We live in an age where attention spans are rapidly decreasing and public speaking ranks amongst the top fears globally. The public speaking pendulum has swung, from the days of ancient Greek and Roman orators who spoke for hours in front of a rapt audience, to the 21st century attention span, dependent on sound bites and click bait for impact. The question today is: How do we speak for maximum impact in a time-constrained world?  

I have asked this question in various forms to my students over the last seven years. This book is a tribute to them. All 4,000 of them and counting, from universities around the world, and from various executive programs, and who gave me a chance and inspired me as well as each other. 

I am an accidental academic with an unconventional path that led me into teaching in the first place. I am the son and grandson of star athletes in India.  My mother was the first woman to represent India at Wimbledon and my father and grandfather played on the national cricket team.  At a young age, I wanted to follow in my family’s footsteps, becoming a member of India’s junior national tennis team and Stanford’s NCAA national championship varsity tennis team.  I even considered going pro, but instead I pursued an MBA and a career in consulting, before breaking into television anchoring in India.  After a short time, I was asked to anchor live broadcasts of the 2008 Olympics, with audiences of more than 30 million people and 7-8 hours of live anchoring daily. The opportunity was tremendous, but I learned that the ability to relax and enjoy myself helped me juggle facts about the more than 11,000 athletes, 300 events, and 40 sports that make up the Olympic Games. I went on to anchor broadcasts of the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games and the 2011 Cricket World Cup, which also drew tens of millions of viewers, as well as prime-time business news broadcasts for top Indian cable news channel NDTV.

Since 2013, I have merged my interests in media and management as a professor of the practice for students at top tier universities: Harvard University Graduate School of Education, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and Policy, and the Indian School of Business.  It was here that I realized the gift and true joy of teaching students. I began to see myself as a catalyst in other people’s lives. Speeding reactions, providing an outlet, pushing for excellence. In my courses, I invite my students on a journey: to learn, prepare, relax, and deliver. And the impact on my own life – as well as their fellow students – has been more significant than I could have imagined. 

My courses have been delivered to graduate students taking elective or required communications courses, co-faculty perfecting their skills for media appearances, and senior leaders across the globe. To date, I have taught diplomats, policy makers, corporate CXO’s, policemen and women, lawyers, Central Bankers, consulting and private equity partners, and students from a whole host of other professions, on how to win hearts and minds in minutes.  My curriculum covers impromptu speaking, elevator pitching, interviewing, framing, presenting, debates, toasts, tributes and eulogies, sharing personal values, and media management, in courses ranging from 2 intense days for executive education, to 13 weeks of a semester course. Depending on the length of the course, students are required to develop and deliver speeches on various prompts, like a “problem-solution” speech, a “reframing speech”, a “speech to teach” and an “adaptive leadership” case recitation. Longer courses allow for more speeches per student, but in most cases, no student leaves my course without completing what I refer to as a “core values” speech.

A core values speech is to be 4 minutes. 240 seconds. Not too short, not too long. Enough time to say something that matters, with enough restrictions to make every word count. Concise and precise. I encourage my students to allow 10 hours of work to craft a quality core values speech. Some initially balk at the number, but most affirm that if anything, 10 hours is an understatement. I challenge them knowing most of them would be able to slap something together in a couple hours, but that is not the bar.  The bar is to take every bit of stimulation offered in the course – the resources, the readings, the exercises, the cases, the interpersonal synergies, our communication community – and deliver an experience that will make your grandchildren proud, if they were to see and hear it. A couple hundred, I believe, met this high bar. From this group, I have picked 80 for the first edition of this book.

A mainstay resource in my curriculum has been the book. “This I Believe.” An initiative involving people, famous and common, sharing four minutes of their personal philosophy in a transcript format. The first collection was intiatied in the 50’s, and then revived in the early 2000’s.  The initiative was started by Edward R. Murrow, arguably one of the most famous journalists of all time. For five years, I served as the Deputy Director of the Murrow Media Center at Tufts University (now called the Edward R. Murrow Center For a Digital World). Via this center, I led various initiatives around media and communication, including a dozen TED-style events. At eight of these events, entitled The Faces Of Community, I invited a few of my students, many of whom were apprehensive in the first place as they enrolled in a fully elective course on public speaking, to recreate their outstanding class speeches for a larger audience. For the larger community. These speeches were culled from many, typically representing the Top 10 from about a hundred delivered in classes between each event. And on those stages, I started to see some magic.

Minutes of Magic attempts to capture the best of these speeches, because excellence needs an audience. Each speech, in real time, was four minutes long, and four minutes of magic, capturing something the speaker deeply felt - a personal philosophy that is central in and to their lives. The speech typically comes alive by a powerful story, and in many instances, there is a real challenge in the art of being personal without being private.

To enjoy them as I have, I ask for two things that have helped me: an open mind, and patience.

An open mind. The topics that follow are diverse, sometimes opinionated, often on hard-hitting topics. But deeply authentic. They have resonated in classes and auditoriums. They are from students from many nations and have been ordered simply by last name, including within themes. And, most importantly, they were spoken. There is a subtle but vital difference between writing a speech to read vs. to be heard, and there is value in understanding this difference. See if you can sense it.

Patience. The night before my very first course, my mother called me from the other end of the world. Bombay to Boston. She asked, “Who are these students that you will be teaching?” I told her that I would be teaching at “a school of International Law and Diplomacy”, but that didn’t seem to clarify much. I proceeded to say, “these are students, who have typically not just helped their neighbors, but travelled across countries and continents to serve the underserved. Peace Corps, Teachers, Social Entrepreneurs, etc. ” My mother took a pause. and then gave me this one piece of advice: “Son, in that case remember to have that extra reserve of love and patience for them.” These words have remained with me, and I ask the same of you. People from widely different career paths and walks of life have since made up the tremendously diverse group of students I’ve had the privilege to teach. Some lived through traumatic events, some had speech impediments, some had not used English substantially before. But I have come to believe effort is a great leveler, and there is as much nurture as nature in public speaking. This confidence consistently inspires me to continue attempting to inspire others.

And with these two pieces of advice in your pocket, I give you the next 80 speeches, coming to you in essay format. Imagine the student delivering them, walking up to the front of the classroom, hands shaking, heart determined, breaking from the typical graduate school world of exams, research, and theory, to practice the soul searching work of determining a core value, a life philosophy, and the discipline to mold it into just a few minutes of magic.