My Year of TED introduction

Welcome friends. That's right. That's how I talk. My name is Greg, I am 25, I'm a Cancer and I enjoy movies, books and wildlife encounters. I imagine there's lots more to me but I'll get to that later. Now, it's about to get a little personal. About a year ago I started waking up in the middle of the night feeling I was leading an unfulfilled life. I was about to turn 25, had been out of high school longer than I realized, and I was at the point where I had friends starting to get married and have kids, and generally contribute to making the world a better place ...all that good shit. On top of that I was just out of film school and had a total of two shitty films three minute student films under my belt, not the resume I wanted. I was am a pile of unfulfilled dreams. I decided it was time for a change. I remember saying "2014 is going to be my year" then I had the awful realization that I said that last year....

I discovered TED talks a little over 2 years, I had seen them previously on Stumbleupon and friend's Facebook  pages and such but never decided to really utilize the site for everything it had to offer. Once I started exploring the talks it really was like an adventure, hearing all the different perspectives out there. It was all great but honestly the experience for me was always pretty similar. I would watch a talk and I would be really moved, I would pass the ideas on to friends but the lessons would never really stick the way I hoped. When I heard about the concept 'My year of TED' I was intrigued because this seemed like a recipe for success and for the hero's journey I always wanted. But it was also pretty intimidating. See, the year of TED consists of turning one or more of your favorite TED talks into a set challenge that you undertake for 30 days, still not too bad right? But here's the thing, you start one 30 day challenge only to pick up another about 15 days in. So at any given time you are doing two challenges. That's right there's no half assing this...

Over the course of preparing for this task I rewatched several dozen talks and here's where I will be a little more honest, oh and head's up this blog may contain explicit content probably just foul language but who knows where this will take me...what was I saying? There were some talks that blew me away....but there were also others that left me very confused . But that was the joy of this whole experience, that some talks lent themselves to challenges easily and others I had to get creative with. I'll be discussing what the core of the talks were about as I perceived them and how I came up with these whacky challenge. I will start with simple challenges (or so I hope) and see where things go from there.

Now here's the kicker....I'm going to blog about it every damn day. "But Greg, it's a whole year" I know 365 blog posts on my path to self improvement and quest to awesomeness. The blog is exciting because I think writing about and experience always makes for a fun reflection and also it will keep motivated if there's people reading and they know when I skip a day, so I can't pussy out. Of course there's a good chance that this whole thing will sputter out and that I will learn nothing but that's a chance I'm willing to take.