even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand ted videos it would actually currently take you over two hundred and fifty hours to do so and i did a little calculation of this the damage to the economy for each one who does this is around dollar fifteen thousand so
having seen this danger to the economy i thought we need to find a solution to this problem
here 's my approach to it all if you look at the current situation you have a thousand tedtalks each of those tedtalks has an average length of about two thousand three hundred words now take this together and you end up with two point three million words of tedtalks which is about three bibles worth of content
the obvious question here is does a tedtalk really need two thousand three hundred words isn 't there something shorter i mean if you have an idea worth spreading surely you can put it into something shorter than two thousand three hundred words the only question is how short can you get
what 's the minimumamount of words you would need to do a tedtalk while i was pondering this question i came across this urban legend about ernest hemingway who allegedly said that these six words here for sale baby shoes never worn
and i also encountered a project called six word memoirs where people were asked take your whole life and please sum this up into six words such as these here found true love married someone else or living in existential vacuum it sucks i actually like that one so if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words
you don 't need more than six words for a tedtalk we could have been done by lunch here
i mean and if you did this for all thousand tedtalks you would get from two point three million words
down to six thousand so i thought this was quite worthwhile so i started asking all my friends please take your favorite tedtalk and put that into six words
so here are some of the results that i received i think they 're quite nice for example dan pink 's talk on motivation which was pretty good if you haven 't seen it drop carrot drop stick bring meaning it 's what he 's basically talking about in those eighteen and a half minutes or some even included references to the speakers such as nathan myhrvold 's speaking style or the one of tim ferriss which might be considered a bit strenuous at times
the challenge here is if i try to systematically do this i would probably end up with a lot of summaries but not with many friends in the end so i had to find a different method preferably involving total strangers and luckily there 's a website for that called mechanical turk which is a website where you can post
i found out i could get a six word summary for just ten cents which i think is a pretty good price even then unfortunately it 's not possible to summarize
each tedtalk individually because if you do the math you have a thousand tedtalks the pay ten cents each you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks because some of them will probably be or are really bad so i would end up paying hundreds of dollars
so i thought of a different way by thinking well the talks revolve around certain themes so what if i don 't let people summarize individual tedtalks to six words but give them ten tedtalks at the same time and say please do a six word summary for that one
because there 's an example by statistics professor hans rosling i guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks he 's got eight talks online and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words because that 's all he 's basically showing us our intuition is really bad
he always proves us wrong so people on the internet some didn 't do so well i mean when i asked them to summarize the ten tedtalks at the same time some took the easy route out they just had some general comment
actually it sounded nice in the beginning but when you look at six hundred summaries it 's quite a lot it 's a huge list so
in the end amazingly again people were able to do it for example all the courageous tedtalks people dying or people suffering was also one with easy solutions around or the recipe for the ultimate jaw dropping tedtalk flickr photos of intergalactic classicalcomposer i mean that 's the essence of it all
so i had fifty overall summaries done this time i paid twenty five cents because i thought the task was a bit harder and
unfortunately when i first received the answers and here you 'll see six of the answers i was a bit disappointed because i think you 'll agree they all summarize some aspect of ted but to me they felt a bit bland or they just had a certain aspect of ted in them so i was almost ready to give up when
one night i played around with these sentences and found out that there 's actually a beautiful solution in here so
why the worry i 'd rather wonder
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