On Saturday, Laura and I got to attend a Pittsburgh TEDx event called TEDx Grandview. It was really cool. For me, one of the coolest things is how this event got started: A 25-year-old young professional, Kacey Wherley, had a desire to start this two years ago, so she went for it! The first year, they had about 100 attendees. This year, there was over 500. That inspired me to have the courage to go after dreams in my heart and realize that anything is possible. Kacey and her team are all volunteers. They don’t get paid to do this. They are doing it to simply give back to the city. It’s incredible.
This was an intro video created by Covalent about Pittsburgh:
Inspired by Steel from Covalent on Vimeo.
The event was held at the Hazlett Theatre on the North Side. There were 10 talks throughout the day. They also played two talks from TED.com. I’ve posted my highlights from each talk below. I also posted two TED talks that they played during the event. Warning: One of them swears once, just a heads up. Overall, Laura and I loved the event and are both looking forward to next year.
Here are the two TED Talks they played at the conference:
Ted Talk: Improv Anywhere – This is hilarious!
TED Talk: Shane Koyczan – A pretty powerful spoken word about bullying. *Warning – this video does swear.
Key Takeaways from the Talks:
- Too often, we live lives that we think we should be living instead of living the lives we were meant to.
- Stop shoulding!
- God doesn’t give you dreams and ideas to screw with you!
- Ultimately, whatever we create, we will hand off to someone else for them to create something beautiful out of it.
- To reform education, we must:
- Simplify transactions as much as possible
- Don’t build what the community can provide
- We have to learn to make what is valuable and evaluate what value we are actually providing
- We need to provide real world experience
- The web is meant for everyone, you don’t have to ask for permission, there are open standards, and collaboration.
- CSS Tricks License – This is awesome! It talks about the value of giving your work away for others to use!
- It’s not about what you do, it’s about what you enable others to do!
- Social capital is extremely important
- Dishonesty is a result of distance in a relationship
- When you know people, you’ll treat them better
- The average person has 150 important relationships, people with special needs often have 25
- How are we affecting the lives of others
- Be bold, be inspired, keep going
- The poor deserve beauty just as much as the rich
- We need to treat the poor as though they were our own family members
- Poverty is the absence of dignity
- Eating has now passed smoking as the #1 cause of disease and death
- 52% of Americans think it’s easier to do their taxes than it is to learn how to eat well.
- We need to cook more! Learn how to cook!
- This talk was great. Christ talked about the future of cyber-security and how important it was. He is a hacker and tries to show people where their technology is unsafe. He’s making the world a better place.
- Hustle!
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