Last year, I decided to watch one TED Talk every Thursday for the entire year. Here’s are eight of my favorites and my notes on each talk.
1. A Powerful Way to Unleash Your Creativity – Tim Harford
In this talk, Tim Harford addresses multitasking, which he feels has gotten a bad name. He believes that while it is typically a bad idea, that’s only because we’re doing it wrong. We’re multitasking when we’re in a rush.
Harford believes that “slow-motion multitasking”, the act of having multiple projects going during the same time period, is a common habit of master creatives. A study of the top scientists in the world found that in their first 100 research papers, on average they changed the subject 43 times – and Harford believes this shifting of topics is key to creative breakthrough.
Why do creative people have multiple projects on the go?
- Creativity often comes when you take an idea from its original context and move it somewhere else – think of Archimedes struggling with displacement, and finally had his eureka moment while taking a bath.
- Learning to do one thing well can often help you to do something else well. Think of athletes who practice cross-training.
- It can provide assistance when we’re stuck.
So, how do we stop all of these projects from becoming overwhelming? Harford suggests we manage our ideas by keeping them all in a box. It doesn’t matter whether the box is physical or digital, what matters is that we don’t lose our ideas so that we can build on them.
Examples of slow-motion multitaskers: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Twyla Tharp, Michael Crichton.
2. Inside The Mind of a Procrastinator – Tim Urban
Tim Urban is the founder of Wait But Why, one of the best blogs on the web. When you’ve got some free time (maybe when you’re procrastinating), give it a read. It’s sure to spark a lot of thought.
He gave this TED Talk in 2016, to highlight what goes on in the mind of a procrastinator.
He discusses three parts of the procrastinator’s brain:
- The Rational Brain: The part of our brain that tells us to do what makes sense.
- The Monkey Brain: The part of the procrastinator’s brain that tells them to do what’s easy and fun. It distracts the rational brain from doing what makes sense.
- The Panic Monster: The part of the procrastinator’s brain that wakes up when a deadline is coming, signaling to the procrastinator that the work that makes sense needs to be done, now.
Urban states that when the Panic Monster is the only mechanism for doing hard things, we run into problems. It leads to long term procrastination – the ignoring of health, fitness, and other important aspects of our lives. This, in turn, leads to unhappiness and regret.
He concludes the talk by stressing that we need to stay away from the instant gratification monkey part of our brain. We don’t have that much time, and we need to do what makes sense if we want to be fulfilled.
3. How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals – Stephen Duneier
From TEDxTucson, Stephen Duneier discusses marginal adjustments, and how they can help you reach your biggest goals.
Duneier believes that what stands between us and our goals isn’t a magical skill or talent you’re born with, the gap is in how we approach decision making. Marginal improvements often have a huge impact on our lives.
In this talk, Duneier breaks down how he went from being a C student to an A+ student by making his workload manageable. Instead of pressing himself to read a book, he’d tell himself to read a couple of paragraphs at the most. Starting things, it turns out, is the quickest way to finishing them – and keeping our tasks simple is the quickest way to starting.
He highlights other examples, including how he learned to speak German, and how he used marginal adjustments to set a world record for knitting granny squares. He credits these achievements to the same process. Duneier takes ambitious projects and breaks them down into their simplest form while making marginal improvements along the way to improve his odds of success.
4. The Power of Believing That You Can Improve – Carol Dweck
This talk is all about how we educate our children. Carol Dweck (the author of Mindset) speaks about a high school in Chicago where students who didn’t receive passing grades were assigned the grade of “not yet”.
This lets students understand they’re on a learning curve, a path to a better future.
She believes that to inspire kids to believe that they can improve, we need to build a bridge to yet. We do this by praising wisely.
Praising wisely is not praising intelligence or talent, but praising the process that kids engage in. Their focus, strategies, effort, perseverance, and improvement. This process creates resilient kids. To change children’s mindsets, we need to teach them that pushing beyond their comfort zone to learn something difficult is a good thing. Students taught this process showed a significant improvement in grades in many studies.
When you implement praise wisely, it changes how people view things. This leads to growth and improvement.
5. The Magic of Not Giving a F*** – Sarah Knight
Sarah Knight had a great job as a book publisher, but she was still unhappy. So she quit. She cleared out her mind, and left room for focusing on the things that brought her joy.
She decided to make a manifesto of sorts out of this, called The Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. In this talk, she defines giving a fuck as caring, and not giving a fuck as not caring. If you don’t care about something, she believes you should stop giving your time, thoughts, and money to it. This gives you more time and energy to things you actually do care about.
Part of her method is called “Not Sorry”. She suggests being honest and polite, but not being sorry about the things you’ve decided not to care about. These things can be tasks, events, and even people. Decide what annoys you, make a list, and carefully cross out the things you don’t want to care about anymore. Then stop giving a fuck about those things and cross them off your list.
6. Quit Social Media – Dr. Cal Newport
Cal Newport is a computer scientist and the author of Deep Work. He’s never had a social media account.
When he tells people this, he hear three common objections:
- You’re rejecting a fundamental technology innovation
- It’s vital to my success
- It’s harmless
In this TED Talk, he walks through reasons why (in his opinion) those objections aren’t valid. He believes social media is purely an entertainment product, that using it is not rare or valuable, and that it leads to many negative consequences like feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and anxiety.
Newport says that life without social media is peaceful and productive. If you treat your attention with respect, you can work with intensity and trade that for time. He finishes the talk by asserting that you’ll be surprised by what you can get done in 8 hours with intense concentration. He covers this at length in Deep Work.
7. How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are – Andrew Solomon
I had a really rough week and found this TED Talk to be extremely helpful. Andrew Solomon reminds us that ease makes less an impression on us than struggle. While we cannot bear a pointless torment, we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful – so we need to forge meaning, build identity, and invite the world to share in our joy.
“If you banish the dragons you banish the heroes”
One other note: while I’m not too familiar with Bible passages, 2 Corinthians 12 was mentioned in this talk, and it resonated.
8. The danger of hiding who you are – Morgana Bailey
Morgana Bailey is a Human Resources Professional who hid her true self for over 16 years. In this talk, she explains why that’s dangerous, and how our biggest obstacles are our own insecurities.
“There are more scary things inside than outside”
-Toni Morrison
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