In business, knowledge is power. As an entrepreneur, taking the time to learn from the experience, failures, and triumphs of others can be a great way to ensure that you’re making the right moves for your business. Thanks to the popularity of websites like TED, Clarity, GrowthHackers, and others, it’s never been easier to gain access to insight and advice from the world’s brightest minds and most successful people.
If you’re looking for information that can help you grow your business and become a better, more successful startup founder, start by taking the time to watch these six inspiring and actionable TED videos:
Table of Contents
If you want to build a successful business, you have to be able to convince people that your ideas are worth spreading. In this TED talk, marketing guru Seth Godin talks about what entrepreneurs can do to differentiate and stand out in a world that is constantly being flooded with new ideas, new products, and new companies.
Presenter: Seth Godin
Takeaways: Make something worth noticing, then don’t market to the masses—market to people who actually care and want to listen.
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In order to make the right moves in business, you need to rely on data. Smart business owners know this. For many, collecting data isn’t the problem—it’s being able to actually interpret it and draw meaning from it. In this TED talk, data expert David McCandless illustrates the value of visualizing data in order to reveal insights and trends.
Presenter: David McCandless
Takeaway: Data visualization is the best way to navigate information glut — and it has the power to change the way we see things.
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A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs spend their their entire lives chasing success because they believe it will lead to ultimate happiness. But psychologist Shawn Achor believes that happiness shouldn’t be thought of as an end-goal—instead, he believes it should be used as a tool to boost creativity, work ability, brain cognition, and more.
Presenter: Shawn Achor
Takeaway: If you want to get more done and succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to go out of your way to do things that make you happy.
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As you continue to grow your startup, you will face challenges, experience failure, and come across problems that you don’t know how to solve. In this TED talk, growth mindsight researcher Carol Dweck explains that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems by reshaping how we address challenges, failure, and problem-solving.
Presenter: Carol Dweck
Takeaway: There are two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve: Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet?
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At the moment when you hire your first employee to help you grow your startup, you become more than just a business owner—you become someone that others look up to and depend on. You become a leader. In this TED talk, leadership expert Roselinde Torres shares the three simple but crucial questions would-be company chiefs need to ask to thrive in the future.
Presenter: Roselinde Torres
Takeaway: Dare to be different.
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As the founder of your startup, it’s natural to feel the need and desire to be involved in every meeting and project that relates to your company—but that level of participation can wreak havoc on your ability to actually get real, meaningful work done. In this TED talk, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried explains why he thinks no one gets any actual work done at offices anymore and offers three suggestions that you can use to make work work.
Presenter: Jason Fried
Takeaway: Cancel your meetings next week and focus your time on completing meaningful work that actually help you move the needle.
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Fred Metterhausen is a Chicago based computer programmer, and product owner of the current version of Maptive. He has over 15 years of experience developing mapping applications as a freelance developer, including 12 with Maptive. He has seen how thousands of companies have used mapping to optimize various aspects of their workflow.