TED Tuesday: It’s Time to Re(IMAGINE) Death

"Miller thinks deeply about how to create a dignified, graceful end of life for his patients. Take the time to savor this moving talk, which asks big questions about how we think on death and honor life."

Good Morning Folks,

At the end of our lives, what do we most wish for? For many, it’s simply comfort, respect, love.

Death is a subject no one likes to talk about. Yet it is one of the only certainties of life. Any of our families could deal with a health crisis, accident or aging parent and find themselves totally unprepared for the decisions they will face. So for that day, and with the goal of using these TED Tuesdays to enrich you both personally and professionally, I share B.J. Miller's "It’s Time to Redesign Death".

Sue Campbell notes, "Miller was a sophomore in college when, horsing around with friends, he climbed onto a parked commuter rail car and was electrocuted. He lost part of one arm and the bottom of both legs as a result. That, he says, was the beginning of his “formal relationship with death.”

Now a physician working at the Zen Hospice guest house in San Francisco, Calif., he focuses on providing palliative care and on fundamentally changing the American health care system. Right now, medical care centers on the disease. Miller argues that it should center on people — what patients want to do and what makes them feel good — taking into account caregivers as helpers and healers.

Miller says “life and health and health care can become about making life more wonderful, rather than just less horrible.”

The video is 20 minutes long and lays out rich ideas. Take the time to savor this moving talk, which asks big questions about how we think on death and honor life:

 

As B.J. says, "I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well -- not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination."

I hope that you learned something new and valuable today from this powerful TED talk on patient-centered compassion. Thanks to Sue Campbell and the Next Avenue Blog for tipping me to this talk.

Have a great day and thanks for being a part of our amazing journey.

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

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“Remember if you are not smiling then you are doing it wrong."

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE. 

TED Tuesday: Nilofer Merchant: Got a meeting? Take a Walk

"What you’re doing right now, at this very moment, is killing you.”

Good Morning Folks,

Nilofer Merchant suggests a small idea that just might have a big impact on your life and health: Next time you have a one-on-one meeting, make it into a "walking meeting" — and let ideas flow while you walk and talk. 

Her famed TED Talk, titled, “Got A Meeting? Take A Walk” has been seen online by over two and a half million viewers to date. The talk posits that “sitting is the new smoking,” and encourages sedentary office workers to be both healthy and productive by walking, rather than sitting, at meetings.

This is a short, highly insightful, and relevant talk to those who spend hours on end (no pun intended) at the office. Sitting is serious business, and here’s why you need to know about it. Have a look:


CPC Strategy, commenting on the presentation, noted: meetings on the go are good for 4 main reasons:

1) It’s good for your health. Office dwellers, and many of us are, form a habit of being sedentary week in and week out. Yes, this is American, but clearly not conducive to a healthy, active lifestyle.

2) It generates new ideas. Being stuck in your usual surroundings on a daily basis can really hinder your creativity. You start to get tunnel vision and tend to think more inside the box. The same goes for writing. You have to revisit your work after a couple days break to really look at it from a fresh perspective. If you change your surroundings and your context, you can start to look at things differently.

3) It gets you out of the office. Sort of like #2, but an excuse to get out of the office and stretch your legs is always welcome. We started having our marketing brainstorming meetings outside, and quite simply, it’s a revelation.

4) Speaking of backsides, gentleman, don’t sit on your wallets at work. It’s bad for your spine and refraining from doing so will do wonders for your back

The bottom line, which is, walk and talk. Walk the talk. You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas.

Have a GREAT Day! 

Mitch

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“To love without condition, to talk without intention, 
to give without reason and to care without expectation. 
This is the art of true relationship."

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

TED Tuesday: Meaghan Ramsey— Why Thinking You're Ugly Is Bad For You

“Let's show our kids the truth. Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel”

Good Morning Folks,

About 10,000 people a month Google the phrase, “Am I ugly?” Meaghan Ramsey of the Dove Self-Esteem Project has a feeling that many of them are young girls. So it's no surprise that today's TED selection has been viewed over 3 million times!

In this deeply unsettling talk, Meaghan walks us through the surprising impacts of low body and image confidence—from lower grade point averages to greater risk-taking with drugs and alcohol. And then shares the key things all of us can do to disrupt this reality.

For you, your kids, or someone you or they may know ... I present:


We strive to have the most inspired, motivated, and best trained employees in the industry! I hope these TED Tuesday presentations keep you well informed and enrich your life both personally and professionally.

Have a GREAT Day! 

Mitch

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“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” ~~Epicurus

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

TED Tuesday: Lidia Yuknavitch— The beauty of being a misfit

"Even at the moment of your failure, you are beautiful. You don't know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. That's your beauty."

Good Morning Folks,

According to IBM, "Every company, every industry, every occupation is undergoing massive change in a global, information economy. To succeed—even survive—in this modern workforce, workers must be adept in more than one subject and keep up with an ever expanding knowledge base that never seems to stop moving. Workers need to be lifelong learners who are comfortable with learning “just in time” rather than “just one time” in life."

At FSO we are constantly learning new things and inspired to want to do more. This is why we cull through hundreds of TED talks each week in order to bring you a valuable and inspirational lesson on Tuesday.

Today's speaker is a self-proclaimed, card-carrying, misfit. In her acclaimed novels and memoir, author Lidia Yuknavitch navigates the intersection of tragedy and violence to draw new roadmaps for self­-discovery.

To those who feel like they don't belong: there is beauty in being a misfit. Author Lidia Yuknavitch shares her own wayward journey in an intimate recollection of patchwork stories about loss, shame and the slow process of self-acceptance. "Even at the moment of your failure, you are beautiful," she says. "You don't know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. That's your beauty."

Lidia discovered her calling after an interrupted journey as a would­-be Olympic swimmer. Her prose erases the boundaries between memoir and fiction, explodes gender binaries and focuses on the visceral minutiae of the body.

Says Lidia, "You can be standing dead center in the middle of your failure and still, I'm only here to tell you, you are so beautiful. Your story deserves to be heard, because you, you rare and phenomenal misfit, you new species, are the only one in the room who can tell the story the way only you would. And I'd be listening."

Have a look:

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Have a GREAT Day! 

Mitch

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“If a Plant's Roots Are Too Tight, Repot.”

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

TED Tuesday: Remembering Scott Dinsmore— How to find and do work you love | TEDxGoldenGatePark (2D)

"But doing the impossible and pushing our limits, because there are 2 reasons why people don’t do things: one is because they tell themselves they can’t do them and the other is people around them tell them, they can’t do. Either way we start to believe it. Either we give up or we never start in the first place."

Good Morning Folks,

Today's speaker, Scott Dinsmore, an Alamo, California native, entrepreneur and adventurer, was killed last year while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, a feat his family says was to fulfill a lifelong dream.

Dinsmore, who was hiking with his wife, died doing what he loved, something he preached through his work, on a blog on his website and in the widely viewed (3+MN) Ted Talk that follows, recorded in 2012.

Before he reached the summit, a cascade of boulders rolled down the mountain and one of them hit and killed the 33-year-old.

In his blog post Scott Dinsmore said he almost decided against booking the Tanzania trip because he didn't think he could go on a digital break.

"How ridiculous is that? To pass up an adventure I've talked about for years -- because I'd convinced myself I couldn't disconnect. Or more truthfully, because I couldn't find the courage to do it. That would have been a tragedy."

Scott Dinsmore quit a job that made him miserable, and spent the next four years wondering how to find work that was joyful and meaningful. He shares what he learned in this deceptively simple talk about finding out what matters to you — and then getting started doing it.

Then Scott made it his mission is to change the world by helping people find what excites them and build a career around the work only they are capable of doing. He is a career change strategist whose demoralizing experience at a Fortune 500 job launched his quest to understand why 80% of adults hate the work they do, and more importantly, to identify what the other 20% were doing differently. His research led to experiences with thousands of employees and entrepreneurs from 158 countries. Scott distilled the results down to his Passionate Work Framework - three surprisingly simple practices for finding and doing work you love, that all happen to be completely within our control. He makes his career tools available free to the public through his community at http://LiveYourLegend.net

What Scott has created at Live Your Legend is mind-boggling. He creates inspiration, the challenge to dream big and bold, and the tools to make all that a reality. But most unbelievable is the community he's developed of people who are passionate about doing something great, and helping each other achieve that. Have a look:




Let me close as Scott did. "And as we finish up, I have just one question to ask you guys, and I think it's the only question that matters. And it's what is the work you can't not do? Discover that, live it, not just for you, but for everybody around you, because that is what starts to change the world. What is the work you can't not."

Have a GREAT Day and Love Life!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE. 

Ted Tuesday: David Steindl-Rast: Want To Be Happy? Be Grateful

"Remember that you deserve to be happy. 
It's your natural-born right."

- Pharrell

Good Morning Folks,

"Happy," originally produced for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, topped charts in more than 15 countries for almost two years. It has 900+ Million views on You Tube.

It's impossible not to listen to Pharrell's "Happy" and think about FSO. It could be our anthem. HAPPY IS OUR ENTIRE COMPANY.  As you'll hear in today's program, the only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude.

You see, the secret of happiness is like the secret of dieting: There is no secret.

We all want to be happy, says David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk and today's Ted Tuesday speaker with over FIVE MILLION views on Ted and YouTube (just in case you are wondering who ever heard of him or whether it's worth your few minutes to tune in).

Everyone wants to be happy. But not all happy people are grateful (they want more of something, or want something else); but all grateful people (even though many live with misfortune) are happy.

So: it’s not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.

Every moment is a gift, and ‘opportunity’ is the gift within every gift.

The master key to happiness? Moment by moment we have this gift.

In some moments we’re not happy – because of someone’s suffering, loss of a friend, etc.

But the key here is that we’re learning something in every moment: patience, for example. And then in the next moment we get another opportunity.

How should we respond to all these opportunities? Same as you were taught as a child about crossing the street: STOP, LOOK, GO.

STOP when you turn on the water-faucet: millions don’t have access to drinkable water. Or ditto when you turn on the power switch. (David’s put little ‘gratefulness stickers’ on the tap and light-switch at his place, after a trip to Africa where these good things weren’t available.)

LOOK – open your eyes, and your hearts (use the opportunity to make others happy).

GO – Do something!

Grateful people are not fearful, and therefore not violent. Grateful people are joyful people.

Grateful people are FSO people and I am honored to be in your company.

May love, health, joy and laughter continue throughout your  life.

Now discover why happiness, as David suggests, is born from gratitude. 

Get ready for an inspiring lesson in slowing down, looking where you're going, and above all, being grateful.

Thanks to John Mark Ministries and Ted for making it possible to share this with you, and to you for watching. 

Let’s FOCUS on today, so we can build tomorrow.

Have a GREAT day as I look forward to seeing all of you soon.

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

Learn more about what DIFFERENTIATES FSO here

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE. 

TED Tuesday— Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. Collaboration

“Amazing video - 20 min accelerating your creativity, and understanding the world.“

Good Morning Folks,

If you're a massive TED fan like me, you've probably watched a whole lot of the compelling talks by now. But when it comes to consuming all the insights TED has to offer, even the most dedicated enthusiasts can't hold a candle to Chris Anderson.

As the curator of TED, he's had a front row seat for nearly every presentation or performance that's graced the event's stage. Which is what makes his answer to a recent Quora member who asked "What  is the top TED talk that you took away the most learnings from?"

This all time TED classic was his #1 choice.

In this prescient 2005 talk, Clay Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning. Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York Universityʼs graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named “Social Weather.” Heʼs the author of several books. This spring at the TED headquarters in New York, he gave an impassioned talk against SOPA/PIPA that saw 1 million views in 48 hours. He's become a consistently prescient voice on networks, social software, and technology's effects on society.

Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications. Have a look:


Growing a network is always good, because multiplies the brain power on any topic--being in the network helps you get the questions out to the experts and from there, the answers and ideas just begin to flow.

Watching these TED videos seems to build my creativity... Even though most of the videos have nothing to do with what we do. Incredible.

Have a GREAT Day! 

 Mitch

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"The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself."

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the fourth consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

TED Tuesday— Nancy Etcoff: Happiness and its surprises

"We are wired to pursue happiness, not only to enjoy it, but to want more and more of it."

Good Morning Folks,

At FSO we are constantly learning new things and inspired to want to be better at everything we do. That's why every Tuesday I present some of the best and most popular TED talks on the planet.

Today, cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff looks at happiness — the ways we try to achieve and increase it, the way it's untethered to our real circumstances, and its surprising effect on our bodies. This Harvard psychologist argues that we ogle such features because they radiate the health and fertility our species needs to survive. Have a look:


In her book Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff refutes the social origins of beauty, in favor of far more prosaic and evolutionary explanations. Looking for a partner with clear skin? You're actually checking for parasites. And let's just say there's a reason high heels are always in fashion.

Her recent research into the question of happiness exposes results that not only are surprising but reinforce things we should've known all along: like the fact that having flowers in the house really does make us happier. As the instructor of "The Science of Happiness" at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Program in Aesthetics and Well Being at Massachusetts General Hospital, Nancy Etcoff is uniquely qualified to solve the mysteries of contentment.

Have a GREAT Day! 

 Mitch

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"Begin by always expecting good things to happen.”

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the fourth consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

TED Tuesday- Judson Brewer: A simple way to break a bad habit

Can we break bad habits by being more curious about them? Psychiatrist Judson Brewer studies the relationship between mindfulness and addiction — from smoking to overeating to all those other things we do even though we know they're bad for us. 


Learn more about the mechanism of habit development and discover a simple but profound tactic that might help you beat your next urge to smoke, snack or check a text while driving. 


Have a GREAT Day! 

 Mitch

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"Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure."

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Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the fourth consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

Ted Tuesday: The Key to Success: Grit

“Grit is sticking with your future — day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years — and working really hard to make that future a reality.”

Good Morning Folks,

Every Tuesday we bring you one of my favorite TED talks. TED.com is a treasure trove of inspiration, and I promise you whenever you are feeling down, you can go there and find a few smart words that will cheer you right up.

Today though the message is "Never give up! It's more than just a platitude.

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

Assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Lee Duckworth studies intangible concepts such as self-control and grit to determine how they might predict both academic and professional success.

In her extensive research, psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth found that more than IQ or talent or any other factor, the #1 predictor of a person's success is their unflagging commitment to a long-term goal... in other words, their grit.

Find out why... WATCH: The Surprising Trait That's MUCH More Important Than IQ

Have a GREAT day. Love LIFE!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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“The secret to happiness is low expectations.” 
— Barry Schwartz 
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TED Tuesday– Dr. Abraham Verghese: A Doctor's Touch

"I will always, always, always be there. I will see you through this. I will never abandon you. I will be with you through the end." ~~ A Doctor's Message

Good Morning Folks,

Our quest to build a healthy company and to achieve of our 2016 goal begins with each of us. Our employees are our number one asset. So, as I screened TED talks last weekend in hope of finding one to share today, it occurred to me that being "healthy" is more than measurements in profits and cash flow, but also with regard to the health and wellness of all of our associates. "A Doctor's Touch" seemed like the perfect share.

Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points, and calls for a return to the traditional one-on-one physical exam.

In short, it is just good medicine. Moreover, it is what most patients want.

I think this Ted talk touched on an interesting trend. With an increase in the technology available to treat disease, it becomes all to easy for physicians to take a step back from physical examinations and patient care. I thought Dr. Verghese it the nail on the head when he started talking about an IPatient because in a way that is what medicine as evolved into. Doctors sometimes care more about the images they get from their scans then the actual patient themselves. This isn’t their fault, or necessarily a bad thing. A doctors job is to treat a patient the best they can, so sometimes that does mean spending less time on things like a physical exam, and instead focusing on getting as many scans as possible. I do believe though that while we should be grateful of our technological advances, doctors shouldn’t neglect some of the foundations of modern medicine.

Dr. Verghese explains, "And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years. Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses, touch the breast mass, intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her. And the message, which I didn't fully understand then, even as I delivered it, and which I understand better now is this: I will always, always, always be there. I will see you through this. I will never abandon you. I will be with you through the end."  Have a look:


Dr. Verghese says: “I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.” In our era of the patient-as-data-point, Abraham Verges believes in the old-fashioned physical exam, the bedside chat, the power of informed observation.

"The truth is, I love and embrace technology, and have no desire to return to the pre-CAT scan and pre-MRI days of old. But I see no reason to let new technology make us lose the abilities we have had for over a hundred years to make sophisticated diagnosis at the bedside. Indeed, it should make us so much better."

I thoroughly enjoyed this video and all the ideas that were presented within it. I hope that you did too.

Have a GREAT day, be happy and…

Love Life!

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

*TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference on the West Coast each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer -- TED includes the award-winning TED Talks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.  More at TED.com