In this video, Elizabeth Gilbert speaks on creativity and how to nurture it. She challenges the notion that art and creativity has to lead to pain and suffering, and ultimately, drinking gin at 9 o’clock in the morning.

I bumped into a friend this past weekend and I heard that he was dealing with the death of his father. I asked him if he had ever heard of the the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. He had not. And since I consider this person a very well read person it surprized me. I decided to start a personal poll and ask those that I bumped into, if they had read or heard about the book. Most had not.

Randy was a dynamic professor at Carnagie Mellon who had a family with three small children when he heard that he had a particularly virulent form of cancer and only had 6 months to live.

Here’s ABC Special about  The Last Lecture and below is the actual lecture.

We’re all scrambling for time. What if we just gave up 1 percent of our collective TV watching time and applied it in more productive ways?

I found this video by Clay Shirky on what he calls the “Cognitive Surplus.”

Here some food for thought from his presentation:

• The whole Wikipedia project represents about 100 million hours of effort.
  Here in the U.S. we watch about that, in TV ads, on a weekend!

• The internet population of the world watches about a trillion hours of TV a year.
  If we just used 1 percent of that time for more worthwhile endeavors, that’s about 100 Wikipedia projects a year.

Hmmmm…I think I can give up 1 percent a year.