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Bestselling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin outlines a common creative affliction: sabotaging our projects just before we show them to the world. Godin targets our "lizard brain" as the source of these primal doubts, and implores us to "thrash at the beginning" of projects so that we can ship on time and on budget.

Nine tips for for powerful oresentations by Seth Godin.

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Social networking needs to be real to have value

"John F. Kennedy is often reported to have said "The only reason to give a speech is to change the world." Over the years this has been paraphrased by many speaking and training professionals. Not surprisingly, people occasionally mock this kind of statement as being just so much hubris or pomposity. "Surely," they proclaim, "not every presentation or speech is important enough to even make the slightest difference." However, when we say "change the world," we do not mean necessarily to change the world in a monumental, earth-altering, life-changing way. The operative word in that phrase is change. Affecting a change is a necessary condition of an effective speech. "A presentation that doesn't seek to make change is a waste of time and energy," says business guru Seth Godin. "

"While watching the Oscars tonight, I was intrigued to see a promotion that Walmart was running to celebrate the craft of film making. I don't normally pay a lot of attention to  commercials, but these ads managed to catch my attention, and I think that they have some interesting potential for teachers who are looking to add some creativity to video projects in their classroom. Walmart contacted four award-winning directors, Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Neighbors), Antoine Fuqua (Southpaw, The Magnificent Seven), and Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, The Kite Runner). They sent each of them a receipt with the same six items and challenged them to make a one minute movie that was centered around the six items on the receipt. You can learn more here, but take a look at the videos below to see what these talented directors came up with… The three stories are very different, but they would be, wouldn't they? I mean, if you challenged your students to do something like this, the results you got would likely be very different too. Wouldn't they?  Because although the parameters are the same for every student, this is still a very open-ended activity that just screams for a creative outcome."