My Top 10 List Of TED Talks On Creativity

by Yaro Starak, creator of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Hello again. I’m off on a new tangent this week, it’s been inspired by Yaro’s last post. Actually, I’ve had this niggling feeling I needed to take his advice since receiving the email in my inbox several weeks ago with tips on writing great articles – I just have so much spinning in my head that it often takes a while to action everything that’s fighting for my attention.

The Master Plan

Yaro’s great idea is to make top 10 lists of things related to my topic. He suggested a top 10 list of my favorite books on creativity. Whilst that’s a brilliant idea, there’s one small problem… for some terrible reason, most likely due to my own scattered brain, I’ve stopped reading books to completion. I get part way through them and charge off on other tangents. This is a considerable problem when it comes to making top 10 lists of my favorite books on creativity.

So I did what all good creatives do when faced with an impasse and I improvised. Whilst I spend the next few weeks finishing reading all the books on my top 10 list, I decided to make a top 10 list of something else. The “something else” is largely responsible for why I don’t finish books anymore!

Details Of My Ongoing Love Affair

I have an ongoing love affair with TED. At the end of the day, when I’m sick of dealing with black text on a white computer screen, I crawl into bed with TED and let the world’s most inspiring, informative, ingenious and innovative people take me on adventures into their worlds.

I don’t watch TV these days. I watch TED. Somehow, because I’m learning new things and being inspired by what I see, I can sneak past that feeling of guilt I get from watching mind numbing entertainment because it’s not productive. So my first ever “top 10 list” is my top 10 TED talks on creativity.

The Master Plan Explained

This is how it’s going to look. I’m going to show in order of 1 to 10, the talks I have found to be most inspiring and also practically useful in regards to creativity. I want to explain to you how each clip made the cut and why it’s ranked as it is. So each week, I’ll cover two or three clips, and try to explain why they’re important and a give summary of the magnificence within them.

Some of the talks are directly related to creativity. Others are great examples of someone being creative. And others are expressions of crucial elements of creativity, like Isabel Allende’s talk on passion.

There’s one talk in here that isn’t so much about creativity. But I realized it’s possibly the most useful way to overcome one of the biggest stumbling blocks to realizing your potential, and take the risks needed to explore and express your creativity. Even though it’s not necessarily pitched as being about creativity, it could be the most important clip of them all if it moves you to action.

Drum Roll… Here’s The Top 10 List

1. Sir Ken Robinson “Schools Kill Creativity”
2. Sir Ken Robinson “Bring On The Revolution”
3. Tim Brown “Creativity and Play”
4. Isabel Allende “Passion”
5. Ross Lovegrove “Organic Designs”
6. Tim Harford “Trial, Error and the God Complex”
7. Matt Cutts “Try Something New For 30 Days”
8. Joshua Walters “Being Just Crazy Enough”
9. Larry Lessig “The Law Is Strangling Creativity”
10. Elizabeth Gilbert “About Genius”

As you can see, I’ve got a bit of a thing for Sir Ken, I have an ongoing love affair with his work to rival the one I have for TED talks. Sir Ken even tops my TOP 10 book list and hogs the first few places : /

I think this is for a number of reasons.

Details Of My Other Love Affair

Ken’s talks are educational, insightful, beautifully articulated and they make me laugh. This combination is a bit like holding the ace of spades as far as I’m concerned, especially that last element.

Another reason they top the list is because Sir Ken’s talks set a great foundation for the rest. Sir Ken deals with the starting point of the problem of dislocated creativity, our schooling. We waste a good twelve years of our lives learning how to do things that don’t energize and inspire us… learning how to stuff our dreams away and stamp out our creativity so we can endure those years of schooling.

Really, it’s just like twelve years in training for what to expect for the rest of our lives… Unless we’re blessed to have held onto enough hope and determination to do what we love anyway… or unless by some stroke of luck, the schooling system actually did steer us in the direction of living the life that speaks to our deepest truth. Sadly, Sir Ken says during his second talk, of the many people he meets, very few have been able to find this place within themselves to live from.

If you have the time and inclination to watch these first two talks in my top 10, I assure you it will be a great foundation for us to launch into the ones that follow in the list next week. Once again, I’d love to hear any comments you have at the end, and I’m going to leave you with a fabulous Sir Ken quote about creativity.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

Cheers, Neroli.

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