There will be a time you feel less motivated and seek for something to cheer you up. Come to listen to TED talks, an online non-profit organization. With the slogan “Ideas worth spreading”, they have been successfully sharing ideas and encouragement through inspiring speeches. If you are in need of some serious inspiration and personal development, check out these inspirational TED talks.
Try something new for 30 days | Matt Cutts
If you’ve ever got bored with your daily routine, this one is definitely for you.
Matt Cutts, a computer scientist suggested in his short and cheerful talk that you should try something new for 30 days. As it is a right amount of time to create a new habit or subtract one, you can do whatever you’ve ever dreamed or wanted to do in your life. The lessons you achieve after each 30-day-challenge will be priceless and memorable. This is the effect of breaking the pattern of your daily life to earn more energy and confidence and to experience your life to the fullest.
8 secret of success | Richard St. John | TED2005
Inspired by the question from a high school girl “What leads to success?”, Richard did interview 500 successful people and compiled it to a 3-minute talk. So here goes the list of 8 secrets of success that you could note down and follow.
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- Passion – Do it for love, not for money. If you do it for love, the money comes anyway.
- Work – It’s all hard work, nothing comes easily
- Good – Get damn good at what you do by practicing continuously
- Focus – Focus yourself on one thing at a time
- Push – Keep pushing yourself, physically, mentally through shyness and self-doubt
- Serve – Serve others something of value to achieve successes
- Ideas – Start by doing very simple things
- Persist – Persist through failure and CRAP
Everyday leadership | Drew Dudley | TEDxToronto 2010
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- This is an energetic and short speech of about 6 minutes long. Drew talked about the redefining leadership. It’s not something extraordinary like changing the world, it is about the moment and the power of a simple act on someone else’s life. Listen to it if you feel like people are losing connection with the others.“Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it. You’ve made someone’s life better by something you said or did. It’s scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, frightening to think we can matter that much to other people. As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other.”
Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard? | Jon Jandai
Have you ever felt overwhelming living in a materialistic society? This simple talk from Jon Jandai, a farmer from Northeastern Thailand can ease your mood. He shared his experience of a decentralized society where you can do anything for love and pursuit the self-reliance. Enjoy his colloquial speech, take rest for a moment and again come back to the connection with the surrounding environment, with the Earth.
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“People who are clever than me, even if they have a good job, need to work more than 30 years to have a house. For me, who cannot finish university, it is hopeless to have a house. But then I started to do earthly building and spent two hours per day, after three months, I got a house”
The power of introverts | Susan Cain | TED2012
Introverts are people who get their energy from having “alone time” or their solitude. They make up 16-50 percent of the world population. However, since the 20th century, the world entered the culture of personality where people feature their role models as great salesmen, which means being social and outgoing and ignore the transcendent power of solitude. It can be difficult to be an introvert. In her passionate talk, Susan has raised awareness about introverts, their great abilities as well as their extraordinary influence to the world. If you are an introvert and ever felt like you are different from the others, listen to this talk and celebrate your introversion as Susan did.
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“Introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what’s inside your own suitcase. And that’s okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.”
If you have any difficulty with understanding these talks, notice that all these inspirational TED talks have subtitles. What you have to do is simply install eJOY eXtension to Chrome and enjoy being inspired by great ideas from these great minds. eJOY eXtension will help you to look up every new word and even save them for later practice.
You can also check out our post of 5 Inspiring TED talks for Language Learners for more interesting speeches.