My Embarrassing TEDx Failure
After three months of writing and rehearsing the day finally arrived. This was my big chance to deliver a powerful, impactful presentation that could launch my career and turn me into an overnight success (after ten years in the field).
Slated right before lunch I had to wait all morning to give my presentation.
Anxious and antsy I watched speaker after speaker, trying to be present so I could engage with them later, but not really paying much attention. Sweating, my script was rattling around my brain, and I was genuinely nervous.
I hadn’t been nervous before a performance in years. After a decade in professional magic I was a pro at being in front of an audience.
But the once-in-a-lifetime pressure of TEDx was different.
Please welcome our next speaker, Brian Miller.
Finally I found my spot, smiled, and delivered my opening line:
“Our world is a shared experience, fractured by individual perspectives. Imagine if we could all understand each other.”
I saw something light up in the eyes of the audience. They were in, and for the next 11 minutes and 15 seconds everything went smoothly.
Sure, the audience was quieter and less energetic than I was used to as an entertainer, but I expected that and rolled with it. I’m a pro after all, and this was my big break.
Then it happened: I completely blanked on my next line.
Crash
Let’s back up for a minute.
My TEDx conference was held in a high school, organized and led by students. A social studies teacher, Parag Joshi, curated the speakers and supervised the process, but it was largely a student effort.
That also means the audience was 90% high school students, who had been told to sit quietly and had been doing so… for three straight hours leading up to my talk, just before lunch. They were hungry, and a little restless.
You can’t see it well on the recording, but there were three rows of stadium-style seating with chairs. I noticed a student on the top row rocking in his, most likely antsy to get to the break. As he rocked more vigorously I knew he was going to slip. And he did.
It wasn’t a loud crash and he didn’t fall completely out of his chair, but he did end up halfway in the lap of the student next to him, who pushed him back upright, while the attention of the handful of students surrounding him was ripped from me in the chaos.
My instinct was to “call the situation,” as comedians say, to make a joke out of it. That’s what I would normally do, except I knew that on the final recording any direct interplay with the live audience would break the spell for someone watching on YouTube. I didn’t want the home audience to feel left out, so I decided to check my entertainer’s intuition.
Of course I was still talking during all of this, running on autopilot from 200+ word-for-word rehearsals. I reached the end of a sentence and realized I had no idea what I had just said.
What line comes next?
The longest 5 seconds of my life
What followed felt like an eternity and turned out to be just over five full seconds of silence while I searched for my next line. Even objectively, it was a long time. You can clearly see it here:
The best public speaking tip I ever received was this: If you forget what you wanted to say, just stop talking. Don’t say “um.” Don’t say “hang on, let me think.” Just go silent and stare intently at the ground, the sky, or let your eyes mingle around the audience. This makes it look like you’re thinking hard about what to say next, that you’re deeply considering your words.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I stared at the ground intently, as if contemplating the mysteries of the universe, and finally found my next line. I continued without skipping a single rehearsed word, and finished the talk without any more mishaps.
It was brutal waiting three weeks for the video to be produced and uploaded to YouTube; I thought I blew it. I was convinced no one would watch it, and even if they did, my blunder would look so amateurish no one would be able to move past it.
It was all for nothing, I told myself.
Of course, that’s not what happened. The talk went viral, earning over 3 million views worldwide, solidifying my status as an “expert” in my niché – human connection – and rocketing my transition away from magic and into professional speaking.
Listen to your piano teacher
In all the years since my TEDx talk went live, not one single person mentioned the big pause. In 2000 comments on YouTube, one of the most poisonous platforms on the Internet, I never found a single remark about it (plenty of hate about my hat, hair, suit, and facial hair though).
People were so enraptured with the story and the message that they didn’t even notice one of the biggest blunders of my career.
Remember your first piano/violin/chorus recital? Your teacher said, “If you screw up don’t make a face and don’t say anything about it. The audience doesn’t know what the song is supposed to sound like.”
It was good advice.
My TEDx video was the worst version of that presentation I’ve ever given, because it was the first time, but it was also real, raw, and human. Show up for others with heart, courage, and humanity and you’ll find that people are much gentler and more forgiving.
And always remember that our world is a shared experience.
