Category — brain food

You have heard of TED, because you are always on the lookout for new trends and developments in science, technology and economics, right?

If you do not know TED, you are missing out big time. It is one of the most spoken about conferences where “the world’s greatest thinkers and doers” meet every year to present their newest findings, discuss, engage and enjoy.

TED started out in 1984, and stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design.” Participation is expensive - and chances are, even if you have the cash you won’t get a seat, because TED is sold out in advance, way in advance. But do not despair! The internet is here to save the day for you.
Almost all TED talks are available online, making ted.com one of the most inspiring and interesting resource for brain food I know of these days. You can search by attributes “inspiring, funny, jaw-dropping…”, topics, speaker - and trust me, almost all of those talks are more than worth the 5-20 minutes you will spend watching them. Seriously. So take the time and dive in. You will laugh. You will be excited. You will be surprised.

Here are some of my favourite talks - your mileage may vary of course:

• Clifford Stoll - 18 minutes with an agile mind
• Malcolm Gladwell - what we can learn from spaghetti sauce
• Lawrence Lessig - how creativity is strangled by the law
• Rives - select from three videos on the site, and once you are hooked, his website has some more media to indulge
• Ben Saunders - three things to know before you ski to the north pole
• Will Wright - toys that make worlds
• Aubrey de Grey - why we age and how we can avoid it
• Richard St. John - 8 secrets of success
• Hans Rosling - the best stats you’ve ever seen (well, at least as non-consultant, as the Consultant Ninja points out)

And you will find John Doerr, Bill Clinton, Philippe Starck, Richard Branson, Larry Page, Stephen Hawking, Norman Foster, Jane Goodall… it just goes on and on. (To be honest, it took me two days to complete this post because whenever I was looking through the list of talks for the one I really liked, I discovered new ones that I just had to at least skim through)

To round things off, this year’s sponsor Autodesk has had visual artists work out pictures mirroring the contents of the various speeches, which you can download in one big (over 50MB) PDF from their site. They call it “TEDBIGVIZ”. This way of visualization is really powerful. You can grasp the concepts and ideas of the talks without having heard/seen the talk, but of course it is even better when you use this to recap contents already familiar to you.

So, instead of getting dull TV, I recommend you feed your brain with some quality stuff.
Of course, if there are other resources (preferably free) for inspiration and insight, please share them in the comments!

Time management often seems to be the issue - but is it really?

My own experience tells a different story. Of course, time management is important, especially in the fast-paced consulting world, where sometimes you feel like the week is just a stream of deadlines, meetings and deliverables. But often enough, energy is a more limiting factor than time…. and it seems that researchers agree big time.
Introducing The Energy Project, founded by Tony Schwartz, has been following this question for a few years now.
I got onto them because a former colleague sent me their article from Harvard Business Review, titled “Manage your Energy, Not Your Time”. It is available as a free download right from the website of The Energy Project.

Go there now, download it, print it out, read it the next time you are on the plane, train, or whatever your mode of transportation is.

The basic proposal is:

Be aware of what you focus on, and when.
Don’t try to multitask throughout the whole day, because it wears you down (Classic example: The every-five-minutes email interruption)

Fuel yourself with the energy of meaning and purpose.
I see some grinning faces already - as the tasks of a consultant bring it, sometimes when you are knee-deep in some data analysis, it is hard to see meaning and purpose of what you are doing there. What might help there is being aware of the big picture - what you will do with the data you dig out, for example. If the big picture is nothing that carries meaning and purpose for you, that would be an alarm bell ringing very loud right there.
In the worst case - when you are a junior down in the smallest stream of a huge project, far from the big picture strategy… be a renegade. Make your analysis, your pile of data, your Powerpoint slides something special - make it a game if you will.
If there is no meaning in what others give you, and you have no choice to reject it, then you better give it some meaning. Gosh, dare I say it - be creative! Your alternative is work that drags you down, and there are few things worse for your energy than that.