TED Talk - Simon Sinek : How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Summary:
    Simon Sinek is now an author of the bestseller "Start With Why", the book was named after his famous quote given in this speech, and he now puts a lot of effort into inspiring people to do what inspires them. Simon came up with a question that as both being great leaders, why some succeeded buy some failed? With that in mind, he did some research on famous commercial failure case and successful examples. Finally he reached a conclusion which was not a new idea but was illustrated in a new way, the "Golden Circle" theory along with his well-known quote "Start With Why". The "Golden Circle" gave us a visual concept of how great leaders inspire people's action. The secret is to communicate to people from the inside-out of the circle, which is from "why you do it" to "how you do it" and ends with "what you do", otherwise we can't drive people's behavior to do whatever they are being inspired to do. This rule can be used on occasions like election, products promotion, etc.

What can listeners learn from this talk?
    Simon's concept of "Golden Circle" can also be interpreted as a philosophy of life that everyone of us should think "Why we do it" before we take our first step to do something. Moreover, for those who want to start their own business, Simon indicated that the recipe for success is not only about being funded by wealthy ventures, or having the best minds your money can find and happened to be at the right time of the market condition. Without knowing clearly the "why" and expressing the change this new business is about to make, success still won't be as smooth as it seems. Therefore, he said “[Martin Luther King, Jr.] gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.”  Listeners should keep this way of thinking in mind no matter what they do.

TED Talks - Andrew Fitzgerald: Adventures in Twitter fiction

Summary:
    Andrew Fitzgerald works as a member of the news and journalism partnership team at Twitter, is also a writer of a novel, an editor and a Tweeter. He experiments with new and creative ways of story-telling in his spare time, and the outcome was pretty much interesting, which draws the outline of digital story-telling on social media. In the speech, Andrew Fitzgerald showed three good examples of how creatively can platforms like Twitter can be used for writing fiction and non-fiction stories together with Tweeters. Andrew explains that, in fact, several series of fiction novels have published by initially coming out as a short story on twitter. Later on, there are multiple  perspective and feedback from readers involved as a part of the story, which in turn makes it possible for the fiction characters to engage with the real world and eventually came out to be great series of artwork. At the end of the speech, he suggests people to make good and creative use of these digital tools, and to think of the new structure of digital story-telling.

What can listeners learn from this talk?
    Human beings are born to be story tellers, and people do love to tell stories. Luckily, we're now living in a digital generation with a wide-open accessibility to powerful tools on the internet, such as social media websites and blogs, which can spread our ideas or stories rapidly with little effort. In other words, even though we didn't intent to tell the world our stories, it might just go viral by itself if the story is considered interesting or inspiring to the readers. However, not everyone have the talent or been trained for literature. In this case, by following the way the speaker suggested, every single person can take part in a story and be a co-author only by posting their lines on Twitter. Thanks to technology, real time story-telling has blurred the line between fact and fiction, and the line between writer and reader as well. Writing a novel haven't become so easy for either the author or the reader, the writers get enthusiasm from feedback to keep up their good works and the readers can find what they want to read easily and leave comments simultaneously, which is a whole new experience of reading. I'm pretty much looking forward to this online co-working trend of writing novels to go viral and someday to involve in one of them.

Movie Clip - We're the Millers

Which movie does this clip come from?

This clip is from the movie "We're the Miller's", released on July 2013. 

What is this movie about?
     "We're the Miller's" tells a story about how a drug dealer make up a fake family to ship weeds from the boarder of  Mexico back to the US, and those funny things happened during the whole trip. David was a local marijuana drug dealer, and was pretty satisfied with his single situation. At the age of marriage, he merely had the thought of having his own family. He was robbed afterwards with nothing left and the drug lord forced him to carry more drugs from the us-mexico boarder to clear his debt at once. However, to make the whole illegal shipping less suspicious, David decided to form a fake "Miller" family, with the member of a stripper, a runaway teenager, a virgin 18-years old neighbor and a drug dealer himself. During the trip back to the state, the fake family came through several emergencies that could possible reveal their real characteristic and been sentenced to jail. Each family member always had their ways to explain the ridiculous facts. At the end of the movie, David realized they would never carry back the weeds on time and meet the drug lord's request. He gave up and turned to work together with the DEA agent he met on their trip. Eventually, the evil drug lord was arrested. The Millers were more like a real family at the end of the movie, living happily together.

     This is definitely the funniest movie I've ever seen in recent year! I've never laugh so loud in the theater! If you love comedy then you will love this one!

What is happening in this clip?

     The Miller's family was about to enter the boarder pass station, there they met the Fitzgeralds' family. By no reason, David hit the break too hard and the weed fell on Rose's lap all of a sudden. Rose had no choice but to cover the drug with a blanket which make Mrs.Fitzgeralds mistaken it as a baby. They were almost in a trouble but David came up to give the drug a human's name, LeBron, an irony to the famous NBA player who was caught smoking marijuana last year.