Keep learning from the best.
School is back in session — and it can be for you, too. Whether you’re a recent graduate or recently retired, learning never goes out of style.
Here are three TED Talks we like that remind us what we can learn when we stay curious and make the world our classroom.
3 rules to spark learning with Ramsey Musallam
After 13 years of teaching, a life-threatening condition led high school chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam to reexamine how he taught students.
“Student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information,” Musallam shares in his TED Talk.
In marketing, we’re always talking about building and crossing the “curiosity gap” — or keeping eyes and ears engaged so they gain new information. As Musallam learned, curiosity can lead others to ask tough questions and gain important information, and this is something we too can get behind.
The nerd’s guide to learning everything online with John Green
YouTube can be your classroom, author John Green says in his TED Talk. As a young student, he wasn’t a very good student himself. Then, he found himself in the right learning environment.
“I found myself surrounded by people who celebrated intellectualism and engagement, and who thought that my ironic oh-so-cool disengagement wasn’t clever, or funny, but, like, it was a simple and unspectacular response to very complicated and compelling problems. And so I started to learn, because learning was cool,” Green says.
Today, Green says that same community can be found online. So, listen to Green’s talk and then explore your world by learning with others who think learning online is pretty cool.
Smash fear, learn anything with Tim Ferriss
From swimming at summer camp to dancing the tango in Argentina, entrepreneur Tim Ferriss covers a range of scary learning experiences in this TED Talk. For Ferriss, each one has taught him that “fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator.”
“Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn’t do,” Ferriss says. “More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. And the best results that I’ve had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what’s the worst that can happen?”
