TED Talks have been around a while. The current intro video says there’s something like 900 available online. I can’t say for certain which one I watched first, but I was an early adopter, subscribing to the podcast feed, and so on. In recent years, I fell away from them, mostly because (and I realize how much I let others drive my decisions here, but it was expedient) I kept hearing people at work talk about them, but their lives never seemed to change as a result.
Lately we’ve been tuning back into them, having cut cable and needing something to fill some gaps in the day (and the Apple TV makes it easy) and I’ve noticed something interesting about TED talks. Two things, really.
The first is that some of them contain Really Interesting Information that I can use to shape my future actions.
The second is that the bastards put dates at the beginning of them.
As an admitted data hoarder who also, by his own admission, had a chance to watch all of these much earlier than, say, right now, this is crushing at first. To watch a video that’s been online for 2, 3, or even 5 years now, and see a nugget of wisdom that could change the next day, week, or even lifetime of my business, well, that hurts a little.
Like I should have stopped goofing off training and implementing to watch one more thing.
And the key, well, one of them, is that the information might not have meant as much as it did right now if I hadn’t watched it with the set of experience and problems that I have facing me right now.
The other key is to remember that the entire extent of human knowledge has been available long before the advent of the modern internet. If you’re a data hoarder, there’s a good chance you’ve visited a library in the past (insert large number) years, so let me remind you that the sheer physicality of it all reminded you pretty quickly that there’s a ton of knowledge out there that you’ll never ever get to, ready or not, and any pretense of simply trying to keep up with the “new stuff” is a pipe dream and, keeping with key #1, a distraction.
Hey, data hoarder: you’re going to find information that you need that was available well before you found it. That’s OK. You found it, and the real test is what you do with it now.
Photo by dfulmer
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