Woohoo! Thoughtful 18 minute TED Talks are in equally thoughtful written form – SCN Encourager

Now you can just scan those “ideas worth spreading.”

Reading.

Sometimes I wonder about its future.

I really do.

Naturally, I don’t have any facts or figures to back up my worries, but given the ever-increasing popularity of video and all things visual today, isn’t it only logical that people will start reading less and less?

Once in awhile, though, I’ll run across something online that gives me hope for the cause of reading.

Take those thought-provoking, 16 to 19 minute TED Talks – you know, those videos which feature presentations by individual experts and influencers about a wide variety of topics.

Those videos are not what gives me hope.

It’s the text adaptations of the TED talks that do!

They’re awesome.

You can scan the “written form” of an actual TED talk in about 1/3 the running time of a video.

See what I mean by checking out this excellent article about stress.

Its title is “How to be Good at Stress.”

Scan. Scan. Scan.
Zip. Zip. Zip.

Ah… learning the way it was meant to be.

While I appreciated the new insights about stress, I’m not convinced stress is something I want to devote a lot of time getting good at.

Especially since being “good at stress” seems to be directly linked to your prior experiences with it.

But this article based on its TED talk not only rekindled my hope for the future of reading, it also inspired several ideas for a few “how to be good at [blank]” articles of my own.

Based on extensive experience, I could author the following articles for TED with great integrity:

“How to be Good at Apologies.”
“How to be Good at Bad Investments.”
“How to be Good at Selective Listening.”
“How to be Good at Covering School Events that Happened Yesterday.”

It’d be interesting to see if they could live up to TED’s “ideas worth spreading” criteria.

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