self

A short 2006 clip of chaotic traffic in India, with cars, bikes and pedestrians weaving around each other and one car going against the flow.

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch gives a lecture on time management at the University of Virginia in 2007. He covers practical habits such as tackling important tasks first and distinguishing important from urgent work.

A three-minute clip of Jeff Bezos describing his Regret Minimization Framework: imagining yourself at 80 to decide whether to leave a Wall Street job to start Amazon.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, built around three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss including being fired from Apple, and death. It is a 15-minute talk on finding work you love.

Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Jon Kabat-Zinn leads an hour-long Google tech talk on mindfulness, introducing the basic ideas and including a guided meditation. It is aimed at newcomers.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It includes the calligraphy class and the 'stay hungry, stay foolish' close.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, shares stories from messy real-world jobs in this TED talk. He argues that hard work has been unjustly degraded in society.

Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project speaks at Google about managing energy rather than time. He draws on The Power of Full Engagement and his work on stamina and sustained performance.

The original music video for Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen, a spoken-word piece built on Mary Schmich's 1997 column of life advice, produced by Baz Luhrmann.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories from his life about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. He urges graduates to follow their dreams and find opportunity in setbacks.

A Nike commercial in which Michael Jordan lists the shots he missed and games he lost, saying that repeated failure is the reason he succeeds.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

Vim author Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing: find inefficiencies in your own editing, then learn the Vim commands that fix them.

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

Merlin Mann's 2007 Google Tech Talk on Inbox Zero, covering Getting Things Done, why an empty inbox matters, and strategies for handling high-volume email. It is a talk on attention and processing mail rather than on emptying it for its own sake.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

A 2006 parody made by a Microsoft team that shows how the company would redesign iPod packaging, with a box piled with feature claims, logos and clutter in contrast to Apple's clean design.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

The first lecture of Leonard Susskind's Stanford Continuing Studies course on modern physics, beginning with classical mechanics. It is the start of a six-quarter sequence on the theoretical foundations of physics.

Lecture 7A of the 1986 MIT 6.001 SICP course, with Gerald Sussman presenting the metacircular evaluator, part 1. It shows how a Lisp evaluator can be written in Lisp itself.

A short Apple Get a Mac ad that mocks Windows Vista's constant security pop-up prompts.

A short clip of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony in which he says it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. It comes from questioning about Monica Lewinsky.

Footage of DC-X Flight 8 from July 1995 at White Sands, in which the Delta Clipper Experimental reusable rocket turned over into a re-entry profile and re-oriented itself for landing.