Today is one of the last business days of 2016, and even though we’re hard at work in the Payline offices, we know that every business experiences a slow work day. Here are our 3 favorite TED Talks to motivate and inspire you and your team to finish out the year.
1. Build a Tower, Build a Team by Tom Wujec
We featured this TED Talk in a recent blog post from our Director of Inside Sales, Zach Dillman, who uses this video to inspire his team at Payline. According to TED.com, in this talk, Wujec presents his research into the “marshmallow problem” — a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. He wonders: “Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?”
2. My Year of Saying Yes by Shonda Rhimes
This popular talk is a great starting point for TED Talk motivation if you have not used this resource with your team before. Rhimes is a hard-working and successful woman in show business, and is the creative mind behind television favorites like How to Get Away With Murder and Grey’s Anatomy. She loves to work, saying, “When I am hard at work, when I am deep in it, there is no other feeling.”
She has a name for this feeling: The Hum. The Hum is what keeps her motivated and moving forward. But what happens, she wonders, when it stops? In this moving talk, join Rhimes on a journey through her “year of yes” and find out how she got her hum back by making time for the things in life that matter most.
3. How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative by Tim Harford
Sometimes, the smallest challenges and interruptions can derail the creative process; but, if you channel perceived negativity from your challenges, you can turn your frustration into creative success. If you are willing to work with or around a little messiness and imperfection, you are more likely to experience success with your work. And, as Inc. points out in their round-up of TED Talks, “apparently, the tougher things are, the more we rise to the occasion”.
Building a motivated team requires both thoughtful planning and necessary resources. Thankfully, your hard work can pay off when your company benefits from efficient and productive teams and employee satisfaction. Work with a company like Payline that is motivated to help your business be successful in 2017.