Worst TEDx luck ever

I have spoken at four TEDx conferences over the past three years.

None have turned out exactly as I had hope. 

In 2013, I delivered a talk at TEDx Litchfield called "Speak Less. Expect More." The talk actually went extremely well. A representative from TED told me that he loved it and thought it had a chance on getting on the TED channel. Then we discovered that the sound on the recording of the talk was compromised. You can understand what I'm saying, but it ain't easy.

That same year, I spoke at a TEDx Western Connecticut State University on the topic of personal productivity. Once again, the talk went very well. I was excited to see the results.

The organizers - all college students - never posted any of the videos to the TEDx site. They posted photos to a Flickr album, though. 

Not really the same at all.

In 2014 I delivered a talk entitled "Say Yes" at TEDx Somerville. This talk also went well, and the organizers were tremendous in their preparation and execution. Even the recording of the talk is solid. But the timer on stage was incorrectly set for 9 minutes (my originally allotted amount of time) instead of the revised 15 minutes that I had been assigned, and since a TED Talk can never exceed 18 minutes, I suddenly had no way of judging how long I was speaking or if I was even supposed to be speaking for 15 minutes.

I should've waited. Asked for the timer to be set properly. Taken a moment to ensure that everything was ready before I opened my mouth. I didn't. 

You may watch this talk and see nothing amiss, but when I watch the recording, I see myself rushing through sections, dropping entire sections out of the talk, and generally disengaged with the material. I was so consumed with the mental gymnastics required to change the content of the talk mid-speech that it wasn't the performance that it could've been.  

It wasn't a bad talk by any stretch of the imagination. I've received a great deal of positive feedback as a result of the talk and the subsequent video.

But it wasn't exactly what I wanted.

This year I spoke at TEDxBU on the topic of education. Once again, the talk went extremely well. I heard from many people in the days following the talk, telling me how much it meant to them. But when the video of the talk was released a couple weeks ago, I learned that the first minute of the talk was lost due to technical malfunctions and one of the cameras was not running at all. The video looks terrible, and the loss of the first minute makes the rest of the talk a mess. I couldn't bring myself to even watch the whole thing.

I'm currently being considered for two TEDx Talks in 2016. 

All I want is an opportunity to speak and end up with a quality recording of the talk that I had originally planned on delivering.

I never thought a goal like this would be so damn hard to achieve.