If you think you know everything, you’re most likely wrong – Why I love TED talks!

How a commitment to personal improvement through continual learning can make you a better Steemian.

I wrote yesterday about the importance of having respect for other’s beliefs, and accepting that you can’t possibly know everything. You can read that post here;

How to not be ignorant about the world – and in the process become a better Steemian

One of the drivers behind this series of posts is the recent (and probably ongoing) flag wars that have seen some publicity across a variety of feeds over recent weeks. To my mind, in most cases flagging someone is a counter-productive way to approach community governance. It can amount to little more than attempting to censor the beliefs of those you disagree with.

I would always advocate engaging in constructive dialogue with someone rather simply flagging a post because you find it unpalatable.

The approach I try to take when I come up against an opinion I disagree with is to put forward an alternative. The job then becomes to convince that person of why another point of view may be worthy of their consideration. This doesn’t always work, but at least it’s a constructive way to approach a conversation, rather than simply getting into an argument.

In order for this approach to work though, you need to know what you're talking about.

You can’t possibly have an informed opinion, if you aren’t yourself informed. I’m sure everyone can think of a least one occasion where they have been caught in a conversation with someone who clearly doesn’t know what they are talking about. Most likely it frustrated you and made them seem like a fool, whether they realised it or not.

Thought Leadership and Knowledge

Steemit is a platform where many people share views about many issues. If you wish to be a thought leader, and influence others with your opinions, then you must constantly strive to be well informed. This doesn’t happen by itself. A commitment to personal improvement through continual learning allows you to have confidence that the opinions you put forward are educated ones. They might still be wrong, but you’re improving your chances.

This is where TED talks come in. There are numerous ways that you can seek to educate yourself on any given subject, but I feel that TED has provided us with a great resource right at our fingertips.

TED talks represent an enormous wealth of information, stored online, and accessible by anyone who has 10-20 mins to spare. I have seen TED talks given by distinguished academics, current and former world leaders, Nobel laureates, and also by ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things. Not every TED talk is amazing, and not every opinion is correct, but if there is a topic that interests you then chances are, there is a TED talk about it.

• Do you want an opinion on why American politics has become so polarised and what, if anything can be done about it? There’s a TED talk on that topic. Jonathon Haidt, a world renowned psychologist discusses this issue in one talk I watched.

• Do you want to learn more about global poverty and what can be done to eradicate it? There are numerous talks on that, including the one I shared yesterday.

• What about cyber bullying. If you’re of my generation, then this is something you probably didn’t have to deal with as a child. Never the less, it is something that almost all of us with children have to deal with today. There’s a multitude of talks on this topic including one by non-other than Monica Lewinsky.

It will be my aim to share a number of these talks each week as a complement to my other blog posts. Not all of them will be of interest to everyone, but I will endeavour to provide talks that I think are of good quality, and present a wide range of perspectives.

To kick off this series of posts I thought I would start with the talk that is rated as the most popular TED talk of all time. It deals with education, and some of the views it shares are a little unconventional. It’s thought provoking though. Enjoy.

Ken Robinson – Do schools kill creativity?

Image courtesy of www.freeimages.com

Written with StackEdit.