Today for you I have another linky post of TED talks. I promise that I also have the intention of posting more thinky content, but that requires more of my brain than I’ve had available of late. I’m working hard and often my background listening is TED talks, hence I seem to always have a plethora of those to share with you.

I have an incredible mountain of links just waiting to go into linksalads (yes, plural), but I think I will declare an amnesty on a truck load that have been stored in Facebook and nowhere else simply because we’re going on 8 months or so since I trawled through it and… well you can imagine how many links that would be. Maybe I will, but it’s likely I won’t. It really depends on the scrollback interface on whatever Facebook layout is engaged at the time. We shall see.

But for now, inspiring and thinky TED talks!

Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations:

This was really interesting, according to West, the problems caused by the increase in ubranisation can also be solved through that same mechanism of cities and corporations through scalability and networks. I found it particularly interesting that if you double the size of a city, you increase all the good things and bad things, by about 15% (apparently up to and including walking speed o_O). Fascinating stuff.

Thandie Newton: Embracing otherness, embracing myself:

“I was an ‘other’ before anything else, even a girl.” This talk cuts to the heart of the interplay between self and individuality, and the abstract concept of connection and that sense of oneness. Newton speaks beautifully and with poignant insight, stating that “Race is an illegitimate concept, which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance.” It is a statement that I am in agreement with and think that the concept can be extrapolated to many other spaces where oppression and inequality lurk.

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity:

This talk was about language, how it is a tool for social cooperation. It allows us to take an idea that we have, and transfer it directly into the mind of someone else (through the filters of perception of course). I was interested in the way he referred to this as solving a crisis of ‘visual theft’ with groups of people. You could also call this copying or learning. Interesting to think for a moment and consider how the addition of language makes clear the intent and the purpose of actions. Language uniquely enables prosperity through the transfer of ideas.

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better

If we take ‘listening’ to mean ‘making meaning from sound’ then it is also reasonable to consider what filters we utilise through listening. Filters such as our culture, our language background, values, beliefs, attitudes, intentions and more. Listening is distinct from sound in that we often become desensitised to sound in general. Treasure mentions some concern with how the art of conversation has been replaced by personal broadcast, that it doesn’t facilitate conscious listening which is required for understanding. I like the idea that spending 3 minutes per day in silence that we can maintain a high degree of sensitivity to sound, something I’d like to try. I am aware through other talks also of the concept mentioned about the ‘hidden choir’ in the chorus of sound and the different ways it comes together, for example birds and trickling water and road noise. By far the most important point for me is that listening promotes connection, and that depending on your listening position, the opportunity for connection is increased or decreased accordingly. A favourite (judging by my notes) from this set of talks.

Josette Sheeran: Ending hunger now:

This was fascinating and moving. Hunger and starvation horrify me and it made me so overwhelmingly happy to hear the ways in which the World Food Program is working to combat hunger. I agree with the speaker in that it seems inexplicable that we can have all this technology, all this advanced society (so to speak) and yet… we’re still dealing with this basic lack of food for a significant portion of the global populace.

It was interesting to find out that stunting as a result of malnourishment from conception through to two years of age is apparently irreversible and thus limits the capacity of those individuals to participate in society fully and advance their position. School feeding is apparently a significant way in which significant wins against hunger have been achieved. Not only is there food for consumption, but it promotes education and keeps kids in school longer. Sheeran states that if you use local agriculture and produce from local farms for school feeding programs, that the effect is “transformative”. An example of this is Brazil, whose school feeding program comprises 0.5% of the GDP per annum. I also agree that in order to solve hunger globally that it needs to be a global commitment with a collective approach.

Jeremy Gilley: One day of peace:

In 1999, Gilley was part of an effort to create a global day of ceasefire and non-violence. A global day of peace. This is one of the most interesting examples of how a commitment to idealism inspires individual action in people worldwide toward a common commitment to peace.

Alex Steffen: The shareable future of cities:

There is in today’s world an opportunity to consider how we tackle climate change. Steffen urges a call to rethink how our cities can help rather than hinder. Our energy use is predestined by the types of cities and communities that we live in. I love this particular quote where Steffen states:

“Right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken  said, ‘by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP’ And if we have another 8 billion … people living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we’re going to run out of future really fast”

Ultimately, the point is that it is not about the leaves above, but the systems below as a part of our ordinary and everyday that provide us with the most useful ways in which to engage with climate change and future humanity considerations.

Eve Ensler: Suddenly my body:  (TW: sexualised violence and rape culture references)

Author of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ Eve leads us in a deeply personal, confronting account of how she came to understand her disconnection and eventual connection with her body. This is is quite intense in the language and it might be triggery for anyone sensitive to sexualised violence, so keep that in mind and look after yourself if you wish to watch this talk. I am a fan of Ensler’s poetic metaphor, the charismatic and intense way in which she speaks, commanding respect and challenging us to think and to listen regarding what goes on in the world around us.

Joan Halifax: Compassion and the true meaning of empathy:

This is probably my favourite talk of this set of links. In this talk, the speaker asserts that love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries and that they are vital to life. Halifax has a unique perspective on death through her work with the dying and condemned and how one aspect of wonderousness is that people all around us can be dying and we do not quite take on that can happen to us – it is disassociated. I thought her statement about “the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present” in those who tend to the dying as being very poignant.

This talk moved me on many levels and this quote is another example of how deeply this resonated with me: “compassion is comprised of the capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. it is that ability to stand strnog and to recognise also that I’m not separate from this suffering”. I am not separate from the suffering around me. This resonates strongly with me and it’s something that I am thinking on increasingly.

Halifax speaks with conviction that we “aspire to transform suffering” and that although seeds of compassion must be activated, that they are present in all human beings. I agreed with her that it is fear, pity and moral outrage that are enemies of compassion and that our present experience of the everyday is overladen by terror and fear and such a very narrow band of moral rightness. This global condition is insidious and it pervades our ability to perceive and act with compassion and love. The answer is to consciously take on compassion, to actualise compassion and nurture the quality of resilience that it brings to our lives. Far from draining us, compassion supports us and provides us with an inner well of strength with which to deal with our experiences.

So much food for thought in this talk, one I think would be worthwhile to listen to more than once, perhaps periodically. Much like the Brene Brown talk on vulnerability (I’ve linked to that before).

Sasha Dichter: The generosity experiment:

This talk was interesting and I appreciate a lot of the context where he engages with the ‘no’ reflex and how that closes off opportunities for generosity. Generosity is about ‘yes’, and that what that means is that there is potential and possibility involved in listening to someone and taking a risk on an opportunity to address issues and global problems that are generally considered ‘impossible’ or inevitable. Well worth listening too and considering how you yourself engage with generosity. Are you always responding ‘no’ to requests for help? Is the ‘no’ a reflex or a considered response? All good questions that I’m letting tick over in the back of my brain.

A slightly shorter links post than I usually give you, but I must admit I’m rather pleased by that 🙂  Enjoy! Let me know what your thoughts are about these talks, I’m interested in how other people hear these ideas from visionary people that I’m exploring and find inspiring.

Lately at work I’ve been using TED talks as my background for working interspersed with music and podcasts. (I have a post about both of those brewing, with about a hundred other ideas…I’ll get there one day?) 

As always, TED talks are too good not to be shared and I always like seeing links from people to talks I want to listen to that I haven’t yet heard of. That said I’ve gone through a LOT of talks lately, so be warned that this post is rather epic.

I was thinking of trying to group them by similar topic… but I don’t know that I’ll do the best job of that also I tend to think inspiration, creativity and people doing cool stuff is its own category 😛 Even if they’re talking about different subjects.

Some of these I’m going to have more comments on than others. All of them were worthwhile listening, some of them I had more wordy/thinky reactions and some of them were just interesting and different to listen to and I haven’t got more to say about it just now.  

Bruce Aylward: How we’ll stop polio for good

I didn’t realise how devastating this disease still is, I actually thought it *had* been eradicated.

Shirin Neshat: Art in exile

This talk really did embody that statement ‘the personal is political’, the speaker’s journey through exile and artistic expression is engaging and I was particularly struck by this statement: “Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives.” I’m struck by my privilege because… that isn’t true for me in the way it is true for her and other Iranians, other people who live under very different circumstances than I do. This was a good and timely reminder of looking outside my own little bubble.

Daniel Temmet: Different ways of knowing

This was fascinating – I loved for a moment experiencing the world in a very different way. What I took from the talk overall is that there are a million different ways to see and perceive something – don’t limit that possibility, don’t make it reasonable.

Maya Beisar(s) and her cello(s)

This is technology, music and imagination put together beautifully. Remixing, it’s everywhere.

Steve Jobs: How to live before you die

I’ve never been a fan of Jobs’, but I did like this talk about how to move through the world and work out what you’d really like to be doing, and trying to find a way to do that.

Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously

This is one of my favourite recent talks. The artistic expression on a massive level makes my heart soar. If you’ve recently seen those amazing paper sculptures turning up in various places, you may well enjoy this talk. The speaker discusses how she really came to understand the value of imagination being an artist, beginning with a fishing net.

Honor Harger: A history of the universe in sound

The introduction to this talk mentions that we don’t know much about what the universe sounds like, which seems like a funny thing to say, but then getting to *listen* to space was amazing.

Rajesh Rao: A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

The infectious fascination this speaker has for this particular mystery of history – what he calls the “mother of all crossword puzzles”. I’d never heard of anything around the Indus script or the peoples and civilisation surrounding it. I was surprised about that, as a result I really enjoyed this talk and wondering about history in a very different way than I have before. I love how he breaks down the way they’re forming assumptions and rules from which to translate from, in order to test translations and so on. Fascinating stuff.

Two talks from Stefan Sagmeister, a short talk: On what he has learned (so far), then a longer discussion on: The power of time off.

This speaker really had a way of speaking, of sharing and inviting you to consider and imagine. I loved his list of things from the first talk that he’d learned and then was amazed by some of the art pieces and installations he’d created based on those learnings. Some of my favourite things were “Being not truthful always works against me”, “Assuming is stifling”, “Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted”, “Everybody thinks they are right” and, “Everybody who is honest is interesting”.

In the following talk the speaker talks about what value taking one year in seven completely off from his business, going on sabbatical really brings to him. He talks about it in a personal context, in a business and earnings context and other ways, it was very interesting and I found a lot of merit in what he talked about. The work I’d ultimately like to be doing could really benefit from something like this being part of my business model and my practices. Just imagine what could happen if we had more opportunity to stop, take stock, to think, to be, to reflect and engage inwardly, to explore. I love this idea so much. I’m not at all considering the reality of funding such a practice, right now that’s not so much a practicality as it is a reason to never think about how I could make it happen.

Robert Hammond: Building a park in the sky

This was an interesting talk and speaks to parts of me that pull for community and transformation of conforming surrounds etc. I love his description of “a mile of wildflowers through the middle of Manhattan” and how he kept invisioning the creation of an “inner city wildscape”.

Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days

This idea had a lot of merit – the examples the speaker showed were useful, within reach, both ordinary and inspiring. I may think about this a little more and try and find a way to incorporate something like it in my ordinary and my everyday.

Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new

This woman’s delight was infectious! I loved her enthusiasm for being exactly who she is, in conjunction for how she went about achieving it. Also, I loved some of the looks she shows in the talk. I do think that her concept gets a bit more difficult for those of us with irregular body shapes – certainly going op-shopping is as much an exercise in frustration as regular shopping (though at least it costs less). Maybe I just need to practice. Regardless there’s a lot of merit in this idea and I’ll be thinking about this too as part of my everyday/ordinary.

Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption

This talk was another favourite, it looks to the way we as individuals and consumers are adapting to a new surrounds, how we’re questioning the drive to simply purchase and consume. I love the idea that we could start to see some really obvious and amazing changes in the way we as communities and individuals engage with ‘stuff’ and consumption moving toward a more collaborative and less impact model. She talks about how we’re now becoming “wired to share” in a “peer to peer revolution”, that we are no longer passive, but have become creators and collaborators, or, groups for purpose.

Marc Koska: 1.3million reasons to re-invent the syringe

This was a mixed thing for me. On one hand, the health concerns are staggering, on the other hand, the waste impact seems to be so massive. I can’t argue with the necessity, given the reports of re-use of needles and the obviously devastating effects that come from that.

Nathan Myhrvold: Cooking as never seen before

I loved that they actually cut things in half to photograph them! I love that they concentrated on the 1/100th of a second that it needed to look good for the book. I think that such a book genuinely has a lot of potential in getting people involved in cooking and understanding what’s going on when they cook. 

Jonathan Drori: The beautiful tricks of flowers

This is one of those talks that I listened to because it’s never an area of interest that I’ve taken much notice of before. Actually the way flowers do their thing with insects is pretty interesting and amusing in places. Some beautiful images in this too.

Nadia Al-Sakkaf: See Yemen through my eyes

This woman is the Editor of the Yemen Times and is flat out amazing! I am so deeply inspired by her, I love how outspoken she is, I love how powerfully she comes across and I love the way she seeks to see and speak clearly into the future about the past.

So, that’s what’s been going through my brain as I’ve been working this week (and oh how scary are my process maps becoming, plus there’s been development of a business case in there too)! Hopefully you enjoy some of these too 🙂

The good thing about using TED talks for background music/company while I’m working is that they’re inspiring and often very motivational. I got a heap of work done on Friday because I was listening to these. I love TED talks – I’ve got a whole other bunch of talks that I’ve yet to listen to, so more posts like these are planned.

First of all Stanley McChrystal talking about leadership: ‘Listen, learn and lead‘. This quote really sums up what I got out of the talk: 

“Leaders can let you fail, and not let you be a failure.”  

This talk came from a military background of experience, I don’t usually find myself in a space where I find that inspiring or motivating. However, there were interesting insights around leadership and how people who are so very different can find a commonality with which to come together as one unit. I appreciated this. 

This next talk almost brought me to tears for it’s beauty and vision. Harnessing the internet for the powers of breathtaking connectionism and creativity. Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre presents at TED talking about his experience creating a virtual choir: ‘A virtual choir, 2000 voices strong‘. This talk really gives you an amazing platform from which to truly appreciate these virtual choir performances. 

His first piece titled “Lux Aurumque” involved 185 voices from 25 countries around the world, is an amazing proof of concept. Its success inspired Eric to create an even larger virtual choir using his song “Sleep”. The result was an epic music experience, a virtual choir 2.0 comprised of over 2000 voices from over 58 countries around the world. 

Although I’m disappointed in Google as a organisation at present, I was impressed by Sebastian Thrun’s presentation to TED: ‘Google’s driverless car‘. After losing a friend to a car accident, Sebastian says that he “decided dedicate my life to saving one million people every year.” Sebastian reports that he’s not there yet, that this is just a progress report.

In my listening his work on the driverless car has a number of potential positive impacts on society. Not the least of these is the potential to massively reduce traffic accidents; plus, the ever persuasive money maker in saving people time – he estimates around “4 billion hours per year” in the US. He also comments on how it will contribute to environmental initiatives to reduce pollution by reducing time spent waiting in traffic – his estimate for the US is that it would save “2.4 billion gallons of gasoline per year”. This car looks pretty nifty – I wonder how far we are from cars like this being ‘ordinary’ and part of the everyday landscape?

“Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz talks about how we engage with being wrong, or rather how we avoid it at all costs focusing only on being right and in many cases not taking the lessons that come with being wrong into account. Her talk ‘On being wrong‘ is well worth a listen. Also, how cool is her job title ‘Wrongologist’?!

I really enjoyed David Meslin‘s talk on ‘The antidote to antipathy‘, He talks about how people in general aren’t uninterested or uninvolved with politics because they don’t care, or because they’re stupid or because they’re lazy… but that “apathy as we think we know it doesn’t actually exist … that people do care, but that we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way.” From intentional exclusion, unprofitable messages with the economy of freedom of expression to the cynacism provoked by political parties who all say similar things and are unwilling to engage genuinely outside of the politics machine. 

In another fascinating talk, David Christian discussed ‘Big history‘, and how the increasing complexity surrounding conditions for the universe involves amazing instances of vulnerability and fragility. This was one of those talks that makes me swoon over science and physics and cosmology. To think about the universe with this kind of breadth leaves me breathtaken. 

Forth grade teacher John Hunter presents about ‘The World Peace Game‘ and his experiences of teaching in classrooms with it. He talks ofchildren’s ability to act on far reaching vectors and affirm their actions as the right thing despite the disagreement of others. He talks about his student’s understanding of war and it’s cost when they write condolences letters to the families of the soldiers who are killed when they ‘go to war’ on another nation.

The World Peace Game’s board has 4 levels including a deep sea and deep space level, as well as a land and sea level with four nations both rich and poor. The way he talks about all he’s learned from children’s engagement with the game is truly humbling, I love that he’s created a trust between himself and the students in order to achieve the potential of what the game has to offer. I also love that the concept really does engage with real world issues that we’re unable to solve as adults – hearing children’s perspectives on them is amazing. 

Caroline Casey tells the story in her talk ‘Looking past limits‘ about how she became Mowgli from ‘The Jungle Book‘. She’s had an amazing and far reaching career, but everything all came together for her with an intense authenticity when she trekked across India on the back of an elephant. This was a beautiful story, and reminds me of the notion of considering what I would do, if I knew I couldn’t fail? I don’t have an answer in words yet, though my heart knows the words. 

Silence is the subject of Anil Ananthaswarmy’s talk on ‘What it takes to do extreme astrophysics‘, he visits some of the most remote and breathtaking locations in the world and the astrophysics projects going on there. I am so very excited by the passion and dedication with which teams of people all over the world undertake to take us to new levels of understanding about the universe and our place in it.