My favourite TED talks (Part Three)
I have been passionately promoting TED almost since it started. It is a fantastic initiation that completely re-shaped public speaking and informative presentations by creating a very entertaining and unique formula for sharing information. In today's accelerated world it offers us full engagement in any contemporary subject in maximum 20 minutes. Speakers are carefully selected and well-prepared to meet the high standards, therefore it is a real privilege to give a TED-talk. There are thousands of great speeches in basically any topic that you could imagine, so it is not easy to choose the best ones. Still, in this series I would like to share with you a few personal favourites.
Dan Ariely is a real genius, I love his friendly and engaging presentation style. He is always very personal and tells a lot of interesting stories to illustrate his main points. He has a brilliant way of looking at things and questioning what we thought was obvious. He calls himself a behavioural economist and yet he created a unique niche for himself within science. (Being an economist and a psychologist I really fancy this combination and love how he merged the soft and intangible psychological aspects with rational economic theories.) He deals with many topics, but probably my favourite of his lectures is this one where he speaks about the irrationality of our "rational" decisions. If you become a fan like me, here are some more great presentations from him:
- About our buggy moral code - the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes).
- About our conflicts of interest - how the pursuit of knowledge and insight can be affected, consciously or not, by shortsighted personal goals.
- About workplace motivation - it is a well-researched subject and yet he can approach it in a fresh way. He shows two exciting experiments and concludes that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose.
- And finally a sociological study about how wealth is distributed over societies - he reveals some new, surprising research on what we think is fair ... then shows how it stacks up to the real stats.
Do you have a favourite TED-talk? I would be interested to know. We can learn from each other... 😊 Stay tuned, soon I come back with another suggestion for you.
Previous parts of this series:
Simon Sinek on leadership
Ursus Wehrli on tidying up arts