Ideas worth spreading. The moniker from the award winning video site TED.com which hosts videos online from its twice-yearly and global conferences every year.
TED.com certainly does have ideas worth spreading. With 600 speakers and growing and 700 videos and growing, it’s a pandora’s box of inspiration. However it may become a little disappointing if you find yourself inputting interesting snippets from your most recently viewed TED video to a dinner party conversation only to discover that others around the table have also watched it, thus preventing your ability to appear forward-thinking, intellectual and all together stimulating. But that’s the point.
Subject to popular belief, TED is not a narcissistic man but rather an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, which, curated by Chris Anderson, are the industries it brings together.
From its own idea seed in 1984 grew the invitation-only conferences that brought acclaimed speakers and experts in their fields to the stage – from Bill Gates to Frank Gehry, from Malcolm Gladwell to Richard Branson – that was then shared with the world through the internet.
TED.com is the perfect website if you are looking for distractions at work, however do not watch late at night unless you enjoy experiencing insomnia as you ponder the big, unanswerable questions: how patternicity affects us, how to end sex slavery, abolish hunger, fight corruption, live peacefully, the list goes on.
Its themes are raw and honest; it’s speakers thoughtful, passionate and often unassumingly persistent in their areas of work.
If you want to know what makes a good TED Talk, you only need to seek out the TED Talk on the video site that analyses and explains this.
Some of these worthwhile ideas are outlandish, extreme, fearlessly future-gazing and the majority are inspiring and thought-provoking.
Many, however, are simple. These are unfussy solutions that can catapult our world into a better being, such as Alan Siegel cutting through legal jargon, David Pogue on interface design, and many more who provide easy tools and studies to better understand the self.
They encourage firm messages of Slow Life, such as George Whiteside’s talk entitled “Toward a Science of Simplicity”, John Maeda on “The Simple Life” and one of the best-known advocates of Slowness, journalist Carl Honore, whose own TED Talk praises slowness, just like his book, which jorg&olif reviewed here.
Then there is a consideration of the importance of time off, as psychologist Phillip Zimbardo prescribes in his video, or the most recent video by designer Stefan Sagmeister who illustrates how much innovation comes from his yearlong sabbatical every seven years.
Now, I wonder how to get an invite for next year? There must be a simple solution…
