True Success

The TED talk that former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden gave was about what true success is and how it is measured. Wooden said that true success is when a person takes themselves and their given situation and makes it the best it can be. People need to focus on making themselves the best they can possibly be, not on how other can be better. The way that Wooden spoke about success was using stories from his own personal experiences and quotes from other respected people on how to be successful. It was remarkable to see someone his age that could memorize all of those quotes and speak with such clarity and authority. I see this view of true success as something that has been lost in almost every aspect of life, both in education and in society. Education today is about trying to make the students the best that they should be; to hold them up to a certain standard and that they should at least equal it if not surpass it. More classes in schools need to focus on how well the student can do and appreciate the effort that the student can give. Teachers and other people in education need to realize that one student's best effort may be how another student does when they don't try. As long as the student is trying their best, there is no need to push students more than what they can handle. I see grades as a way of making students try too hard and end up not caring anymore. Grades should either not exist or be way more lenient for different students. In society as a whole, people are expected to act a certain way and to live up to a specific standard. Society needs to change it's thinking to allowing people to be themselves and to be accepted that way and not have to conform to how everyone else wants them to be. Success is a measure of how well a person does for themselves and not how society views success.

Cognitive Surplus

In his TED talk, Clay Shirky talked about what he called cognitive surplus, which is what individuals do in their spare time to help the good of the society. The two different types of cognitive surplus he mentioned, communal and civic, both have profound effects on societies worldwide. Communal cognitive surplus is the material created to benefit an individual community of people who have a common interest. The material made is not necessarily beneficial but is funny or enjoyable for that group of people. This type of cognitive surplus is a major part of what Daniel Pink focuses on in his books Drive and A Whole New Mind. The motivation for this right-brained activity is to help out the community, not for a prize or reward. People want to help other people for the sake of helping, not for what they can get out of it. This type of cognitive surplus is highly undervalued in today's society, and is seen as more of an afterthought or the remains of the other type of cognitive surplus, which is called civic cognitive surplus. Civic cognitive surplus is matter that is beneficial not only to an individual community, but also to the whole of the world. This material is seen as extremely beneficial, and is made out to be the most important part of cognitive surplus as a whole. The way that Clay Shirky presented this material is that civic cognitive surplus is indeed the most important type of cognitive surplus, and communal cognitive surplus is an inevitable result of helping people out. This is not the way that both should be compared. I see this as a more traditional way of thinking, that one way is completely better than the other. I see both communal and civic cognitive surplus being equally helpful; they just have different areas of expertise. Communal cognitive surplus helps out more on an individual basis, which means that it can more deeply affect people than civic cognitive surplus. Civic cognitive surplus affects a wider range of people across the globe, but not as personally or intimately as communal cognitive surplus. Both types of cognitive surplus need to be understood for what they really are, and not be compared as the same thing. One issue that society has is that if it's not important to them, than it has no value at all. This is a view that needs to change. Clay Shirky had a great example of this using the LOL cats. These are pictures of funny cats with funny captions. These are highly valued by many people, but some see these as useless and therefore unimportant. They are not inferior to other types of information or entertainment; they are just different ways of expressing creativity, and creativity is something that should not be compressed into what society values. 

New Techniques of Motivation

The TED talk by Daniel Pink showed that the traditional ways that businesses motivate people are now irrelevant to how hard people actually work. Scientific studies have shown that people who work for rewards or incentives often do work harder in the short term, but eventually lose interest in their work. These studies also show that people who work for the pure joy of just working and helping people work harder long term and produce better work. The way that Daniel Pink spoke was in a way of presenting a case to a jury in a court. He presented his "evidence" through many different studies and experiments done in many different places and times around the world. His final statement to the "jury" was that motivation should not be incentive-based, but instead should be based on what people enjoy doing and what they create by themselves. Pink supported his argument by using different slides showing images of a problem that people have to solve, and showing different quotes from professors on their different studies of motivation. This video matters to me personally because it shows that maybe future careers will be different for me, that I might have a job in which the way they motivate people is different to that of modern day businesses. This is extremely important to education because the incentive to get good grades is changing. No longer is the excuse that you need good grades in order to be successful valid. That type of motivation has been proven to be ineffective and even harmful to students. Students need to be able to learn about topics and issues that they want to learn about, to a certain extent, so that they feel satisfied in their learning, and this type of motivation will improve the overall grades of students. This matters as a worldwide issue because companies and businesses need to reevaluate the way that they motivate their employees to work hard and to improve the overall welfare of the company. Instead of offering their employees bonuses and extra vacation time, they need to allow them to come up with some of their own original ideas and to have some fun, just like the company Google does. This type of motivation will help improve the overall success of the company and also increase the happiness and output of the employees. 

The Limits of Technology

The TED talk of Billy Graham shows that no matter what new technology comes out or new information is discovered, the age old problems of evil, suffering, and death still cannot be fixed. Religion gives answers to why these problems exist, but even religion cannot permanently destroy evil, suffering, and death. Billy Graham’s way of speaking was captivating to the audience, and his stories from the Bible and of his own personal experiences explained his point and his belief. He used his experiences with some very famous people, such as Mrs. Gorbachev and Albert Einstein, to show that even some atheists and other non-religious people think that the world, with its immense beauty and lack of understanding of the aforementioned non-resolvable issues, there has to be a power out there greater than that of the human mind or technology. The fact that there is a God out there who is guiding our lives is the most important information in this video and to me personally. Education does not teach the issues of evil, suffering, and death in the world, and how these issues cannot be resolved by science or technology advances. This shows to the world that no amount of science, technology, or human creativity or intellect can fix the oldest issues that the world still has. Evil, suffering, and death are inevitable parts of human existence, but God is there to help guide and help everyone through evil and suffering, and when the time comes, as it does for everyone, for a person to die, God is there with open arms to welcome them into a new world where these problems no longer exist. People need to understand that while the advances of technology and science are excellent and that they should be encouraged, that there are some problems that they cannot answer, and that no one can answer except for God. Science and religion are not opponents; they are partners that need to work together and can work together with their own expertise in their own specific fields of knowledge. 

Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk

The video of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk showed the value of human creativity in education as well as the ineffectiveness of the current education system to understand and embrace this new idea of creativity being a core and fundamental learning aspect. Sir Ken Robinson had many techniques he used in his TED talk that were extremely effective, such as telling stories to get a point across and using humor to let people’s brains relax for a while before he threw new ideas out there for the audience to comprehend. His voice did not get very loud or quiet, but stayed very steady; at the same time, his voice inflections were excellent in conveying either funny or serious points. His presentation style was the use of different stories and jokes to convey his message of how schools kill creativity. He introduced ideas to people, and then explained them by either using a story, a joke, or both. The message from this video, that schools need to focus more on creativity, is the most influential point of this TED talk. I approve of this approach because I am very involved in drama, and that is an area that is not very focused upon in a normal school’s curriculum. While Arapahoe High School has done an excellent job in making sure students learn about the creative culture, more schools need to put a greater emphasis on teaching creative subjects. When schools start to put a greater focus on these creative curriculum classes, students will be better adapted to succeed in the world ahead of them, as the world is becoming a place where math and science are easily replicated, and creativity is a skill that is extremely rewarded. While no one can predict what the future holds for these students, the best way to prepare them is to notice the slight trends of change in job availability, and that trend is sloping more toward a creative future.