Why the worry? I'd rather wonder.
If you aren’t familiar with TED, you should be. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, though, as they point out, the scope has grown a bit. It is two annual conferences and many affiliated conferences throughout the world dedicated to “Spreading Ideas,’ specifically “Ideas Worth Spreading.’ The most amazing part is what the conferences do with these ideas. Gaining admittance to one of the two main TED conferences is not particularly easy, but the ideas are important. So:
On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
But describing what TED really encompasses is a little difficult. The title of this article, “Why the worry? I’d rather wonder.’ comes from Sebastian Wernicke‘s TEDx talk “Sebastian Wernicke: 1000 TEDTalks, 6 words,’ as seen below:
He crowdsourced through Mechanical Turk a series of six word summaries of a number of TED talks, and then crowd-sourced summaries of the summaries. Here are six he received, all which describe a part of TED:
- Why don’t we just get along?
- All the happiness is already here
- Old people worry kids don’t mind
- Solving our problems? I’d like that
- Without ideas world becomes rather messy
- Fascinating things to make you wonder
TED provides insights and thoughts on many, many different subjects, discussed in short, concise talks (generally 18 minutes or less) by many of the leading world thinkers and doers. It’s insight and interesting. Even if one doesn’t agree with all of the speakers or their ideas, there is ample field for thoughtful idea exploration and inspiration.
I encourage you to visit TED.com and experience the magic that is TED.