Top 25 Ted Talks

Question 1

Do schools kill creativity? Ken Robinson

My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.

As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads.

There’s something curious about professors in my experience - they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.

Answer 1

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

“If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.

Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.

Question 2

How to speak so that people want to listen - Julian Treasure

Seven deadly sins of speaking:

1/ Gossip
2/ Judging
3/ Negativity
4/ Complaining - viral misery
5/ Excuses
6/ Exaggeration becomes lying
7/ Dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that.

I’d like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world.

Honesty
Authenticity
Integrity
Love

You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened.

Answer 2

Register. If you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. We vote for politicians with lower voices, it’s true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That’s register.

Timbre It’s the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that’s not you, that’s not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice.

Prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It’s root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don’t have any prosody at all. That’s where the word “monotonic” comes from, or monotonous, monotone.

I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don’t have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful.

Question 3

The power of introverts - Susan Cain

You need to understand what introversion is. It’s different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they’re in quieter, more low-key environments.

Most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks.

Interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they’re much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they’re putting their own stamp on things.

Solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. Darwin took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations.

We have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude.

Answer 3

When we hit the 20th century, we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality.

Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it.

I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions - you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It’s great for introverts and it’s great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work.

Number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I’m not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.

Number three: Take a good look at what’s inside your own suitcase and why you put it there.