While I couldn’t read the book, I did the next best thing – I checked out Sheena Iyengar’s TED talk on the art of choosing. I was surprised at how she drew such perceptive inferences from the experiments she had conducted. It would have been dull, drab data for her. How did she choose to ignore the dullness of the data and opt to, instead, get fascinated by the beauty of it? I was impressed.

The TED Talks present the same challenge that she talks about – information choice overload. While everyone says TED Talks are great, you ask them about how many talks have they watched, the number is usually in single digits (few will get to double digits). Most Indians would have watched Pranav Mistry’s demo of Sixth Sense technology or Hans Rosling on population growth – why? There was some Indian connection and more importantly, these got forwarded/shared on Facebook/Youtube. This tells me two things –

1. There are ‘Made to Stick’ principles at work in everything we do and
2. People don’t make the effort to check out other TED Talks because (surprise!) there are just way too many of them. It is the same jam sampling experiment that Iyengar talks about in her talk.

It might be a good idea to start a curating service for TED Talks –

1. You subscribe to the service. Share your linkedin and facebook profiles.
2. You give three areas of interest (from a set of say 7 areas that are thrown up automatically, based on mining of topics from your linkedin and facebook profiles).
3. You specify the periodicity of talks that you want to watch – once a week/fortnight/month/specific month.
4. You get a relevant link sent to your mail.

Wow! The simplicity appeals to me – I’d sign up for such a service. If someone can do this, great. If no one volunteers, I’ll start it very soon.