deliver you best.

Some of the analogies which are widely accepted by audience.

• Teaching virtualization using love stories.
• Teaching programming using cooking recipes.
• Teaching the need for AI using couple fights?

Reels and Memes:

Internet is beautiful place. Lot of creative content like infographics, memes has always helped to nail the subject matter. Examples of asking GPT’s to find ways for killing myself to check its intelligence, or killing my beloved wife using LLMs will always bring intriguing smiles.

Breaking Boundaries with Dark Humor:

It is hard to be sarcastic without being offensive. Sometimes I use extra martial affairs to teach relations among entities, setting baby on fire to teach machine learning, killing people to solve population problems. This ignites objective rational thinking and widens the view point.

The End

No matter how good you are at distillation of your thoughts. Every great thing has to end. The End gives meaning to The Start.

Always inspired by great teachers like Randy Pausch, Sir Ken Robinson, Walter Lewin and many more. Their dedication of educating inspires how our efforts may influence well being of others.

The best way to justify the end is to die while doing the best you can. Just like APJ Abdul Kalam did. Hope I’ll too.