I have been passionately promoting TED almost since it started. It is a fantastic initiation that completely re-shaped public speaking and informative presentations by creating a very entertaining and unique formula for sharing information. In today's accelerated world it offers us full engagement in any contemporary subject in maximum 20 minutes. Speakers are carefully selected and well-prepared to meet the high standards, therefore it is a real privilege to give a TED-talk. There are thousands of great speeches in basically any topic that you could imagine, so it is not easy to choose the best ones. Still, in this series I would like to share with you a few personal favourites.
I was always fascinated by scientists who are able to talk about their science in a popular way. This requires a special skill: to be able to bring down your very elevated thoughts to us, to the Earth. In this awesome talk historian, David Christian tells the complete history of humanity (or even beyond) in only 18 minutes. Backed by stunning illustrations, he narrates the events from the Big Bang to the Internet. This is "Big History": he takes us to an enlightening journey, giving us a wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.
Do you have a favourite TED-talk? I would be interested to know. We can learn from each other... 😊 Stay tuned, soon I come back with another suggestion for you.
Previous parts of this series:
Simon Sinek on leadership
Ursus Wehrli on tidying up arts
Dan Ariely on the irrationality of our "rational" decisions
Julian Treasure on listening
Tim Urban on procrastination
Nicolas Christakis on social networks
Amy Cuddy on the power of body language
Dan Pink on motivation
Kelly McGonigal on stress management
Shawn Anchor on happiness at work
Ron Gutman on smiling
Celeste Headlee on good conversations
Michael Shermer on myths, superstitions and urban legends
Hans Rosling on interesting statistics
Apollo Robbins on the art of misdirection
Jill Bolte Taylor on an insider view of stroke
Kai-Fu Lee on artificial intelligence
Itay Talgam on lessons leaders can learn from conductors
Emily Levine on the theory of everything
Brian Little on who we are really
Al Gore on climate change