36 TED Talks Worth Watching

I’ve spent ten hours and forty-eight minutes watching these, not including the fact that many I’ve watched more than once.

TED is a great example of useful video in my opinion, but as someone pointed out at the TEDx event I attended last weekend, it’s not just about ideas being spread, hopefully some people take action on some of these ideas too.

In fact I went through a period in my life not too long ago where I made a point of watching one new TED video each day as a scheduled break in the day.

I keep a running Evernote…err…ugh…note, on all the TED talks that I’ve watched that I found particularly interesting and that I would possibly watch again.

It’s a great way to keep track of ideas that have given you some insights, and quite frequently I’ve had the very great experience of watching a TED talk, getting version 101 and then going on to read the books written by many of these great speakers. At the very least it’s led to me checking out their work online, people like Kevin Kelly (who has done some TED talks, but whom I did not feature below), Sir Ken Robinson and Steven Johnson, all people with ideas I discovered through TED initially and have since come to feature in my own writing and work in some way, shape or form.

TED has the tremendous power to influence us all.

Here is a list of talks I recommend watching, in no particular order:

1. Jamie Oliver on Teaching Food/Cooking To Every Child

2. Simon Sinek on Why and How Leaders Inspire Others

3. Daniel Pink on Motivation 3.0

4. Dr. Nicholas Christakis on The Hidden Influence of Social Networks

5. Jason Fried on Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

6. Sir Ken Robinson on Schools Kill Creativity

7. Sir Ken Robinson on Bring on a Learning Revolution

8. Steven Johnson on Where Good Ideas Come From

9. Dan Ariely on Are We In Control of Our Own Decisions?

10. Daniel Kahneman on The Riddle of Experience vs Memory

11. Rory Sutherland on Sweating the Small Stuff

12. Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion

13. Derek Sivers on How to Start a Movement

14. Dan Ariely on Our Buggy Moral Code

15. Dean Ornish on Changing Your Genes

16. Dan Buettner on Living to Be 100

17. Rory Sutherland on Life Lessons of an Ad Man

18. Derek Sivers on Keeping Goals to Yourself

19. Gever Tully on 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do

20. Hans Rosling on The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen

21. Mark Roth on Suspended Animation

22. Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs

23. Chip Conley on Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile

24. Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi on Psychological Flow

25. Tim Brown on Creativity and Play

26. Tony Robbins on Why We Do What We Do

27. Dan Gilbert on Why We’re Happy

28. Heribert Watzke on The Brain in your Gut

29. Chris Anderson on The Long Tail

30. Timothy Ferriss on Smash Fear, Learn Anything

31. Sam Harris on How Science Can Show Us What’s Right

32. Dean Ornish on Healing

33. Sugata Mitra on Child Driven Education

34. Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice

35. Jeff Bezos on The Next Web Innovation (and oldie…)

36. And because I really like Richard Branson…Life at 30,000 Feet