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My Take On TEDxSydney

On Saturday I went along to TEDxSydney, which was an amazing day of fun filled inspiration. To be honest at times iThnk I suffered from sensory overload but all in all a phenomenal experience from which I’ve stolen many ideas for TEDxDunedin.

There were some truly great musical acts…like Mr Percival

So over all a great day, but for me there were two talks that really did stand out…

Rachel Botsman

Rachel talked about something that probably isn’t all that unfamiliar to most net natives – “Collaborative Consumption” – the idea that we now go about our consumption in a more socially integrated manner, we recycle, re-use and redistribute our goods in a way that fundamentally challenges traditional business models – vid explains it better than I ever could…

Nigal Marsh

Out of all the great talks from the day it was Nigel Marsh the best selling author of “Fat Forty and Fired” who gave the talk that stuck with me the most. He spoke about work life balance – he started off by tearing the entire concept of Casual Friday’s to shreds…

“How does wearing sneans to work one day a week actually add more balance to my life and allow me to spend more time with my son”

He also encouraged us all to set boundaries on our employers…

“Why would you put your happiness in the hands of any organisation that is designed to make money, they’re fundamentally designed to take all that they can from you”.

As he said this I wondered how would this apply to someone who has seven hungry children and works for minimum wage? – but it was an interesting thought all nonetheless.

His points above were thought provoking – but didn’t really apply to me as I’m young and hungry with no kids…

The most accessible and easily applied idea that Nigel shared was the idea that we all have to set goals and picture what our perfect day looks like. Then we need to realise that there is no such as a perfect day.

We need to expand the time frame over which we use to define what a good balance is. Start measuring a good week or a good fortnight – that way when you miss out on something today you still have time to make your week “good” and enough good weeks add up to a good year and then eventually all going to plan you’ll  have a “balanced life”.

Since Saturday I’ve taken this advice on board, and so far this week has been a good week….I’ve still been flat tack but I’m a bit more relaxed and less burdened by having to squeez every little thing into a 24 hour period.

I’ll keep you posted on how this pans out…if you try to apply it to your life let me know how it goes.

This post was written by Sam Schuurman (aka SocialSammy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.