TED Talk #3: Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink started out is speech with humor to really get the audience's attention about his topic. In his speech he talks about motivation and why it works and how it works. He shows the audience "The Candle Problem." This challenges people to think in new and creative ways. He then talks about how people responded to the puzzle when offered a reward if they solved it correctly and the ones who weren't offered a reward. He says that people offered higher rewards did the worst in all the tests than the people offered smaller rewards and the people not offered any reward at all. I personally think that this is really interesting. I would've thought that the people offered the highest reward would've performed the best in the problem they were given because that just seems like the nature of humans to do something for a reward. Daniel talks about how certain companies have days where the employees can do their work when and where they want to do it and that the product of these days was that the outcome of the company increased. Some might think that those days would cause productivity to go down because people were free to do what ever they wanted to but according to Daniel, that is all wrong. His TED Talk is very interesting and may finally change the way people are motivated  and how people do work in their lives.

1. What are your take-aways from this video?

• If people are offered a reward, it may dull creativity in the mind and force them to perform worse in the task at hand.
• Allowing people to do work on their own time may create a more effective environment for a company or school.

2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?

• Daniel uses a lot of humor in his presentaion.
• He also, at some points, got really loud and raised his voice to show his anger and passion about what he was talking about.

3. What is his/her presentation style?

• Daniel Pink uses his hands when he talks to emphasize a point.
• He refers to the power point going on behind him while he talks about it. But he doesn't only focus on what's happening behind him, it's just there as a reference.

4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?

•  This TED Talk matters because it addresses the economy and it addresses the very minds of humans and how they work. He claims that too many people are ignoring the facts of motivation and that is hurting the economy and the way people work in the world.
• This video matters to school because schools could start having free days like some companies now do and that could change the way of education.
• This video definitely matters to me personally because he is saying facts that I would've thought to be the opposite of what is. It opened my mind to new ways of thinking about what motivates me, even though that information was probably inside of me the entire time