PickVidsBest Productivity & self-improvement Videos
The 95 Productivity & self-improvement videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 8 introductory, 2 intermediate, 85 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a talk. What they share is that one speaker finishes a claim, and the examples exist to hold that claim up. Channels you will keep seeing include TEDx Talks, TED, CGP Grey.
How to Speak
Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks.
Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005
Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, built around three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss including being fired from Apple, and death.
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction
Andrew Huberman's long Huberman Lab episode is a masterclass on dopamine.
Music and Life - Alan Watts
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.
Hamming, "You and Your Research" (June 6, 1995)
Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course.
Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey
Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010.
Marty Lobdell - Study Less Study Smart
Psychology professor Marty Lobdell gives a one-hour lecture on how to study effectively, covering short focused sessions with breaks, study environment, note-taking and memory techniques.
You Need a Theme, Not a Goal
CGP Grey argues for picking a theme for the year or season instead of setting goals or new year's resolutions.
Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me
Mike Monteiro's CreativeMornings talk on getting paid for creative and freelance work, covering contracts, working with lawyers, and refusing to work for free.
Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn leads an hour-long Google tech talk on mindfulness, introducing the basic ideas and including a guided meditation.
Your Brain Thinks Your Whole Home Is One Room
CGP Grey argues that your brain treats a whole home as one room during lockdown, blurring work, rest and leisure.
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death.
The 7 Habits of Highly Miserable People
CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy.
Ira Glass on Storytelling 3
A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work.
NVC Marshall Rosenberg - San Francisco Workshop - FULL ENGLISH SUBTITLES TRANSCRIPTION
A roughly three-hour San Francisco workshop by Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication, with full English subtitles added by a fan.
LEADERSHIP LAB: Writing Beyond the Academy 1.23.15
Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas.
Why Is It So Hard to Do Something That Should Be Easy? (Wall of Awful pt. 1)
A short How to ADHD explainer, featuring Brendan Mahan, on why simple tasks can feel impossible for people with ADHD.
Steve Jobs Secrets of Life
A short excerpt from a 1994 interview of Steve Jobs in which he says everything around us was made up by people no smarter than you, and that you can change and shape the world.
7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0
Vim creator Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing.
How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork
Will Stephen's humorous six-minute TEDx talk shows presentation techniques that make you sound brilliant while saying essentially nothing.
Bryan Cranston's Advice to Aspiring Actors
A one-minute clip of Bryan Cranston at an Academy new-member reception, advising actors to approach auditions without desperation and focus on solving the problem rather than landing the job.
The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU
Josh Kaufman's TEDx talk argues that you can reach practical competence in almost any skill with about 20 hours of focused practice, rather than the 10,000 hours often quoted.
You Suck at Excel - Joel Spolsky (Reupload)
A reupload of Joel Spolsky's talk teaching spreadsheet users the Excel features they are probably missing, such as keyboard navigation, named ranges, tables and lookups.