This was one of the most interesting Ted Talks I've watched. I thought it would be more about literally asking people for things like interviews but it was more about asking in general. Amanda Palmer started out by setting a soap box on the stage. She was wearing normal street clothes, very different than the usual suits that you see in a formal Ted Talk. In her hands she had a white piece of tulle and a flower. Amanda Palmer did dress like the normal Ted Talk presenter but she also didn’t look like one. She had a bold hairstyle and unusual eyebrow, Amanda Palmer looked like a performer. She started her Ted Talk with a story, one of the best ways, in my opinion, to start a presentation. But even before that she started her Ted Talk with visuals, something that would make the audience say “hmm what’s this going to be about”. Amanda Palmer was a street performer and she started out her Ted Talk as if she was on any busy city waiting for people to walk by so she could start her act as a living statue. As a living statue Amanda made money the first 5 years after graduating from college, Amanda puts a name to the random street performers people see everyday. Amanda was able to connect with the people she would see, she was able to connect through the eye contact that they made. As a living statue Amanda was able to make a direct connection. Amanda was able to develop the “art of asking” even more so when Twitter was introduced, she was able to be connected with people all over the world and she was able to ask for even more. In this Ted Talk Amanda was able to share the experiences by connecting with people simply by asking. In her asking people starting giving her money and Amanda starts to give away her music for free. She wants people to share what she has to offer and all that she asks in return that her fans help her continue to create music. Overwhelming people were willing to pay for her music when she simply asked. People wanted to help her.
For me what I really got out of this was it is ok to ask for things. When you ask you create a connection with the people around you and those connections will be able to benefit you for the rest of your life. Being able to connect with a person is a great skill to have and anything that makes it easier is awesome to know. When you are interviewing people you are asking for their help and you are making a connection with them. You are trusting the people to help you with whatever you are trying to learn about. Amanda talks about the importance of interacting with people, how meaningful those connections can be, how important it is to be unafraid to ask. At the end Amanda proposes the question “How do we let people pay for music?” as a solution to the money being lost in the music industry. People don’t like being told to do something, but when people simply ask I think they are much more willing to give it a try.
I'm glad I found this video. It was a fun conspiracy theory about the prevalence of 4am. I wish I could've found a clearer connection to business when I first watched it but it was still a fun video to watch. After watching it a few more times I realized that this video had a lot to do with business and specifically my manifesto. The topic itself is really silly but it still caught my attention and I watched the whole video, multiple times. After some thought I realized that this video had everything to do with business, everything in business in terms of presentation. This video starts out with Poet Rives connecting a bunch of different forms of media, comics, magazine covers, songs, and movies, with the time 4 a.m. The rest of this Ted Talk continues to connect more things to 4 a.m. or what Poet Rivers calls “the 4 a.m. conspiracy”. Poet Rivers is able to captivate the audience, and myself, throughout his whole Ted Talk. Upon the first viewing I couldn’t really understand why I actually went through the trouble of watching the video. On the surface I thought maybe I watched it because it simply was just funny. But there is always more depth than that. I realized that what drew me to the video was the funny topic but what made me actually watch all the way through multiple times was the way the topic was presented. Poet Rivers creates an intricate web connecting all sorts of things a people to 4 a.m. And although my rational mind knew all of this was just silly fun, the way Poet Rivers showed the audience these connections, the way he presented his conspiracy theory made it seem like something that was really important; something that I should pay attention to. And that’s what really makes a presentation, isn’t it? Making the audience feel just as strongly as you do about whatever you are talking about. When you hold yourself with confidence while still conveying a sense of urgency the audience will feel the same way. It helps ever more when you are able to add humor into whatever you are talking about. Poet Rivers is constantly making the audience laugh with the silly connections that he makes and in doing so he is able to hold their attention throughout the whole 9 minute talk. Just like in Amanda Palmer’s video there was a stress on creating connection though this time it wasn’t about connecting with people but connected with an audience. This is probably one of the most important things that a person can do. Connecting with people makes them feel like they are part of something important and thus they are more willing to help and listen. I don’t know if there really is a 4 a.m. conspiracy but I did take two things away from this talk:
1. it doesn’t really matter what you’re talking about as long as you make it interesting
2. nothing good ever happens after 4 a.m.
This was super super interesting. It was about if obesity causes diabetes as traditionally thought or if there was an underlying problem. The thing I took away from this was just how well he spoke on a really complicated topic. I know very little about the mechanics of diabetes but I was able to understand everything he was talking about. Also he was just very humble throughout the whole talk. He started about making assumptions and instead of sticking with them he was willing to look at the problem in a different way. Yet another video about connections this one was about connecting and sympathizing with all different types of people and creating false connections. Dr. Peter Attia starts his Ted Talk with two sad real life experiences he had about patients that he encountered. The first was about a woman who all of a sudden died from pancreatic cancer, the second was a woman who needed an amputation due to her Type II Diabetes. Dr. Attia felt sorry for the first and judged the second, to him the first had no control over what happened to her while the second caused her own illness. Dr. Attia in his talk recognized that he had no reason to pass judgement over the woman with Type II Diabetes and unfortunately 3 years later he developed insulin resistance and gained a lot of weight even though he was eating healthy and exercising 3 hours a day every day. This caused Dr. Attia to think about the woman with diabetes, maybe it wasn’t something she did to herself, maybe she didn’t have control over what happened to her. Like many entrepreneurs, Dr. Attia did not just take the first explanation and say “ok, people say it works like this so it must work like this”, instead he say that everything wasn’t just fitting into place, that it was possible that people were making a false connection and there was another reason for insulin resistance in diabetic people. Dr. Attia was able to lose the weight that he had gained by actually exercising less. In losing this weight Dr. Attia lost his insulin resistance. It is commonly thought that diabetes causes insulin resistance, but what happened to Dr. Attia made him that maybe it was actually the other way around that insulin resistance caused diabetes. Dr. Attia was able to see first hand the conventional thoughts on health care fail him and it made him think that he couldn’t possibly be the only one who was affected in this way. Dr. Attia did not limit himself in thinking of the kind of person he wanted to help, he decided to think about everyone. Besides this Dr. Attia biggest strength in this Ted Talk was taking a really complex medical topic like diabetes and presented to the audience in a much simpler way. He could have talked about it in a way that two doctors could have talked about it but instead he brought it down to a level that everyone could understand. This made the talk much more powerful.