Which do you think is more important for speakers, thought leaders, and leaders to be:  cool or good?

Let’s look into these two words a little more deeply before we decide.  The slang use of the word ‘cool’ has had an unusually long run (for slang).  By all accounts, ‘cool’ has been cool for about 100 years.  Most slang terms go in and out of fashion in the blink of an eye.  And cool has near-global dominance. Most people around the world know what it means to be cool – and probably aspire to being cool themselves.

Now comes a study (Pezzuti et al., 2025) which seeks to determine what the state of coolness is, and why it is so popular.  Originally, being cool meant staying calm under pressure.  But now it has morphed into being able to show your emotions.  So one of the ways cool has remained cool is by a bit of elasticity of meaning.

Now, the hard question:  Are cool people good?  The study found some overlap – cool people had to be relatively good to be seen as cool – but not a complete merging of meanings.  Cool people are seen as likeable, a trait they share in common with the good, but being cool means also having some hedonistic tendencies, and some power, both of which are not necessarily good.

So, should speakers and thought leaders be cool or good?  According to the study, the essence of coolness is centered on doing things differently, but not too differently.  That, it seems to me, is the perfect place for speakers to be.  Different, but not too different.

And, with more than a soupçon of goodness.  We want our speakers to contribute to or support some cause that relates to their topic.  We want them to be good, because that helps justify the princely fees they can achieve from the keynote stage.  In fact, I recommend all speakers, thought leaders, and leaders adopt a cause and give 10% of their gross revenues to support it.

I’ve launched and supported TEDx Walden Pond for three years now, and I do so to help spread the idea of excellence in public speaking, and also to spread interesting ideas.  Our third annual event takes place on October 30^th, this year, and we have a slate of extraordinary speakers on topics ranging from the mental health crisis amongst EMTs, to the problem with architects, to a novel idea about the use of green spaces in cities, to much-needed support for parents, to combining apparently unrelated ideas to achieve new breakthroughs, to a daily practice of joy, to an epiphany about craziness gleaned during a marathon, to a problem that could have sunk Netflix, to the wisdom of Twisted Sister.

If you’re in the Boston area, you won’t want to miss this event.  There are a very few tickets left here.  If you can’t be at the world premiere of these amazing talks, then keep an eye out for them online, sometime in December.  These folks are both cool and good.