Gone Fishin’

Ok, maybe I haven’t gone fishing. But as you read this, I’m somewhere in the air over the Atlantic or Europe or Afghanistan en route to Delhi and I haven’t had time to generate a lot of my own original content.

Today, I’ll point you in the direction of some of my favorite video resources that have inspired me over the past several years.

Phil Waknell: The Secrets of a Great Talk

I love this one for two reasons:

1) He makes the point that your audience isn’t going to master your content in 15 minutes, so don’t try to get them to master it.

2) He uses props to engage his audience with a hands-on activity, even though he’s speaking to an auditorium full of people.

David JP Phillips: How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint

This one comes from TEDxStockholm and David offers 5 tips on how to simplify your slides. I appreciate this one because he de-constructs a poorly designed, overcrowded slide and re-works it over the course of 20 minutes.

Jane McGonigal: The Game that can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life

Jane McGonigal has several excellent TED Talks, but I wanted to highlight this one simply because of the title. Watch to see how she keeps an audience on pins and needles for 20 minutes by making them a promise (a longer life!), giving them a mathematical formula for how this promise can come true, and then she slowly unfolds her story arc. Give it a view… unless you want to die sooner.

Leadership Lessons from a Dancing Guy

I learned about this video from a colleague. It’s a short, 3-minute illustration of leadership in action and how a movement can get started and it uses a very unlikely source: a shirtless, dancing guy at a concert.

How about you? Are there any videos that you’ve found particularly thought-provoking or creativity-inspiring? Let’s hear about them in the comments section.

Brian Washburn

Brian has over 25 years of experience in Learning & Development including the last 7 as CEO of Endurance Learning.

Brian is always available to chat about learning & development and to talk about whether Endurance Learning can be your training team’s “extra set of hands”.

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