The sleigh bells are ringing, you’re slowly becoming broke as a result of all that gift buying and you still have a ridiculous amount of deadlines to catch up on before the year ends. So what’s better than binge watching some feel-good TED Talks of people doing inspiring things to get you in the festive spirit?
1. The heart-breaking text that inspired a crisis help line
The message that started this went as follows: 'He won't stop raping me. It's my dad. He told me not to tell anyone. Are you there?'
Nancy Lublin ends her TED Talk with this statement: ‘I want to use tech and data to make the world a better place’. Unsurprisingly, she gets a standing ovation for her speech, and her work as the CEO of Dosomething.org. Bad things happen all the time, but Nancy and her team are helping young people that are trouble and provide them with a way out. And it's beautiful.
2. An art made of trust, vulnerability and connection
You will get goose bumps one minute into this video. Marina Abramovic is no stranger to performance art (she’s been doing it for 40 years). Her most popular work was in 2010, with a piece called ‘The Artist Is Present’, in which she sat in a chair facing an audience member for eight hours a day. She’s not afraid of being vulnerable, and you’ll just have to watch the video to see the lengths she’ll go to in trusting strangers.
3. How I stopped the Taliban from shutting down my school
When you consider what Sakena Yacoobi has been through, you can’t help but admire her positivity and how at ease she is at laughing at the people who were close to killing her. Basically, education is powerful and she’s on Malala levels of inspirational. Seriously. Watch it.
4. Why some of us don't have one true calling
‘At some point, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night’. Sound familiar? Emilie Wapnick explores the concept of ‘multipotentialite’ (not yet a word, but hey, emoji made it into the dictionary this year). She praises the idea that you don’t have to be one thing to be successful. She may or may not make you want to quit your job and become an astronaut who is also a gymnast. Because, why not?
5. How can we make the world a better place by 2030
So let’s be real, things are pretty shitty in the world right now and no amount of Christmas spirit can take that away. But Michael Green’s TED Talk will give you a little bit of hope: it’s not all doom and gloom. Yeah, it will take a while, a whopping 15 years in fact, but it could happen. There’s quite a few stats thrown about, but the message is powerful.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.