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TED Talks

TED Talk 2: “Keep your goals to yourself” - Careers

• This TED Talk is explained by Derek Sivers and his aim is to explain that telling other people about our personal goals will reduce our chances of actually achieving them.
• Derek begins his presentation by asking his audience to think about their biggest personal goals, then he asks to imagine telling someone about their goals and to think about the feeling of accomplishment they would feel when they did that. This feeling is due to the fact that our mind is tricked into feeling that the goal we just told someone is already done.
• To support his argument, Sivers cites a series of studies concerning the issue and especially:

1982 → Peter Gollwitzer's experiment, called Gollwitzer's test, where 163 people wrote down their personal goals, half of them announced their commitment to this goal and the other half did not; everyone was given 45 minutes of work and was told they could stop at any time. Those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes and felt they had a long way to go to achieve their goal, while the other half quit after 33 minutes and said they felt much closer to achieving their goal: they felt more confident, just like their goal was already achieved.

• Considering this series of studies, Sivers concludes his talk by saying that we could either resist the temptation of announcing our goals and keep our mouths shut or state our goals in a way that gives us no satisfaction, so that we can work better and harder in order to achieve them.
• Have you ever told other people about none of your personal goals and then you couldn't achieve it?

Yes, it happened once, like three years ago or something like that and it happened with the sport I practiced for 11 years. I was an artistic roller skater and when I decided to stop competing, I wanted to become a trainer. I was so excited about that and I told everyone in my family and friends I was about to start the course that would have made me able to teach; but none of this happened because I left my team and the course before I finished it.

TED Talk 11: “Cloudy with a chance of joy”

• This TED Talk talks about the negative associations that every language in the world, but especially the English language, has towards the clouds. An example can be “being under a cloud” when someone is depressed or another example can be “having a cloud on the horizon” when there's bad news: it seems like the clouds are the default metaphor to indicate a catastrophe.

Despite this, the speaker believes that clouds are beautiful and diverse and he believes that people don't notice them because they're omnipresent and people notice them only when they overshadow the sun. But there are some people who show a strange sort of affection for clouds because they remind them of their youth, when they used to find shapes in the clouds to play with: they remind us to slow down and appreciate the present moment, they also stimulate our creativity and help to save money on psychoanalysis bills.

The speaker thinks we have to stand against the unfair judgement that clouds get; and for that reason he founded the “Cloud Appreciation Society” to remind people of the beauty of clouds and to encourage people to slow down and appreciate nature. The speaker also mentions different types of clouds in order to give examples of the beauty of nature: he explains their origins and their shapes talking about how they get these shapes, emphasizing the importance of paying attention to the beauty in the everyday and in nature.

The speaker concludes his talk explaining why cloudspotting is so important in an age where people are perpetually busy or prefer t