Meg Jay gave a talk at TED2013 suggesting that the 20s are a person’s defining decade — and it started a heated debate at the office. Here, a 20-something responds. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

I’m 24 and a woman, and that makes me a target for a lot of speculation and life advice. Sheryl Sandberg wants me to lean in to become a woman leader; Anne-Marie Slaughter says my lady parts may doom me to a half-fulfilled life; Susan Patton thinks I should have spent my time at Princeton looking for a husband (ideally one of her sons); and in TIME Magazine’s most recent cover story, Joel Stein suggests that I’m narcissistic and dying to be famous. Everyone’s talking about me.

And people wonder why millennials are so self-involved.

Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20Now I can add clinical psychologist Meg Jay, today’s talk, to the list of well-intentioned non-millennial millennial critics. Jay spoke at TED2013 — and emphatically stated that “30 is not the new 20.” She urges twentysomethings to rid themselves of the idea that their 20s are a prolonged adolescence, throwaway years. According to Jay, 80 percent of life’s defining moments happen by the time a person is 35. Powerful — and intimidating — words.

To be honest: When I first heard the talk, I was appalled. It wasn’t a message I wanted my peers to hear: it put pressure on an already overstimulated generation to find the right career and start thinking about marriage now. And it seemed to simultaneously berate thirtysomethings, telling them their most important years were over and it was too late to get what they wanted.

In her book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter – and How to Make the Most of Them Now, Jay addresses a lot of the eyebrow-raisers she couldn’t in her 14-minute talk. As anybody who has given a TED or TEDx Talk knows: Boiling years of work down to 18 minutes is a terrifying honor. While the format makes for a good introduction to a new idea, the nuance and detail can be lost in the condensation. The heteronormative lifestyle Jay seems to take for granted in her talk is subdued in her book, which actually dedicates its first 30 percent to work. And the book very quickly establishes a critical condition that’s taken for an assumption in her talk: That her advice is geared toward people who choose to list marriage and/or children in their life goals.

In her book, Jay includes personal experiences and reflections that help to soften what could otherwise seem like a condescending stance. She writes, “Like many twentysomethings, I wanted to establish my career before I had kids, and I did. I waddled across the stage to collect my Ph.D. diploma while eight months pregnant with baby number one.” By the time she had her second child Jay had a university job. But she writes, “Having two babies after thirty-five did not go quite as smoothly as I expected, and now I see how lucky I was. Many women are not as fortunate.” Jay wants twentysomething readers to avoid some of the same mistakes she feels she might have made.

If you are in your 20s and marriage and/or children are things you desire, Jay has a lot to say on the matter. She opposes the media’s portrayal of American twentysomethings as a “culture dominated by singles who are almost obsessed with avoiding commitment.” She writes, “I have yet to meet a twentysomething who doesn’t want to get married or at least find a committed relationship.” The anecdote doesn’t convince me, but Jay’s argument that postponing marriage just for the sake of it is a reasonable one. Just because people get married later doesn’t mean that, a priori, later is better. And that also doesn’t mean twentysomethings should be content to date and cohabitate for years with people they know they won’t end up with. At least thinking about the qualities you want in a long-term partner while you’re in your twenties, says Jay, can help prevent what she sees often in her practice: people who rush into marriage when they turn thirty because it’s suddenly the time to care. Basically: Start worrying in your twenties, and you might not feel as screwed in your thirties.

Twentysomething women trying to figure out how to have it all will have to look elsewhere. In her chapters on work and love, Jay doesn’t address the critical relationship between the two — and more important, how one might hinder the other. She doesn’t recognize that for an ambitious twentysomething, there simply might not be enough hours in the day to further a career and work on finding the perfect mate.

Ultimately, Jay’s goal is to create a sense of urgency for twentysomethings so they don’t end up in their 30s feeling like they wasted the past ten years — and to provide tools to deal with this proverbial fire under the butt. As she told me, “I’m being sincere when I say there’s nothing worse than sitting across from a 35-year-old who’s realizing they’re never going to get the life they want, and that’s sad. Creating urgency for twentysomethings is okay.” But how this helps anyone over thirty is less clear.

Indeed, Jay’s book could be a pretty depressing read for thirtysomethings who haven’t been powerwalking through their 20s. It might also add more pressure to twentysomethings who are being told from every angle what their generation could be doing better. It’s nice to imagine a bunch of Gen X’ers sitting around nodding their heads saying “Yes, yes, yes I wish I had heard this when I was 20. Onward, millennials! Succeed where we failed!” Certainly these people exist, as evidenced by the deluge of Gen X advice to young poets (Jay, Sandberg, Slaughter and Stein are all Gen X’ers); but what’s much more likely is a bunch of thirtysomething women tearing their hair out when they are told that being the first real beneficiaries of feminism and birth control has doomed them to spinsterhood.

And finally: What about youth? If your 20s is not the time to have fun, when is? As Jay says in her talk, “I’m not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that’s not supposed to count. Which by the way, is not exploration. That’s procrastination.”

I’m not going to upend modern philosophical thought when I say: Not all experiences need a focus, and not everything that counts can be counted. While I had hoped that Jay’s final chapter, “The Brain and the Body,” would focus on the sort of “capital” that doesn’t belong on a work or relationship résumé, it turned out to be further reading on my developing adult brain and my rapidly deteriorating eggs. Adults need to play, too.

When I asked Jay about “fun,” she said “there should be fun all throughout your life. Twentysomethings shouldn’t feel this pressure to live their life like an eternal spring break — because how can it, when you’re working and you don’t have money and you don’t know whether you’re going to get a text back from the person you like? It’s actually a very stressful time.” Agreed, but — as you get older — spring break gets harder and harder to schedule. While Jay finds it hard to see what is fun about scrambling for the L train at 4 am after too much Scotch, it’s hard for me to imagine what’s fun about owning a home and having two kids. And, yes, I know that’s in part because I’m in my twenties.

If my father’s house had a mantra, it would be “Life is long.” I was infused with the belief that I could do anything I wanted, at any age. No one likes thinking about life as a series of limitations, and certainly no woman likes to think of herself as a ticking time bomb. But Jay is right when she says we all have to face certain realities: Time runs out. Which is why I am also completely on board with Jay’s own mantra: Be intentional. Because while we may have different ideas on how to live the good life, Jay and I can agree that the intention of living it should be realized early and often.

Julian Treasure takes the stage at TEDGlobal 2009, sharing the shocking fact that — when you can hear others talking in an open office — productivity dips by 66%.

Julian Treasure cares very deeply for your ears. That’s why he’s given TED talks like “The 4 ways sound affects us” and “Why architects need to use their ears.” Treasure is on a mission to make policymakers, engineers, architects and, well, Julian Treasure: Shh! Sound health in 8 stepseveryone think more about what they hear around them — because the way things sound have a tangible, measurable effect on how we feel, how we heal, how we work and how we live.

To this end, Treasure’s The Sound Agency has teamed up with Biamp Systems to create a whitepaper called “Building in Sound,” a look at the data linking sound and well-being.

“This paper is based on exhaustive review of academic papers, and reports from national governments and multinational bodies, going back some 40 years,” it begins. “The research examines the causes and impacts of sound on our health, recovery from illness or surgery, our ability to absorb information and learn, our productivity, and general sense of wellbeing.”

Read the paper in full, or check out some of the most fascinating facts below.

1. The estimated cost of noise pollution is $30.8 billion a year — and that’s just in Europe.  The World Health Organization Europe’s 2011 report, “Burden of disease from environmental noise,” analyzes the relationship between environmental noise and health. In this study, they calculate the financial cost of lost work days, healthcare treatment, impaired learning and decreased productivity due to noise. The total they came up with is staggering, considering they’re looking at just one continent.
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2. Each year, noise pollution takes a day off the life of every adult and child in Europe. This same study also looked at the cost of noise pollution in terms of lost life expectancy. Shockingly, they determined that every 365 days, one million years are taken off European’s collective life expectancy — averaging to a day per person.
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3. If you can hear someone talking while you’re reading or writing, your productivity dips by up to 66%.  Open floor-plan offices distract workers without them even noticing it. In a classic study published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1998, researchers found that employers were highly distracted when they could hear conversation around them, and less able to perform their duties. Another classic study found that noise in the office also correlated to increased stress hormone levels and a lower willingness to engage with others. According to Sound Agency case study, when sound masking technology was used in an office, there was a 46% improvement in employees’ ability to concentrate and their short term memory accuracy increased 10 percent.
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4. The average noise level in many classrooms is not just associated with impaired learning — but with permanent hearing loss. Noise can deeply affect learning too. The WHO recommends a noise level in classrooms akin to that you’d find in a library — 35 decibels. However, a study in Germany found that the actual average noise volume in classrooms is 65 decibels — a level associated with permanent hearing loss. As Treasure outlines in this talk, for a student sitting in the fourth row of a traditional classroom, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent — meaning that they only hear half of what their teacher says.
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5. A 20 decibel increase in aircraft noise is enough to delay a student’s reading level by up to 8 months. A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2006 looked at 2000 students between the ages of 9 and 10 in schools in The Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. — many in schools near airports. They found that aircraft noise was associated with impaired reading comprehension.
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6. 50% of teachers have experienced damage to their voice from talking over classroom noise. A study of teachers published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research in 2004, noted another side-effect of noise pollution in classrooms — 50% of teachers have suffered irreversible damage to their voices. Why? Because as the environment gets noisier, we speak more loudly.
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7. The average noise level in some hospital wards not only impedes healing — but could legally require hearing protection. The WHO recommends noise levels in hospital wards to stay around 35 decibels. But a study in the US found the average noise level in hospital wards is actually closer to 95 decibels — just 10 decibels beyond the noise level at which U.S. federal law requires ear protection for prolonged exposure. Sleep is crucial for patient recovery, and yet with the constant beeps, tones and shuffling, the body feels that it is under threat. Not to mention that staff errors increase the greater the level of distracting noise.
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8. 3% of cardiac arrest cases in Germany have been explicitly linked to traffic noise. Treasure found this alarming fact in a 2009 press release from the Environmental Protection UK.
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9. Noise pollution may possibly even contribute to crime. When the city of Lancaster, California, installed a sound system featuring birdsong along a half-mile stretch of a main road, there was a 15 percent reduction in reported crime, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Similarly, when the London Underground started playing classical music at a crime-heavy station, robberies fell by 33% while assaults on staff dropped 25%, says The Independent.

Below, an infographic further outlining the problem.

Social@Ogilvy, the blog from advertising and marketing firm Ogilvy & Mathers about trends and insights in social media, was very inspired by this blog post. And so they created this very cool graphic recap of it. Check it out above, complete with a rocketing office chair.

Read the post it’s based on »

Check out more at Social@Ogilvy »

Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?When you look carefully at the way people work, he says, you find out there’s a lot more at play—and a lot more at stake—than money. In his talk, Ariely provides evidence that we are also driven by meaningful work, by others’ acknowledgement and by the amount of effort we’ve put in: the harder the task is, the prouder we are.

During the Industrial Revolution, Ariely points out, Adam Smith’s efficiency-oriented, assembly-line approach made sense. But it doesn’t work as well in today’s knowledge economy. Instead, Ariely upholds Karl Marx’s concept that we care much more about a product if we’ve participated from start to finish rather than producing a single part over and over. In other words, in the knowledge economy, efficiency is no longer more important than meaning.

“When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it: meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.,” Ariely explains.

To hear more on Ariely’s thoughts about what makes people more productive – and happier – at work, watch this fascinating talk. Below, a look at some of Ariely’s studies, as well as a few from other researchers, with interesting implications for what makes us feel good about our work.

1. Seeing the fruits of our labor may make us more productive
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   The Study: In a study conducted at Harvard University, Ariely asked participants to build characters from Lego’s Bionicles series. In both conditions, participants were paid decreasing amounts for each subsequent Bionicle: $3 for the first one, $2.70 for the next one, and so on. But while one group’s creations were stored under the table, to be disassembled at the end of the experiment, the other group’s Bionicles were disassembled as soon as they’d been built. “This was an endless cycle of them building and we destroying in front of their eyes,” Ariely says.
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   The Results: The first group made 11 Bionicles, on average, while the second group made only seven before they quit.
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   The Upshot: Even though there wasn’t huge meaning at stake, and even though the first group knew their work would be destroyed at the end of the experiment, seeing the results of their labor for even a short time was enough to dramatically improve performance.
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2. The less appreciated we feel our work is, the more money we want to do it
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   The Study: Ariely gave study participants — students at MIT — a piece of paper filled with random letters, and asked them to find pairs of identical letters. Each round, they were offered less money than the previous round. People in the first group wrote their names on their sheets and handed them to the experimenter, who looked it over and said “Uh huh” before putting it in a pile. People in the second group didn’t write down their names, and the experimenter put their sheets in a pile without looking at them. People in the third group had their work shredded immediately upon completion.
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   The Results: People whose work was shredded needed twice as much money as those whose work was acknowledged in order to keep doing the task. People in the second group, whose work was saved but ignored, needed almost as much money as people whose work was shredded.
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   The Upshot: “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes,” Ariely says. “The good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivation seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it.”
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3. The harder a project is, the prouder we feel of it
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   The Study: In another study, Ariely gave origami novices paper and instructions to build a (pretty ugly) form. Those who did the origami project, as well as bystanders, were asked at the end how much they’d pay for the product. In a second trial, Ariely hid the instructions from some participants, resulting in a harder process — and an uglier product.
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   The Results: In the first experiment, the builders paid five times as much as those who just evaluated the product. In the second experiment, the lack of instructions exaggerated this difference: builders valued the ugly-but-difficult products even more highly than the easier, prettier ones, while observers valued them even less.
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   The Upshot: Our valuation of our own work is directly tied to the effort we’ve expended. (Plus, we erroneously think that other people will ascribe the same value to our own work as we do.)
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4. Knowing that our work helps others may increase our unconscious motivation
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   The Study: As described in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, psychologist Adam Grant led a study at a University of Michigan fundraising call center in which  student who had benefited from the center’s scholarship fundraising efforts spoke to the callers for 10 minutes.
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   The Results: A month later, the callers were spending 142 percent more time on the phone than before, and revenues had increased by 171 percent, according to the Times. But the callers denied the scholarship students’ visit had impacted them.
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   The Upshot: “It was almost as if the good feelings had bypassed the callers’ conscious cognitive processes and gone straight to a more subconscious source of motivation,” the Times reports. “They were more driven to succeed, even if they could not pinpoint the trigger for that drive.”
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5. The promise of helping others makes us more likely to follow rules
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   The Study: Grant ran another study (also described in the Times profile) in which he put up signs at a hospital’s hand-washing stations, reading either “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases” or “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.”
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   The Results: Doctors and nurses used 45 percent more soap or hand sanitizer in the stations with signs that mentioned patients.
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   The Upshot: Helping others through what’s called “prosocial behavior” motivates us.
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6. Positive reinforcement about our abilities may increase performance
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   The Study: Undergraduates at Harvard University gave speeches and did mock interviews with experimenters who were either nodding and smiling or shaking their heads, furrowing their eyebrows, and crossing their arms.
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   The Results: The participants in the first group later answered a series of numerical questions more accurately than those in the second group.
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   The Upshot: Stressful situations can be manageable—it all depends on how we feel. We find ourselves in a “challenge state” when we think we can handle the task (as the first group did); when we’re in a “threat state,” on the other hand, the difficulty of the task is overwhelming, and we become discouraged. We’re more motivated and perform better in a challenge state, when we have confidence in our abilities.
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7. Images that trigger positive emotions may actually help us focus
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   The Study: Researchers at Hiroshima University had university students perform a dexterity task before and after looking at pictures of either baby or adult animals.
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   The Results: Performance improved in both cases, but more so (10 percent improvement!) when participants looked at the cute pictures of puppies and kittens.
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   The Upshot: The researchers suggest that “the cuteness-triggered positive emotion” helps us narrow our focus, upping our performance on a task that requires close attention. Yes, this study may just validate your baby panda obsession.

What have you noticed makes you work harder – and better?

Erik Brynjolfsson says growth is not dead. To make his case in session 1 of TED2013, he points out two moments in the past — one that took place 120 years ago and the other that took place about 15 years ago.

One hundred and twenty years ago, the Second Industrial Revolution began. But while the tools had been invented for mass production to go into effect, productivity didn’t increase for another three decades. Why? Because while the first waves managers replaced steam engines with electric motors, they didn’t radically redesign their systems and workflows. It took a generation for the old ways to be abandoned and new norms to be established. Then, productivity soared.

Brynjolfsson, the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, wonders if we might be in the transition period when it comes to our industrial revolution, computers and the digital age. Interested in the way IT affects organizations, markets and the economy, Brynjolfsson notes that productivity is becoming decoupled from income and employment. But this isn’t a doomsday scenario.

“These troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation,” says Brynjolfsson. “But they are actually growing pains of what I and Andrew McAfee call the new machine age.”

This new machine age is about idea production, rather than physical production. This new machine age is also unique because it is measurable (hello, big data), combinatorial (meaning that innovations can be remixed) and exponential, meaning that it advances at an incredibly rapid pace.

“Computers get better fast than anything ever before,” says Brynjolfsson. ”A child’s PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.”

Machines are even starting to be able to learn. Brynjolfsson points to IBM’s Watson who was not so good at the game Jeopardy, but improved very quickly, soon beating the world Jeopardy champion. Watson is just 7-years-old now and is learning skills all the time. He’s even applying for some jobs.

“The full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to play out,” says Brynjolfsson. But he admits that, for now, the growing pains are very real. People in a wide slew of industries are being replaced by digital labor and losing their jobs — not to mention their ability to find a new one.

Speaking of a human tax consultant versus TurboTax, Brynjolfsson says, ”How can a skilled worker compete with a $39 piece of software? She can’t … People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race.”

So what can we do to make sure that our prosperity continues? ”The answer is not to try to slow down technology,” says Brynjolfsson. “We need to race with the machine.”

This brings us to the moment Brynjolfsson wants us to remember from 15 years ago — when grandmaster Garry Kasparov played IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a game of chess. Kasparov won. But in a rematch a year later, Deep Blue came out the victor. Soon, however, a new kind of chess game was played. In this match, humans and computers could collaborate if they wanted. In this game, it wasn’t a grandmaster or a computer who won — the winner was a human-computer collaboration. Team of  humans and computers could not be beat.

The answer, says Brynjolfsson, is doing the thing that humans do best — thinking — while working with machines, doing what they do best.

Brynjolfsson ends his talk with the bold words: ”Racing with the machine beats racing the machine.” 

Some employees can work 9am to 5pm, five days a week. Others are available on evenings and weekends. But in today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, entrepreneur Wingham Rowan describes another type of worker — one who has a highly unpredictable schedule.

“Think of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition, somebody who’s caring for a dependent adult, or a parent with complex childcare needs — their availability for work can be such that it’s ‘[I can do a] few hours today’ and ‘Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don’t if and when yet,’” says Rowan. “It’s extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly. Which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible, local people booked completely ad hoc.”

Rowan says that he is encouraged by websites like Task Rabbit, which allow people to pick up odd jobs. But he pictures a far more wide-reaching effort to employ flexible workers, beginning with his website Slivers of Time.

His big idea: instead of giving people at the bottom of the economic order online tools that are essentially glorified classifieds, could they use complex analytic tools –  more like what a Wall Street trader deals with — to chart their economic opportunities? And could governments help on this front? Rowan reveals that there is actually a precedent for this — lottery systems, which governments across the globe have approved. To hear how flexible employment would work on the same model, watch this talk.

Below, more TED speakers with big ideas on hiring.

Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!
Hackers are, generally, thought of as common criminals. But there is another way to treat coders who use their talents to point out flaws in cyber-security measures rather than to steal money, says underworld investigator Misha Glenny. At TEDGlobal 2011, he suggests a bold reversal: instead of prosecuting hackers, engage them and even put them to work.

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?
With unemployment high, people are very concerned with the question, “Are robots and computer programs taking over jobs that people could be doing?” At TEDxBoston, Andrew McAfee admits that, yes, they are. But this is no reason to despair, McAfee says. Because human beings will always excel in one area that digital technology cannot compete: coming up with new ideas.

Maria van der Heijden: Jobs for 1 million women
In India, an estimated 700 to 800 million people live on less than two dollars a day. Maria van der Heijden, who founded Women on Wings, shares a vision for how to change this equation — by hiring women for jobs that pay a living wage. In this talk from TEDxDelft, van der Heijden shares how she hopes to employ a million women by connecting their handiwork with global markets.

Majora Carter: 3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship
Brenda Palms-Barber of Chicago, Illinois, took an interesting approach when she started a line of skincare products made from honey. She hired ex-convicts to care for the bees. The idea was to give them employment experience and teach them life skills that could keep them from returning to prison. In this talk from TEDxMidwest, Majora Carter looks at Palms-Barber’s approach — as well as the approaches of two others — to work toward a greener planet and, in the process, hire local workers.

Heiko Fischer: The future of work
A stunning number of people don’t feel like they have any control over how things work at their place of employment, says Heiko Fischer. In this talk from TEDxKoeln, he shares a vision for turning human resources on its head and thinking about employees as resourceful humans. Because companies need their best work — and innovative ideas — in order to stay competitive.

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration
There are two ways to accomplish a business goal, says Clay Shirky at TEDGlobal 2005. You can build an institution with employees, and then layers on top of those employees to manage them. Or you can build a mechanism that allows for collaboration, and harness the spirit of hobbyists and volunteers. In this talk, Shirky explores the upsides and downsides of hiring versus coordinating.

Work comes in all shapes and sizes — there’s no one-size-fits-all model for what humans do to make a living. We can see this in the countless TEDTalks from people telling stories about what they do, be it single-handedly creating a polyphonic orchestra, performing magical stunts on city streets, or even studying fungi. While we aren’t all glamourous actors or pioneers of the internet, all of our work is noble and worth celebrating. To commemorate Labor Day, here are seven great TEDTalks that explore the dynamics of work from all angles.

Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work

It’s commonly assumed that success will lead to happiness. But in the talk above, positive psychologist Shawn Achor argues the exact opposite: it’s happiness that leads to success. Happier people are more creative, have increased energy, and perform at a higher level — all of the factors needed in being successful. And, he tells us, we are all capable of making ourselves happier through small changes in our everyday lives.

Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work
“We’ve traded our work day in for work moments,” Jason Fried tells us in a talk from TEDxMidwest about the challenge of being truly productive in an office environment. We are faced with a barrage of involuntary distractions: between meetings and check-ins with managers, our truly productive time is broken down into 15-minute blocks — hardly enough time for creative brekathroughs. Fried offers provocative suggestions for making work a place where you can once again work.

Auret van Heerden: Making global labor fair
Transnational companies are growing at an alarming rate, but regulation of the good these companies produce as well as the treatment of their workers is lacking, argues Aret van Heerden, head of the Fair Labor Association. He is working to make a space for international collaboration and regulation to address these issues of human rights and quality control. In this insightful talk, van Heerden makes the case for why fair global labor practices are better for us all.

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work
Author Nigel Marsh reminds us that we need to proactively take our work-life balance into our own hands and stop waiting for our employers to do it for us. Small changes can dramatically improve the quality of your life and the relationships in it. And the more of us who do it, the better it is for society. Together, we can reshape society’s conception of a life well lived.

Mike Rowe: Learning from dirty jobs
Mike Rowe makes a living by telling stories about other people’s jobs. From sheep herders to dairy farmers to crab fishermen, Rowe has explored a wide range of professions, and had some outrageous experiences along the way as the host of “Dirty Jobs.” In this outlandish talk, Rowe tells us about his humbling experiences learning from professionals in the craziest jobs.

Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders
Women are not making it to the top of professional ladders anywhere in the world, a fact that deeply concerns Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. In this talk from TEDWomen, she explores the possible causes of this disparity — and what women can do about it.

Niels Diffrient rethinks the way we sit down
Ergonomic designer Neils Diffrient has devoted his life to designing the most comfortable office chairs possible. With human bodies driving his furniture modelings, Diffrient has helped redefine the way we sit in the during the workday.