My favourite TED talks (Part Twenty)
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.
Just to continue with the funny ones, I suggest you watch Brian Little, the research professor at Cambridge University, talking about who we are really. His talk is adorably humorous and informative at the same time. I don't know how many times I have seen it and I am very happy that @singas has reminded me to watch it again... The questions he puts forward are at the core of psychological theory and philosophy: what makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits -- sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. He dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than we think.
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
Dan Ariely on the irrationality of our "rational" decisions
Julian Treasure on listening
Tim Urban on procrastination
Nicolas Christakis on social networks
Amy Cuddy on the power of body language
Dan Pink on motivation
Kelly McGonigal on stress management
Shawn Anchor on happiness at work
Ron Gutman on smiling
Celeste Headlee on good conversations
Michael Shermer on myths, superstitions and urban legends
Hans Rosling on interesting statistics
Apollo Robbins on the art of misdirection
Jill Bolte Taylor on an insider view of stroke
Kai-Fu Lee on artificial intelligence
Itay Talgam on lessons leaders can learn from conductors
Emily Levine on the theory of everything