Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Chimamanda’s purpose is not to scold her audience for a lack of knowledge, but rather to explain that these misunderstandings and limited perspective are universal. By opening with her own admission in the tale about Fide and his family’s poverty, she opens herself to the criticism of this talk. It makes her a more human narrator, and also adds humor to the story in a way that helps the audience feel like she is a close friend, not merely a lecturer. In your own presentations, show vulnerability. Make yourself relatable to the audience by describing a time when you didn’t have your business plan figured out, or perhaps a time that you’ve struggled with in the past. Human experience is a flawed experience.
The purpose of this TED talk is to encourage us to broaden the scope of stories we consume about other people and cultures. But this isn’t a high-level talk that spells out why this is important using stats and facts; it speaks to the heart by using storytelling examples. Listening to the talk, Chimamanda uses around ten different smaller stories to share the core message itself. All of them fit beautifully together, combing her personal experience as a Nigerian in America as well as her Nigerian experience with its own limitations in literature and so on. If you want to make your presentation compelling, use storytelling to show your audience what you mean, don’t just tell them what they should do or know.