I have the World Champion of Public Speaking Sabyasachi Sengupta to thank for helping me appreciate the “Rule of Three,” a basic principle of public speaking I had heard of but misunderstood until now.
I was fortunate to experience the World Championship live this year from the Toastmasters International World Convention in Philadelphia, and I can’t say I noticed his use of this rhetorical technique while I was busy enjoying his speech. I learned about while preparing to share lessons learned from the competition with the members of Club Awesome Toastmasters, Coral Springs, FL where I currently serve as VP of Education. I reviewed an analysis of what makes the speech work by public speaking coach David McRae (see the video embedded below), and one repeated theme of that analysis was how often Sengupta expresses his points in three parts, starting with how growing up in India “My father told me I had three career choices: doctor, engineer, or disappointment.”
Only later did I discover that Sengupta had written his own LinkedIn appreciation of the principle, The Rule of Three – Best tip in public speaking, back in 2022 in the context of business presentations. As he explains there, the three point structure can be used to build an argument (“good-better-best”) or to inject humor (“good-better-twist,” as in doctor, engineer, disappointment). As someone who speaks on complicated topics in business and finance, he finds that drowning people in detail is fatal to communication, particularly spoken communication. If you want people to remember what you said, it’s much better to do the hard work of boiling down each important message to three main points. Then make the most important point, the one you particularly want to make people remember #3.
As I said, I’d previously misunderstood The Rule of Three as meaning I couldn’t make my speech about more than 3 things. I’d need to start it by saying, “Today, I’m going to tell you three things” and end it with “In summary, the three things I want you to remember are ….” I tended to rebel against that kind of rigid structure, even though in fact simplifying a whole argument down to three points wouldn’t be a bad idea if I wasn’t so insistent on doing everything the hard way.
Regardless, Sengupta’s speech is proof that’s not what the Rule of Three means at all. Instead, he uses Rule of Three sentence structure to make his most important points more memorable. Before reading any more, I encourage you to watch it if you haven’t already.
The Rule of Three certainly isn’t the only thing that makes this speech work. He makes great use of humor, storytelling, body language, and common experiences we can all identify with (even those like me who lack the cultural context of understanding what it means to have always “wanted to be a Bollywood actor”). Read the essay from John Zimmer, one of the people who worked with Sengupta on the development of the speech, for more on what makes it work.
But once you start to listen for it, you’ll notice how relentlessly he applies the three-part structure, also known as the tricolon:
The stage is that “one safe space where we can be creative, weird, wacky“
When we’re speaking, nothing matters except “the stage, our craft, and our audience“
In our professional lives, we often hesitate to use our skills as performance because “we think the world will judge us, label us, maybe even laugh at us.”
The other actors at the audition are all “tall, chiseled jaw, and enthusiastic (and then there was me … enthusiastic.”
Financial professionals are really fun: curious, energetic, open to new ideas (he says out loud, while his face is saying something very different).
Now that I understand how applying the Rule of Three can make a speech clearer and more powerful — without making it boring or simplistic — I look forward to applying that rule to my own speeches.
Here is the speech analysis video from David McRae I mentioned: