The Road to the RED DOT: Walking into Light

  ROAD to the RED DOT:  The Power of Coaching   There is a saying in India that without a teacher to guide you nothing is attainable. Even the doors of heaven are opened only by the grace of a teacher’s instruction. There are few more powerful statements about the value and necessity of coaching in all endeavors. In the realm of preparing for the TED stage, I realized at the outset that I need to find a coach with a track record of successfully guiding students to land and deliver their messages from the TED stage. As luck would have it, I found 3 excellent resources to help me craft my skill. The first were Amy Dix and Dave Nitzel of the Authority Speaker’s Agency. The second was Cesar Cervantes of Top Talks TEDx Mentorship. The third was Evolve Benton of Speak4Profit Academy. Each has a special target niche that served best for the path that I was crafting for the purpose of taking my message about the power of human potential to a wider audience. Before January 2024, I was no st

Road to the RED DOT CONNECTION! The Magic of Life   Someone once made a comment about me, part admiringly, part sarcastically. He said, “Ravi can tell a great story.” The implied subtext in it was that the telling of stories is nice but just a form of a con. Not really honest in a truly ennobling way, but really good to marvel at or indulge your afternoon away. I am calling that out as the greatest lie that could ever be foisted upon humanity and this is why. The ability to tell impactful stories is the single greatest determinant to success in any field. Let me explain. Before you open your mouth to speak the first sentence of your story or before you write the first line in a proposal, you have to know how to connect with the person you want to tell it to. In every situation where I have heard someone speak derisively about storytellers, when I look I invariably find a person who is unable to perform that most basic of human activities…. Connection. The ability to connect begin

  …. William Blake Road to the RED DOT Language: The Womb of Creation The domain of a TED talk lies at the intersection of vision, imagination, and possibility. A TED speaker tries to push the envelope of what is possible for all of us through the medium of his or her speech. TED speeches are a peculiar use of language. It is not the use of language to describe what already exists. Nor is it the use of language to describe what does not exist. It is the use of language to bring into existence as an act of creation that which was hitherto beyond conception. It is the use of language to bring forth as a creative act. The ancient sages of India understood the creative aspect of language. They called each of the 51 letters of the Sanskrit script as “Matrika” or “Little Mother”. Thus recognizing the capacity of language to create name and form out of the raw material of our sensory experience. When we use language to describe our experience our words have only a limited power to transform

  A ROAD OF REJECTIONS The best way to think of the TED application process is to visualize it as a college application. Your idea worth sharing and your pitch as well as the talk you build around it is like your college application essay. The application process to various TEDx events is very similar to applying to different colleges. In each case, you the applicant are reviewing the TEDx event organizers by listening to their past performances and the quality of the speakers that have presented on that stage in previous years. At the same time the selection committee at each site is reviewing if you, the prospective speaker, are an ideal candidate for their event. When I started my journey to the TED stage I applied to multiple TEDx events simultaneously. Each TEDx event has a particular goal. TEDx events are curated events. That is to say that the speaker selection is based on choosing speakers with TED-worthy ideas but among all the TED-worthy ideas that make the first cut in t

  Road to the RED DOT: COMMUNICATION “Communication is not simply speaking. Communication begins with connection. When two people have a connection then there is communion…. And heart speaks to heart, communication happens and a community is born. A community is not a collection of bodies in the same space. A community is a collection of hearts speaking the same speech.” …. Ravi R. Iyer, MD   The domain of great speaking contains several vital capabilities that are intrinsic to the experience of life itself. First among these is CONNECTION. The second is IMAGINATION and the third is LANGUAGE and STORY as a representation of experience. These vital capacities are quintessential to the domain of being a healer. The annals of literature are filled with physicians as authors and storytellers. The very definition of being a physician is to be able to connect and care deeply about the stories of humanity. The act of caring requires that you be able to connect to the world of the indivi

  Road to the RED DOT: THE FIRST TED The first TED event was conducted in Monterey, California on February 1984 as an idea of Richard Saul Wurman, an architect and designer and Harry Marks who conceived a convergence of ideas in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The 1980’s was time of tremendous ferment in the domain of representations of knowledge and reality. Companies like Lucas Films, Pixar, Apple, NEXT were creating and expanding technologies that were changing the landscape of how we created, represented, consumed, transmitted, and assimilated information and reality. Despite its prescient notions and star line-up of speakers, the event was a financial bust and a repeat event would not be attempted until 1990. The second attempt was successful, and the TED event became an annual affair in Monterey, California. The first TED events were open to an invitation-only audience and together with their high-ticket price rapidly acquired a cachet as an exclusive networki