What is overlooked in the Ted talk: How to speak so that people want to listen by Julian Treasure

I'm passionate about learning, and one of the best ways to learn something new is by listening to what others have learned, encountered or mastered.

And one of the best places to learn something new is with Ted talks (see?TED Conferences). Covering a wide variety of topics, these talks are a must when you want to listen to other people's points of view or stand on the shoulders of giants.

Also, I like discovering something new and finding new ways of seeing the same thing, this time using words. We share our thoughts when we write or speak, trying to convey an idea or feeling. But many of our words are on repeat. We say the same verb or noun repeatedly, most of the time, without even noticing it. And I believe that what is most present, what we repeat, continuously, defines most of the times our way of living. However, I'm not a linguist and will leave the proper semantics rules to the experts.

So the word?overlooked?in the title translates to?what we failed to see. What we passed over.

I ran some NLP algorithms to find the most frequent words in one of the most watched Ted talks with +90 million views. It's an old one (from 2013), but what is shared during the talk is even more important nowadays.

The title of the talk is: "How to speak so that people want to listen - by Julian Treasure

And to make it even more fun, I created some word clouds using the results. Only remember the biggest the word, the most frequent it is.

Experimentation time:?If you haven't watched the talk, I invite you to act like a scientist for a short moment and experiment with yourself for a little bit. Just look at the word clouds and see what the words tell you. What message do you think is being conveyed in this talk, only based on the most frequent words. Then, go and watch the talk and return to the word clouds. Did anything change? Is the message clear(ish) now in any way? Did you notice a difference in your level of attention to the words? If so, please let me know in the comments!

Results

The first image shows the most frequent words said by?Julian Treasure FRSA during his talk.

From the image, you can see that the most frequent words are:?like, have, all, people, and be. So at first glance, you can notice this talk focuses on what other people like, what we like, and what we want to have or be.

If you have already watched the talk, did you notice the word?love?being said? All honestly, I didn't notice it.

Now let's take a look at the verbs:

On many occasions, the verbs are a call to action (or CTA). And in this case, they call us to go, do and stand, speak and listen. But also are calling us to play and fall.

What do you think of these results? Has your perception of this talk changed in any way? Also, please let me know if you would like to see other figures or even numbers from this analysis.

* For the NLP knowledgeable or enthusiast, all the words in the Verbs-only word cloud are lemmatized, meaning all the verb variations or inflexions are reduced to one single form. Also, I'm looking forward to playing with the Syntactic dependency relation, to creating my own set of stop words who can be more appropriate for a talk to fine tune the optimum weight for certain verbs (i.e., aux verbs).