A friend alerted me to TED talks after seeing one about ‘printing’ concrete buildings and thinking I’d be interested due to architecture etc.etc. Of course, I was. Since then, what with the dawn of iOS 6, I was alerted to the TED app where you can watch talks and listen to the TED stream of something or other. ANYWAY, the point was today I listened to a rather simple but quite interesting talk about how happiness equals success and how success doesn’t equal happiness.

It talked about how the news tells you everything that is wrong with the world and you are alerted to things that could go wrong/be wrong with you more often than you are told about the good in the world and what good can happen.

It sounds simple, right?

The talk was by a guy called Shawn Achor and was called ‘The happy secret to better work’.

His idea was this, to find and reach positivity through a few basic methods (this is a rough translation of mine from his talk):
- 3 Gratitudes: find three things to be grateful for each day, instead of looking at the negatives, only think about the positives and focus just on how lucky you are
- Journaling - record a positive entry in the space of the 24 hour day and focus on how that made you feel
- Exercise - putting your energy into something that feels worthwhile and will be productive and the help in feeling that physically
- Meditation - practising meditation can allow you to focus only on the task at hand
- Random Acts of Kindness - to partake in 3 random acts of kindness each week

After that I watched Steve Jobs’ ‘How to live before you die’. I’ve seen it before and it really hits home. So TED talks are good yo.