TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.” You can view these talks on their website. A few weeks ago, they launched an app that allows you to listen to these talks from your phone, and suddenly I stopped listening to music while working and put these on instead.
I first encountered Ted Talks during my short stint as a writer for a food website, when my editor sent me a link to a Ted talk by Malcolm Gladwell about spaghetti sauce and asked me to write about it. It turned out to be a very interesting, enlightening speech with spots of humor in it. Below is the speech and here is the link to the article I wrote.
Spaghetti Sauce (Malcolm Gladwell)
Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.
Meanwhile, here are some of the ones I found most interesting, inspiring and entertaining.
The Three A’s of Awesome (Neil Pasricha)
Neil Pasricha’s blog 1000 Awesome Things savors life’s simple pleasures, from free refills to clean sheets. In this heartfelt talk from TEDxToronto, he reveals the 3 secrets (all starting with A) to leading a life that’s truly awesome.
“You will never be as young as you are right now. And that’s why I believe that if you live your life with a great attitude, choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow, living with a sense of awareness of the world around you, embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself, being you and being cool with that, letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you, then I think you’ll live a life that is rich and is satisfying, and I think you live a life that is truly awesome.”
Why are We Happy? (Dan Gilbert)
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong — a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.
“We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk.”
How Great Leaders Inspire Action (Simon Sinek)
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers.
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