Ideas worth talking about

Having arrived from an overnight plane from Beijing. I was a little worse for wear on Saturday morning. I was concerned that I would not keep up with the day. How wrong I was. The TedX Sydney event was first class – true to the vision of Ted and a mix of local and international ideas.

There was a strong music theme to the day. Four Play String Quartet were mesmerizing as they electrified the sounds from their stringed instruments.. I was lost in the environment they created. The event was really well produced – with ideas coming thick and fast from the stage:

• An inventor who challenged his own carbon footprint and determined in western society it is almost impossible to get to 2000kw per day (as is the average in China)
• A music teacher who urged us to nurture creativity in the young imploring us that that is what it is to be human
• An historian who shared the voice of the early colony of Sydney – a woman’s perspective
• A puppeteer who uses his hand via his iPad as his doll
• A doctor who urged us that the greatest threat to our most precious resource is obesity
• A scientist who models DNA so we can see how it reproduces and works
• A creative team sharing how they collaborate to produce movies

And many other great ideas

The day was a festival of ideas, colour, art and music. It was very well produced and sprinkled with a few Ted videos from other events. The two speakers from the audience who had 3 minutes to share an idea were passionate, articulate and inspired. One spoke of injustice the other on honoring death as a beautiful thing. She said ‘the last thing we will do in life is die – best make it a good experience’

Below are some of my tweets from the event.  I enjoyed it, was inspired and so pleased I made the effort to drag my bag of bones there. Well done PwC for being a sponsor…’What would you like to Grow’…

I sat next to Carden Calder for much of the day – here is a link to her blog which is insightful on which ideas are more likely to spread and why.

Tweets from @Naomi Simson

• If you do what you always did you will get what you’ve already got
• The world is a diverse place but there are some elements that connect us
• Narrative is melody and melody is story telling
• The closest collaborations often occur when the collaborators have skills that are diametrically opposed…
• Whatever works works… Be with it
• The story tellers job is to question. We need more questioning
• @carden roller coasters and zip lines the MOST Fuel efficient transport. Cool.
• Death has a bad wrap. It’s represented as violent dark and evil. Yet the last thing we will do in life is die… That is a given.
• @carden Loving Kerrie Noonan’s perspective on dying – that we r out of touch w the everyday business of dying
• @ carden most of us will not be surprised by death. Talk to your family about what you want. Talk about it. It won’t kill you!
• Think of waste as a resource… Looking at a pic of a mountain of rubber tyres from Veena Sahajwalla
• You can’t have a great colony without women. You can’t grow a great nation without women from historian Grace Karskens
• Health is our most precious public resource. Katharine Samaras
• Children need to make their own music

Thanks organizers and PwC for including me…