Three great untruths are spreading throughout college campuses, high schools and many homes. These untruths are rarely taught explicitly. Instead, they are conveyed to people by the rules, practices, and norms imposed on them, often with the best intentions. <ol><li>The untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker</li><li>The untruth of emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings</li><li>The untruth of us versus them: Life is a battle between good and evil people.</li></ol>

Untruths that spread throughout culture

The term anti-fragile describes things that have the capacity to not only tolerate stress but to flourish and grow as a result of it. Everybody will face completely unexpected events. When we have limited exposure to unexpected events, we will likely find navigating them difficult. However, when our brain and cognitive processes encounter unexpected events, they learn to adapt and grow, making them more likely to navigate uncertainty successfully. Parents and educators should help children learn and grow by letting them face risks and stressors, not shielding them from them.

Children are “anti-fragile”

Many colleges encourage students to indulge in these cognitive distortions: <ol><li>Emotional reasoning. Confusing feelings with thoughts or reality is a cognitive distortion.</li><li>Catastrophizing imagines a sequence of events. But it's seldom true. </li><li>Overgeneralising. </li><li>Dichotomous thinking. All or nothing thinking.</li><li>Mind reading.</li><li>Labelling. Because someone belongs to a category doesn't mean they embody all the traits of that category.</li><li>Negative filtering. Amplifying negative signals, so it overwhelms the positive.</li><li>Discounting positives. Rationalising away positive evidence as if it doesn't count.</li><li>Blaming.</li></ol>

Nine common cognitive distortions

“seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).”

The antidote to the increasing fragility

The principle in philosophy and rhetoric is that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst way possible. When you think that your feelings are real, you may believe that other people have worse intentions than they really do. This could cause you to see harmful behaviour in places that don’t exist.  A good hack is to try and see why someone said or did something from the most reasonable and well-intentioned point of view that you can.

The charity principle

<ol><li>A good idea is being physically safe on campus, such as not being subjected to sexual harassment, physical abuse, or being targeted personally for hate speech.</li><li>Another really bad view is that we need to be safe ideologically. For example, "I need to be safe emotionally and feel good all the time. If someone says something I don't like, that's a problem for everybody else." This idea is bad because engaging in ideological or emotional safety will make you weak. If you want to become strong, you need to engage,  similar to using weights in a gym. </li></ol>

Two views about safe spaces

University professors are generally left leaning in their politics, yet the percentage of professors who lean left has increased in recent years.  A more uniform group of people will cause a decline in the quality of scholarly research. Because they share a similar view, they won’t be as rigorous in potential counterarguments or the review of the quality of the work.

A loss of professorial diversity decreases the quality of scholarly research

Parents have become overly concerned with the safety of their children. This has led to less free play, less independence and more fear instilled in children, which may increase the desire for safety provided by third parties for young adults. Keeping children safe is important, yet trying to eliminate all risks in a child’s life can severely stunt their development, sense of independence, and ability to confront adversity.

Paranoid parenting

“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either."

The “dignity culture” is increasingly giving way to “victimhood culture.” <ul><li>Dignity culture is characterised by assumed dignity and worth regardless of what people think of you. People are expected to have enough self-control to think little of irritations, slights, minor conflicts and even direct insults as threats to their dignity that should be met with a response.</li><li>Victimhood culture: People and groups try to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance. They are highly sensitive to slights and tend to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties.</li></ul>

Dignity culture vs. victimhood culture

Acknowledge that children are anti-fragile. Encourage them to have unstructured and unsupervised time to learn how to judge risks for themselves. They should get the opportunity to learn how to deal with frustration and disagreement.

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

Teach your children Cognitive Behaviour Therapy so they can learn to recognize and moderate the hallmarks of emotional and motivated reasoning.

Your unguarded thoughts can harm you

<ul><li>Give people the benefit of the doubt.</li><li>Practice the virtue of intellectual humility.</li></ul>

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being

Encourage potential changes to the local education system. <ul><li>At the elementary level, suggest minimal homework and more recess with minimal supervision. </li><li>At middle and high school levels, cultivate individual virtues such as humility, teach debate and encourage debate clubs, and assign readings that promote critical thinking and reasoned discussion.</li></ul>

Help schools oppose the great untruths

<ul><li>Encourage children to spend more time outdoors.</li><li>Place clear but reasonable limits on device time. </li><li>Light use of screen time is not harmful, except if it displaces the many other activities children could be doing. </li><li>Chldren should have no social media until high school. From high school, agree on a reasonable time budget for each child.</li></ul>

Limit and refine device time

How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

education

Learning & Education

books

Books

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures.  Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

Greg Lukianoff

Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind

The father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—Maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.

Most Advanced Yet Acceptable

Why do people like what they like? It is one of the oldest questions of philosophy and aesthetics. Ancient thinkers inclined to mysticism proposed that a “golden ratio”—about 1.62 to 1, as in, for instance, the dimensions of a rectangle—could explain the visual perfection of objects like sunflowers and Greek temples. Other thinkers were deeply sceptical: David Hume, the 18th-century philosopher, considered the search for formulas to be absurd, because the perception of beauty was purely subjective, residing in individuals, not in the fabric of the universe.

The Formula Of Likeness

In the 1960s, the psychologist Robert Zajonc conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects nonsense words, random shapes, and Chinese-like characters and asked them which they preferred. In study after study, people reliably gravitated toward the words and shapes they’d seen the most. Their preference was for familiarity.This discovery was known as mere-exposure effect, and it is one of the sturdiest findings in modern psychology. Across hundreds of studies and meta-studies, subjects around the world prefer familiar shapes, landscapes, consumer goods, songs, and human voices.

Liking The Known: Mere Exposure Effect

In mere-exposure studies, the preference for familiar stimuli is attenuated or negated entirely when the participants realize they’re being repeatedly exposed to the same thing. For that reason, the power of familiarity seems to be strongest when a person isn’t expecting it.The reverse is also true: A surprise seems to work best when it contains some element of familiarity.

Familiar Surprise

Eureka moments are a force in the academic world as well.Scientists and philosophers are exquisitely sensitive to the advantage of ideas that already enjoy broad familiarity.In 2014, a team of researchers from Harvard University studied about sort of proposals that were most likely to win funding from prestigious institutions such as the National Institutes of Health: familiar proposals or extremely novel ones?<ul><li>Most-novel proposals got the worst ratings.</li><li>Exceedingly familiar proposals fared a bit better.</li><li>The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new.</li></ul>

Mere-Exposure Effect In The Academic World

In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals, many new ideas are promoted as a fresh spin on familiar successes.Optimal newness in names: Most parents prefer first names for their children that are common but not too common, optimally differentiated from other children's names.This helps explain how names fall in and out of fashion.

Optimal Newness

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the phrase anomie to describe a destabilized and destabilizing state when rules and rule givers lose legitimacy. It’s what we feel when we face a virus that plays by one set of rules, politicians who play by another, and a professional life that proceeds independent of each — and when we face all of this in social isolation. Empathy can help us navigate this period of anomie. Here are four Empathy Rules that can help us cut across the divisions in our lives and build a sense of community.

Empathy Rules: The Takeaway

Empathy is the act of putting yourself in someone else’s problem in the hopes of understanding, of bridging a gap. It helps us feel in community, not abandoned to anomic isolation. It helps us feel seen and known for who we are.

Defining Empathy

Empathy at the workplace is both rewarding and time-consuming to listen to other people without preconception. Business consultants sometimes suggest something that seems close enough: radical candor.A continual round-robin of criticism and praise promises to dissolve the boundaries between colleagues. But this truth-telling practice proceeds from the feeling: “I know you.” Real empathy starts from a different premise, radical humility: “I don’t know how you feel, but I’m here to listen.”

Empathy At The workplace

Those who think that work is not the “place” for empathy miss the point. The empathy you receive at work makes you a better friend, partner, or parent. The empathy you receive at home makes you better able to listen at work. And there, empathic leadership makes room for intimacy and honesty, driving innovation and engagement. If you open yourself to empathy, you’re allowing yourself to listen across differences. Empathy keeps us from discounting, dismissing, or even cancelling others.

Importance Of Empathy At The Workplace

You can’t put yourself into someone else’s situation if you have preconceptions about its contours. We’re trained to relate to others by expressing what we think we share with them: “Oh, you lost your job. I know how tough that is; I lost mine as well!”It’s the opposite — the strategy of not knowing — that leaves you open to the truth of things.Step back and recognize that you don’t necessarily know what someone else is thinking or feeling. Stop, look, listen, and stay open. It’s not what you know, it’s what you’re willing to learn that provides space for empathy.

Radical Humility: Embracing The Not Knowing

Empathy doesn’t start with a reassuring “I’m like you.” On the contrary, empathy accepts friction. Colleagues may have profound disagreements, just like family members, neighbours, and friends. Empathy is not about being conflict-averse — it’s noisy because people are. To be empathetic, we must be willing to get in there, own the conflict, and learn how to fight fair. It’s about full engagement, even when it is uncomfortable.

Embrace Radical Difference

Empathy implies that you will do the work necessary to comprehend not just the place the person is coming from but their problem. It’s a discipline of basic respect, both personal and civic. You have a stake in helping your neighbour make things better. You can’t get bored or turn away.

Embrace Commitment

Empathy isn’t altruistic. It enlarges those who offer it and binds them to others. It fights anomie. If you’ve been heard, and the rules you’ve been asked to follow take your situation into account, you feel part of something larger than yourself.

Embrace Community

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

Empathy Rules

And when in doubt, it’s better not to mess with these systems. Starting a war to implement democracies is an example of messing with a complex system. Clueless politicians compare a local dictator not with the local alternatives but with a Norwegian prime minister. These people keep staying at their jobs even their reckless decisions because they don’t have skin in the game. Nobody paid anything for the Iraqi invasion or for supporting “Arab spring” failed uprisings.

Complex Systems Don’t Work With Simple Cause/Effect

Those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions

It’s perfectly rational to overestimate some tail risks because you can’t consider them in isolation.  Driving after 2 glasses of wine once will not be extremely dangerous, but doing so every day is.When you measure tail risks in the laboratory you only consider one tail risks at a time, and that’s why their conclusions are wrong. Subjects are being rational in overestimating the risk because, chances are, they are likely already running several tail risks in their lives.

Overestimating tail risks makes sense

Betting harder with money you won and being more conservative with your own money makes sense because that’s how you survive. Thaler and other behavioral economists don’t get it because they see the world as a one-shot game instead of a series of repeated trades.

Mental accounting is correct

In societies, minorities can come to dictate the rules to the majority.This usually happens because of asymmetry or because when the majority is either too flexible, too accommodating, or too indifferent. A case of asymmetry is between smokers and non-smokers. A smoker can sit in a smoke-free area but a non-smoker cannot sit in a smoker area, so the non-smokers will prevail even if they are the minority.However, this can become an issue when the minority prevails because it’s more aggressive or more intolerant.

Minority Rule Is Destroying The West

It is the most intolerant person who imposes virtues on others precisely because of that intolerance. We need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.

Employees display submission by going through years of personal deprivation. Givin' up 9 hours of one’s time for years, every day is the equivalent of domestication. And showing up on time every day is the sign of an obedient, housebroken dog. The question is whether you want to be a housebroken dog or a free wolf. However, being a wolf comes with risks. Wolves who seek their own paths have skin in the game.

Employees Are Broken, Submissive Fellas

it’s not the poor who are actually envious of the rich and it’s not the poor who first embrace communist movements. It’s usually the bourgeois and the intellectuals and the clerical class who first embrace communism. It’s because of jealousy.

It’s intellectual Who Are Jealous of The Super Rich

You often hear people saying that you are more likely to die by X silly thing -ie.: coconut falling- than by terrorist attacks or Ebola outbreaks but that makes no sense.People dying because of falling coconuts or people who die by drowning in their bathtub will never double from one year to the other -they are examples of mediocre stand-.But the effects from events in an extreme stand, say a huge virus outbreak or a series of terrorist attacks, can increase the death toll by several orders of magnitude.

The Idiocy of Naive Empiricism

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one's own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life. As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: * For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations. * Ethical rules aren't universal. You're part of a group larger than you, but it's still smaller than humanity in general. * Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others. * You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. "Educated philistines" have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets. * Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines. * True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you're willing to risk for it. The phrase "skin in the game" is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it's also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, "The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that's necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster," and "Never trust anyone who doesn't have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them."

politics

Politics

From the bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold book that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility 'Skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line' Citizens, artisans, police, fishermen, political activists and entrepreneurs all have skin in the game. Policy wonks, corporate executives, many academics, bankers and most journalists don't. It's all about having something to lose and sharing risks with others. In his most provocative and practical book yet, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows that skin in the game, often seen as the foundation of risk management, in fact applies to all aspects of our lives. In his inimitable style, Taleb draws on everything from Antaeus the Giant to Hammurabi to Donald Trump, from ethics to used car salesmen, to create a jaw-dropping framework for understanding this idea. Among his insights: For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. Minorities, not majorities, run the world. You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). Just as The Black Swan did during the 2007 financial crisis, Skin in the Game comes at precisely the right moment to challenge our long-held beliefs about risk, reward, politics, religion and business - and make us rethink everything we thought we knew.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Skin in the Game

Many people have the experience that people don't listen to them when they speak. This is because we often fall into bad speaking habits. However, with some practice, we can learn to create sound consciously and speak powerfully.

Speaking so that people want to listen

<ol>
<li>Gossiping. Speaking ill of somebody who is not present</li>
<li>Judging. It's hard to listen to somebody if you know you're being judged and found wanting.</li>
<li>Negativity.</li>
<li>Complaining. We complain about sport, politics, the weather.</li>
<li>Excuses. Some people will blame everybody else and won't take any responsibility for their actions.</li>
<li>Exaggeration. Exaggeration becomes lying. No one wants to listen to people who are lying.</li>
<li>Dogmatism, which is confusing facts with opinions. It isn't easy to listen when someone is bombarding you with their views as if they were true.</li>
</ol>

The seven deadly sins of speaking

<ul>
<li>H - Honesty. Being true and clear in what you say</li>
<li>A - Authenticity, which is just being yourself.</li>
<li>I - Integrity, which is actually doing what you say and being somebody people can trust.</li>
<li>L - Love. If you wish somebody well, it's very difficult to judge them.</li>
</ul>

How to make your speech powerful - HAIL

<ul><li>Register. If you want weight, locate your voice down to the chest.</li><li>Timbre. We prefer rich, smooth, warm voices. A voice coach can help with breathing, posture, and exercises.</li><li>Prosody is the sing-song meta-language we use to impart meaning. People who speak on one note are really hard to listen to. </li><li>Pace. We speak faster when we get excited or slow down to emphasise. Silence instead of "ums" can be very powerful.</li><li>Pitch. Speaking with a higher pitch impart a different meaning than a lower pitch.</li><li>Volume. You can sound very excited by using volume, or you have to pay attention by getting very quiet.</li></ul>

The voice toolbox - how you say it

Whenever you’re going to talk to anybody important, do these six vocal warm-up exercises.
<ol>
<li>Arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out. Repeat.</li>
<li>Warm up your lips by saying Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba.</li>
<li>Then say brrrrrrrr, like a kid.</li>
<li>Say la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. </li>
<li>Roll an R. Rrrrrrrrr.</li>
<li>Say “we” high and “aw” low. Weeeaawww, weeeaawww.</li>
</ol>

How to warm up your voice

Tips on how you can become a master public speaker

videos

Videos

career

Career

communication

Communication

Master Public Speaking

Visit http://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more. Have you ever felt like you're talking, but nobody is listening? Here's Julian Treasure to help you fix that. As the sound expert demonstrates some useful vocal exercises and shares tips on how to speak with empathy, he offers his vision for a sonorous world of listening and understanding. The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know. Follow TED on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TEDTalks Like TED on Facebook: http://facebook.com/TED Subscribe to our channel: http://youtube.com/TED TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy (https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy). For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

Visit http://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more.

Have you ever felt like you're talking, but nobody is listening? Here's Julian Treasure to help you fix that. As the sound expert demonstrates some useful vocal exercises and shares tips on how to speak with empathy, he offers his vision for a sonorous world of listening and understanding.

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know. 

Follow TED on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TEDTalks
Like TED on Facebook: http://facebook.com/TED
Subscribe to our channel: http://youtube.com/TED

TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy (https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy). For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

How to speak so that people want to listen | Julian Treasure

The pandemic accelerated a lot of things that have long been predicted by digital advocates: remote working, video conferencing, and making memories in Minecraft. It also accelerated the number of digital transactions that we do.In March 2020, only 10 percent of transactions in small businesses were cashless, for example.

The move to cashlessness

The problem is, not everyone has access to a bank account and a mobile phone. The move to cashlessness has excluded these people further and created even more systemic barriers to overcome in order to participate fully in societyOne in five Americans were unbanked or underbanked in the US in 2020, according to an economic wellbeing report from the Federal Reserve Board.

Why we still need paper money

The modern, cashless way of paying with a simple tap of our phones has edged out some of the most vulnerable members of society.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

The case for cash: Why we still need paper money

Historians exploring the past study documents, scriptures, stories of folklore, journals and letters, seeing the various perspectives about how people lived at that time.
Future historians will have tons of material to study the current age, as data is getting accumulated at a record rate across the globe, with emails, text messages, videos, photographs and social media posts.
Each of these mediums provides a rich understanding of life in our times.

Today’s Data Seen By Future Historians

Thanks to smartphones, people are recording everything:
<ul>
<li>what they are wearing</li>
<li>what they eating</li>
<li>what they are listening to</li>
<li>where they are going</li>
</ul>
..in exquisite detail.
Historians of the future who want to study food, sports, leisure and other aspects of our present culture will find plenty of stuff on social media.

Social Media: The New History Books

Such is the state of social media in present times that future historians might label our age as the Narcissistic Age.People are voyeuristic, narcissistic to the hilt and filled with vanity, caring too much about how they are perceived by others. Social media, with its viral pics and messages, may provide a micro-understanding of how we are living, but without proper context or wider implications of the events shaping our age.

The Narcissistic Age

Apart from the digital records of today, historians will also study physical artefacts, and one thing that they will definitely encounter is plastic, due to its rather long shelf life.  Plastic litter will help them see what we consumed, and the various chemicals in packaged food items.

The Stuff We Left Behind

Small but vocal minorities have ensured that all kinds of ideologies, beliefs and discussions keep happening all the time, and even in the 21st century, plenty of people are there to deny the holocaust or claim that the earth is flat. The vast amount of disinformation will likely puzzle future historians. Decontextualisation is a relatively new problem of digital media, as the stuff being circulated across the web often lacks any information about where it came from or if it is real. The lack of context would amplify over time.

The Disinformation Problem

<ul><li>Just like the political cartoons of the 18th Century, today’s memes pack a lot of informational value for future historians. </li><li>The trouble is that there is so much data and polarizing perspectives that it may lead to further distortions in understanding.</li><li>One thing is for sure: highly original, interesting stories will be narrated about this age, proving yet again that truth is stranger than fiction.</li></ul>

Stories Of Our Times

Social media posts, algorithms and conspiracy theories might shape how future generations understand the world today.

softwareengineering

Software Engineering

What will today's data tell future historians?

Comedians meticulously write and refine their jokes until they seem polished. The reaction awareness comes from reciting the joke dozens of times, similar to when someone describes a story they've told often, and their closest friends think ", oh, this one again." 
Although groups and stories vary, people tend to respond in the same ways in the same places, regardless of who is listening.

Refining and testing jokes

For the comedian, experiencing a new joke that comes to life is an empowering moment. All jokes require the comedian to connect with the audience about the issue. It means finding some universal truth and finding the humour in it, simplifying it and refining it so that it works. The moment the audience laughs is when they realise that their experiences aren't unique - that other people go through the same stuff.

Connecting with the audience

Some comedians resort to strategic methodology to create their jokes, while others employ a more spontaneous technique. Comedians often tend to write on paper in a different voice than when speaking to an audience. Once comedians have trained themselves to live in joke writing mode, jokes are everywhere, easy for the picking. It's the comedians task to make that fruit tasty for the audience.

Strategic and spontaneous technique

Most of the time, when a comedian brings a joke on stage, it'll bomb. While bombing can be a devastating feeling, it doesn't necessarily get easier with experience. However, with time, every comedian develops a way to come back and repair a broken joke.

When a joke bombs

I always grapple with whether or not to tell someone I meet at a party that I perform stand-up comedy when the old, “What do you do?” question inevitably comes up. If I admit it, they’re either…

writing

Reading & Writing

entertainment

Entertainment

How It Feels To Write A Joke And Tell It On Stage

Boreout syndrome is the result of not having an adequate amount of tasks or adequately challenging ones.Having boreout syndrome can cause actual health problems such as heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases, and adopting unhealthy habits in order to make their life more interesting.Employees with boreout syndrome have worse job perfomances and tend to make more error. Moreover, they have a higher rate of absenteeism in order to avoid engaging with their source of boredom.

Boreout Syndrome

In order to combat the boreout syndorme, both the employer and the employee must put in effort in order to adress the issue.Respectively, the employer could ensure that their employees cna talk to them about needing a new task or role without the fear of getting laid off, and they could also distribute challenging, non-repetitive tasks; While the employee must also try to find a way to make their work meaningful and if that fails, find a new job that has a better chance of making them satisfied.

Avoiding Boreout Syndrome

There's been a growing understanding of the dangers of burnout, but few realize how destructive it's opposite can be. Boreout syndrome arises when one has too few or inadequately challenging tasks to perform throughout the day, and it can wreak some serious havoc to your mental and physical health.

health

Health

timemanagement

Time Management

teamwork

Teamwork

Bored to death: What is boreout syndrome?

What makes something effortful? For example, why is it harder to do a math problem than play a video game?
Understanding how effort works is essential. Many of our goals will require a lot of it. If we have the wrong view on how effort works, many of our systems will fail or be poorly designed.

Understanding Effort

At first, the ego-depletion theory was the dominant model on how effort works. It argues that willpower was a resource that could be depleted. Like a muscle, it could also be strengthened.
But the theory was criticised. Giving a reward could increase effort, suggesting it wasn't a physical limitation.

Failure of the Ego Depletion Theory

A new way of thinking about effort is in terms of opportunity cost. In the paper "An Opportunity Cost Model of Subjective Effort and Task Performance", Robert Kurzban and co-authors argue that certain parts of your brain can deploy many possible functions. 
However, the executive will limit the number of simultaneous tasks and apply it only to the most valuable activities. This experience of the cost-benefits will feel like effort. When your current activity doesn't feel like a good use of your limited mental bandwidth, you feel like doing something else.

Effort As Opportunity Cost

Effort is the experience that what you're currently doing is not worth it.
It's like computer time-sharing. The computer resources don't get used up, but they are limited. If you want to do something like running a major background process, like a backup or rendering operation, and want to play a game, you have to decide to shut it off or wait until it is finished.
The opportunity cost model is similar, except that opportunity costs are experienced as effort.

Computer Time Sharing Metaphor

How effortful something feels will depend on what else is available. It is more effortful to work with an alternative nearby, such as your smartphone to browse Instagram instead.
If we see effort as a comparison of alternatives, then habits - automated behaviour - can reduce the desire to reach for a substitute.

Effort Depends On Alternatives

In the opportunity-cost framework of effort, when you get rewarded for an effortful activity, the experience of effort becomes less unpleasant, meaning we can increase our self-control by remembering that certain actions yield positive results.
If persistence in doing a difficult task pays off, you'll find it easier to endure in the future.

Willpower Depends On The Reward

The willpower to do a specific activity depends on learning the value of the activity itself.
The opportunity-cost theory suggests that if you can establish that a particular activity is rewarding compared to alternatives, it will become less effortful.

Discipline Is Specific

Why is math hard, but video games fun? I explore new research pointing to an answer that has surprising implications for your goals.

The Coddling of the American Mind

The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Empathy Rules

Skin in the Game

How to speak so that people want to listen | Julian Treasure

Jasper Asghar