A MUSICAL GENIUS (Arts, Musicians and the Internet) by Usman Riaz

Usman Riaz, a young Pakistani musician, talks about how important the Internet was
in his learning process. As a prodigal boy, he found an artistic limitation in what he
could learn personally in Pakistan. This limitation led him to self-taughtness, and
YouTube videos were the principal support to his development as a multi-
instrumentalist artist. Once he acquired all the knowledge he could, a question came
to Usman Riaz's mind: Why not write his own music? Then, he began to create
songs, and went beyond that relating music with painting and cinema. His creativity
permitted him to be selected by TED to meet and play with one of his idols, Preston
Reed, and to participate in a cultural and musical exchange with people from all over
the world. This TED Talk shows us how helpful platforms, such as YouTube, can be
to the improvement of musicals skills and the exposition of musicians’ work.

THE SKILL OF HUMOR by Andrew Tarvin

Andrew Tarvin, a “humor engineer”, takes a message received from her

grandmother, in which she texted “WTF” as “Wow, that’s funny”, to teach us how
humor could be part of our dairy life. In our hard-working society, humor becomes a
necessity because of its multiple benefits, such as getting people to listen, increasing
long-term memory retention, improving understanding, or aiding in learning.
According to Tarvin, anyone can learn to be funny. Humor is a choice and he
encourages the audience to develop a skill of humor following three simple steps: 1.
Share your point of view, 2. Explore and heighten, and 3. Practice, perform, and
repeat.
TO FIND WORK YOU LOVE, DON’T FOLLOW YOUR PASSION by Benjamin Todd

Benjamin Todd tells his own experience, from philosophy graduate to career advisor,
to illustrate how difficult is following our passion and achieving a fulfilling career at
the same time. Based on several researches, Todd argues that people who focuse
on what they can do for make the world a better place succeed more on finding a
meaningful work than people who follow their passion. “Do what’s valuable” is the
motto of Todd’s thinking. He proposes a three-step procedure for those who want to
do what’s valuable in their careers: 1. Explore: learn about the world and test yourself
in different things, 2. Get good at flexible skills, and 3. Solve pressing problems.
Todd conclude his TED talk with a powerful phrase: “Altruism is one thing you’ll never
regret”.