10. Ten TED Talks

1. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
Sir Ken Robinson's talk on schools and creativity is the #1 most watched TED talk in the world, therefore I had very high expectations upon first watching it. Robinson starts off his talk speculating on all of the TED talks that have been presented thus far in the conference, and marveling at how creative everyone is. He then starts to crack a few jokes about people who work in education and how they are usually not invited to dinner parties, which sets a light-hearted tone and gets several laughs out of the audience. Education is meant to take us into the future which we can't grasp. Nobody even knows what the world will look like in 5 years, yet we are teaching young children now who will be retiring in the year 2065. He goes on to introduce his thesis, which is essentially that creativity is as important as literacy. I felt that this opening was very effective at winning over the audience with Robinson's keen sense of humor and charisma. Additionally, the human interest stories where he shared funny stories of children to the audience were very entertaining and not as serious as some other TED talks commonly are.

One of the main points in this TED talk is the fact that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original at all. Nowadays, we stigmatize mistakes and say that they are the worst things we can do. We get educated OUT of our creativity because many highly-talented, creative, brilliant people think they're not. They think the thing they were so good at in school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. Sir Ken Robinson's ending is about how TED celebrates the gift of the human imagination. He suggests we use this gift wisely by seeing our creative capacities for the richness that they are, and our children for the hope that they are. I think he could have related the ending to his opening a little better, so that the talk came full-circle. However, I liked his ending because it ended on a positive and inspiring note for the audience to reflect on, and reminded everyone that we must focus on preparing our children for the future.

2. Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation
"The puzzle of motivation" is another widely popular TED talk, and after watching the speaker you will know why. Pink starts off his talk with a serious tone, saying, "I have a confession to make." He builds up the suspense and then continues on to say, "I went to law school and didn't do well." However, today, he said he plans on using what he knows to make a hard case that will make the audience rethink the way the world run's businesses. This was a powerful opening in my opinion. Pink is basically saying that even though he has never practiced law a day in his life, there is enough evidence out there to back up his opinion. Not only does this capture the attention of the audience, but it makes them feel like they should have been able to come to the same conclusion as well, because they also are not lawyers.

Pink's talk explains the different things that motivate us, and how incentives most of the time do more harm than good. In the case of "the candle problem", where people were asked to attach a candle to the wall without having wax drip off, the group that was given an incentive actually took longer to complete the task than the group who was not given an incentive. However, this is not the way our world works. Everything today is incentivized, whether it's bonuses, commissions, or their own reality show. Rewards narrow our focus, so for creative tasks they actually dull our thinking and block creativity. Dan Pink argues that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the best form of motivation, and uses Wikipedia as a prime example. Dan Pink wraps up his talk with 3 main ideas, and he numbers them as he tells them, which I think is helpful to the audience so they walk away with the knowledge that the speaker wanted them to have. All in all, we need to repair the disconnect between what science knows is true, and what the business world does when it comes to motivation.

3. Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are
As a social scientist, Amy Cuddy begins her talk by turning to the audience and asking them to analyze the way they are sitting at that moment. She asks them if they are hunched over, making themselves appear small, holding their arms, spreading their arms wide, sitting straight, and so on. She then leaves her opening in a cliffhanger, and says she will come back to that thought a little later, and then proceeds to define body language. This opening was interesting because it engaged the audience right away, and made them pay attention to the way they are seated right off the bat. I liked this introduction because it forced the audience to participate and pay attention, but I also think it might have been distracting to the message that Cuddy was actually trying to say. Following the opening, Amy Cuddy explains how in today's society, we make sweeping judgements and inferences based solely on peoples' body language. However, aside from other people being affected by our body language, we ourselves are affected by it as well. Expressions of power in the animal kingdom always involve getting bigger and occupying more space - with people it is no different. The question that Amy Cuddy is investigating is, can our nonverbals force us to feel a certain way, even if we don't actually feel it at first. For example, when we are forced to smile by holding a pencil in our teeth, it actually makes us happier. The same goes for the alpha gorilla stance, which forces us to feel powerful.

Not only do our minds change our bodies, but our bodies also change our minds. Amy Cuddy tells us not to only fake it til we make it, fake it til we become it. Do it enough until we actually become it and internalize. She says that tiny tweaks can make so much of a difference. For two minutes, try making yourself large and feel powerful, you need to get your testosterone running and demonstrate to the job interviewers who you really are. Cuddy ends her talk by challenging the audience to both try a power pose and share a science. By sharing these techniques with people, you can significantly change the outcomes of their lives. She knows this because it happened to her, when she felt she didn't deserve to be at Princeton when she did. This conclusion was clearly very effective because Cuddy got a standing ovation.

4. Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders
The COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg investigates why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions. Her presentation begins by explaining how everyone in the room is lucky, because they all grew up in a world where they had basic human rights, meanwhile there are still women in the world who don't have them. She then gives off statistics of how few women leaders there are. In a New York office, she says she found out she was the only woman to have ever given a pitch in the fancy office for over a year because the men who worked there didn't even know where the bathroom was. This opening was a good one because it was
both humorous and shocking.

Sandberg explains that there are 3 clear messages that are being given off to women who want to stay in the workforce. (1) Sit at the table. (2) Make your partner a real partner. (3) Don't leave before you leave. Men attribute their success to themselves while women attribute it to other factors. Women do 3x the amount of child care than men do, so they end up having 2 jobs. We put more pressure on men to succeed than women. We have to make it as important a job to work inside the job for both genders if we want to even things out. From the moment a woman thinks about having a child and adding that into the mix of everything she's doing, she stops pushing herself. She "leaves before she leaves", because she stops volunteering to take a promotion, take on a project, or challenge herself. Sandberg ends with this thought: once you have a kid, your job needs to be really really good to motivate you to go back to it. However, if before you left your job you didn't try to climb the ladder and the person next to you did, you're going to be bored when you go back because you didn't keep your foot on the gas pedal. This was a powerful ending that made the audience and even myself think, as a woman, about the decisions that we make, especially the unconscious ones that may be setting ourselves back instead of pushing us forward.

5. Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
Using examples from some of the most popular brands and people, Simon Sinek tells us how the best leaders think, act, and communicate. He shows us how some leaders are able to inspire while others aren't, using his concept of "the golden circle". Sinek begins his talk referencing famous movements we are familiar with. Why is Apple so innovative? Why did Martin Luther King lead the civil rights movement? Because the way they market their ideas is different.

People don't buy what you do they buy how you do it --- this is Simon Sinek's mantra of the presentation that he repeats over and over again. For example, in the case of Apple, this company is so successful because they reverse the order in which they explain their products by sharing their philosophy first, and it works. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe. What you do simply proves what you believe, not why. Instead of telling people what needed to change in America, Dr. Martin Luther King Dr. told people what he believed. By doing this, people who believed the same things that King believed took his cause and made it their own. There are leaders and there are those who lead. Those who lead, inspire us and we follow them not because we have to but because we want to. This closing by Simon Sinek was incredibly inspiring and made the audience think.

6. Derek Sivers: How to start a movement
In his 3 minute talk, Derek Sivers uses a funny video clip of people dancing to explain how movements get started. The leader begins by standing up in a crowd of people and dancing like a crazy person. As soon as the first follower comes and joins him, the leader embraces him as an equal. It's not about the leader anymore, it is about them (plural). The follower then calls to his friends.

The first follower is a form of a leader in itself, because it takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader. The second follower makes it a movement, as three is a crowd. Once there are three people dancing on that hill, the new followers grow exponentially. This is the tipping point, and eventually as more people join in, it's less risky. Those who were sitting on the fence at first, now have no reason not to join. They can still join the movement and be part of the in crowd, if they hurry. Sivers ends his talk by explaining the main point of the video, that is not always clear. Leadership is overglorified. The first follower transformed the lone nut into a leader. If you really care about starting a movement, you should have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. I thought this talk was very entertaining because it explained a revolutionary thought with the aid of perfectly timed video footage to put Sivers' ideas to life. Because the video was only 3 minutes, the speech was a bit different and did not have a clear introduction or conclusion, but the idea given off was still heard.

7. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!
Sir Ken Robinson makes a funny follow-up to his 2006 talk on schools killing creativity. In his talk, he makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning, creating an environment where kids' natural talents can be flourished. He starts off his talk in his usual fashion of making jokes to warm the audience up. He says that there is a hunger for videos of him, which gets a good laugh out of the audience as well as myself. When beginning his talk, he talks about the difference between people who love what they do to the point of it being who they are, vs. people who just simply get by with what they're doing without any real happiness. He says the reason for people not loving what they do is because of something that you wouldn't think- education. Education dislocates many people from their natural talents.

Reform is of no use anymore, because it is simply repairing a broken model. Education needs to be a revolution and transform into something else. The real challenge is to innovate fundamentally in education. It means challenging what we take for granted. Robinson remarks on a quote that says, "college starts in kindergarten", by simply responding, "no it doesn't". Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. We have built our education systems on the models of fast food, where everything is standardized. We must customize, not standardize. Sir Ken Robinson ends his talk by saying that every day, everywhere, there are children who spread their dreams beneath our feet, and we must tread softly. Robinson delivers his speech so eloquently that he gets an immediate standing ovation at the end of his speech. I really enjoy Sir Ken Robinson's speeches because of the combination of effortless charisma, thought-provoking quotes, and inspirational ideas.

8. Erik Hersman: Reporting crisis via texting
Hersman explains a revolutionary of something called Ushahidi, a Google map mashup that allows Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries. Hersman doesn't really have an introduction, he just gets right into the topic of reporting and stopping violence in Kenya. In 2008, there was post-election violence all over the country. He developed a system where anyone with a mobile phone can report violence that they see. It was a simple concept where you could look at a map and there were markings of places where violence had occurred, and what specific type. However, Hersman realized he needed to use this idea and make a platform so that it could be used all over the world.

What Hersman explained is that if this idea works in Africa, it can work anywhere. By building it to work in the most first-world location, it is much easier to develop it and make minor changes for it to work anywhere. He begins his conclusion by talking about "the next big thing", which is the way we process crisis information. When something serious happens, there is an information overload whether its word of mouth or on social media. We need to develop something that filters this information so that we know what to believe. Because this was a short talk, there was not a very clear structure. I thought the talk had a very good message, but a more clear structure would have made it more engaging.

9. Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead
Seth Godin, an entrepreneur, argues that the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived the human social unit from the past known as tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make a big change. He starts off his talk by with a story of how one man named Nathan transformed the SPCA from being an animal killing organization, to a no-kill organization purely by traveling to different cities and reaching out to the community. Godin argues that it's tribes- not money, not factories, that can change our world, politics, and align large numbers of people. Not because you forced the people, but because they connect with what you think.

A movement is formed because people want to join with those who they connect with. Thousands of people aligned with Al Gore's thoughts, and he created a movement by his true fans who care enough to spread the message for him. Movements aren't for everyone, they are about finding the true believers. Godin wraps up his thoughts with three questions. First of all, he asks, who are you upsetting? Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you aren't making a change. Second, who are you connecting? Third, who are you leading? Focusing on these questions will help you make a movement. Leaders challenge the status quo, build a culture, have curiosity, connect people to one another, and have charisma. You don't need charisma to be a leader, being a leader gives you charisma. The last thing Seth Godin says, is asks the audience to create a movement. I really liked this talk as it was very inspiring, but I wish it had more humor like the other talks I have been watching.

10. Drew Dudley: Everyday Leadership
Without knowing it, we all have changed someone's life in some way. Drew Dudley explains what leadership and asks us all to celebrate it by continuing to improve others' lives. He begins his talk by asking the audience, "How many of you are comfortable calling yourselves a leader?" When not many of the audience puts their hands up, he proceeds to go right into his topic by saying that most people think leadership is bigger than them. Being a leader is something they may deserve one day, but to say they're a leader now means they are cocky and arrogant. He worries that people spend so much time celebrating amazing things that nobody can do, that we start to devalue the things that we can do every day. We don't let ourselves take credit for the times when we actually are leaders.

Dudley tells a story about something he calls, "the lollipop moment", where he apparently impacted someone's life so severely, yet he doesn't even remember it. We celebrate birthdays, where all you have to do is not die for 365 days yet we don't tell someone they have changed our lives significantly. It can be scary to think that we matter that much to someone. As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, we give us an excuse to not expect it from ourselves, and not each other. It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us. To wrap up his talk, Dudley's call to action is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each others' lives. We need to get over it so that we can move beyond it. He claims that we've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There are only 6 billion understandings of it. If we redefine leadership this way, it will be so much more effective.