Top 10 TED Talks You Need to See
1. Simon Sinek – How Great Leaders Inspire Action
Views: 24 million
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership – starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?”
Sinek has spent his life’s work trying to convince people to do what inspires them. “People don’t buy WHAT you do,” he says. “People buy WHY you do it.” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers.
2. Brene Brown – The Power of Vulnerability
Views: 31 million
Brené Brown discusses the power of vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Her studies are around human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. .
In a speech filled with quotable material, her most poignant remark may be this: “You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” Definitely a talk to share.
3. Shawn Anchor – The Happy Secret to Better Work
Views: 16 million
We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.
“If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral, or stressed,” he says. “Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we’ve found is that every single business outcome improves.”
4. Tony Robbins – Why We Do What We Do
Views: 21 million
Tony Robbins discusses the “invisible forces” that motivate everyone’s actions. One of the most famous motivational speakers in the world, Tony Robbins has held 10,000-seat seminars and spoken with Olympic athletes, heads of state, and CEOs.
In this speech, which includes a famous TED moment in which he spontaneously high-fives with the spectating Al Gore, Robbins discusses what motivates us, what makes us do what we do
5. Dan Pink – The Puzzle of Motivation
Views: 15 million
Previously a speech writer for Al Gore, Dan Pink is now a career analyst, studying the puzzle of motivation. He offers advice to managers who want to get the most out of their employees. First off, he tells them to forget the traditional forms of reward that, in the end, actually “dull thinking and block creativity.”
6. Angela Duckworth – The Key to Success? Grit.
Views: 12 million
Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled.
Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.
7. Dan Gilbert – The Science Behind Happiness
Views: 15 million
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert explains the fallacy behind the notion that to achieve happiness, people must get what they want. He uses psychology and neuroscience to explain that what we think makes us happy is, often, wrong.
As Gilbert says, “Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.” Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.
8. Nigel Marsh – How to Make Work-Life Balance Work
Views: 4 million
Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. Writer of Fat, Forty and Fired, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity – and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.
9. Tim Urban – Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator
Views: 15 million
Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn’t make sense, but he’s never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done. In this hilarious and insightful talk, Urban takes us on a journey through YouTube binges, Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window – and encourages us to think harder about what we’re really procrastinating on, before we run out of time.
10. Jason Fried – Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work
Views: 5 million
Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn’t a good place to do it. He calls out the two main offenders (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make the workplace actually work.
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