TED Talks are videos that feature all the best ideas on a huge variety of topics. The list here includes some of the most inspiring videos that offer brand new ideas to help boost an individual's productivity.
1. Dan Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation
Pink, a career analyst, said the secret to increasing an employee's motivation is not in worrying over money. It's all about making him feel intrinsically motivated in his job: "the more autonomy, mastery and purpose someone has in their job, the more motivated they become."
2. Stefan Sagmeister: The Power of Time Off
Sagmeister, a designer who owns a studio in New York, said that every seven years, he shuts down his studio and takes one full year off. He believes in the philosophy that "taking breaks makes you more focused and productive."
3. Kelly McGonigal: How to Make Stress Your Friend
Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist, believes "stress in itself isn't bad for us. The only factor that affects whether stress harms us is how we view the stress."
4. Nilofer Merchant: Got a Meeting? Take a Walk
"Sitting has become the smoking of our generation," stated Merchant, who believes that conducting a walking meeting is far more productive than doing so within an enclosed environment. When people go outside and talk while being surrounded by fresh air, a whole lot of fresh new ideas could also come up.
5. Paolo Cardini: Forget Multitasking, Try Monotasking
"Find your monotask part within the multitasking world," recommended designer Cardini. In this video, Cardini presented his idea with several unique projects, such as the mono phone. Cardini wants to downgrade the high-tech mobile devices of today into a simple mono phone that makes the user talk only with a single person at a time and enjoy the conversation like he has never experienced before.
6. Arianna Huffington: How to Succeed? Get More Sleep
In this video, Huffington told everyone to shut their eyes and feel the power of a good night's sleep. She believes that people, instead of choosing to have less hours of sleep in order to get more things done, should do the opposite because sleep helps in increasing productivity and happiness.
7. Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts
Cain talked about how people these days live in that type of world where personality traits such as being social and outgoing are more favored. She also discussed how being an introvert makes one feel difficult and shameful. For Cain, introverts are, in reality, extraordinarily talented and that they can actually offer unique abilities to the world.
8. Gary Vaynerchuk: Do What You Love (No Excuses!)
In this video, Vaynerchuk told the audience to ask themselves one very important question: "What do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?" He quickly followed it up by saying: "Do that! I promise you can monetize that s***."
9. Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action
Sinek talked about inspirational leadership and highlighted the most important question that entrepreneurs should ask themselves: why they are doing what they do. "There are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold the position of power or authority. But those who lead, inspire us. We follow those who lead not because we have to but because we want to."
10. Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work
Fried talked about the many distractions that people face at work and stressed how one's workplace is not suitable for creative pursuits, which would usually require huge periods of uninterrupted time. In order to fight these, he gave the following recommendations to companies: use email, IM and other tools when communicating to each other as opposed to having one-on-one talks; cancel meetings; and implement "no-talk Thursdays" when, every Thursday, co-workers avoid talking to each other, which in turn reduces distractions.
11. Shawn Achor: The Happy Secret to Better Work
Achor talked about the importance of being happy in order to be productive. He focused on the idea of positivity and mentioned how little and simple habits can actually bring happiness and eventually make one productive.
12. Richard St. John: "Success is a continuous journey"
St. John asked the question at the beginning of the video: "Why do so many people reach success and then fail?" He explained that this is because people treat success like a one-way street, that people do everything that leads up to success. When they get there, they've figured that they've made it. They sit back in their comfort zone, and then eventually stop doing everything that has made them successful.
13. Dan Ariely: What Makes Us Feel Good About Work?
"By getting people to work harder, you actually got them to love what they're doing into a higher degree," said Dan Ariely in the video. He also made mention of the topics called "efficiency" as defined by Adam Smith and "meaning" as defined by Karl Marx. In the end, he stressed that there should be more reason than just money to make one feel motivated at work. These include meaning, creation, challenge, ownership, identity, pride, and the like.
14. David Grady: How to Save the World (Or At Least Yourself) from Bad Meetings
Grady talked about what people can actually do to make meetings more meaningful than what most people have perceived them to be. He suggested that it should begin with the individual, who can approach the meeting organizer and offer him anything that one can do to help him achieve his goal. If this is done often enough and is accompanied with respect, "people might start to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations."
15. Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work
Nigel Marsh shared quite a number of interesting nuggets on how to achieve work-life balance. In the latter part of the video, he said: "The small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life."
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