Don't second-guess what "distracts" you, says actor-producer Yara Shahidi; that's your curiosity coming through. The star of hit shows like "black-ish" and "grown-ish" tells how she learned to spot clues to her own future ā and how you can, too.This episode originally aired January 16, 2024.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. For actor-producer Yara Shahidi, curiosity is one of the most important tools we have for imagining a better world and what our place in it can be.
In her archive talk, she asks us not to second guess what distracts us in life, but instead to explore our curiosity for what's around us. It might not solve the world's largest problems, but if we refuse to let our worlds get smaller, imagine what futures we can build together. Enjoy.
Do you remember how big the world felt when we were younger? Because my childhood was filled with time travel and adventures. I sat in awe of how flowers grew from a simple seed. I remember looking up at the sky and wondering, was the earth moving, was the sun moving, or was I moving? And I filled the rest of the time by reading books about fantasy lands.
But slowly, the time travel and adventures of my youth became using my GPS to figure out how much traffic I'd inevitably be sitting in. The flowers became the screensaver to my laptop I spent way too much time on. I only saw the sunrise when pulling all-nighters to get work done. And those fantasy lands, well, those became essays and articles from underfunded newspapers.
And yeah, some of this is just a part of growing up, necessary even, but I realized the imaginative and creative forces that drove me had less and less space to thrive in my young adult life. And in being forced to look at the world as it is, I was missing out on the opportunity to look at the world as it could be.
Now, more than ever, we live in a world that requires of us an imagination so that we can envision what could be different. And while I didn't come prepared today to answer the world's largest problems, I would like to make a case for how one tool can help us continue to build new worlds and find our place in it. Curiosity.
I don't have any fancy graphs to show you all today, but I would like to think that I'm sort of an expert in the field, as my entire life has been a case study and following my curiosities. It started super simple. My grampy and I would reimagine and act out the entire saga of the Odyssey with my Polly Pocket dolls, as one does at the age of four.
And around the age of five, I asked for every religious book. I mean, every religious book. Fast-forwarding to 13, I read my first short story from the formidable James Baldwin, and my life was forever changed. Needless to say, I was grateful to be surrounded by a community of people that honored my interests. But as I got older, I began to get confronted by a big question.
Are you sure about that? Now, this was a question I really could not escape in August of 2018, right as I was embarking on my next adventure. I was beginning my freshman year at Harvard right as my television show, Grown-ish, began filming season two. And I was at a crossroads, because acting for me has been more than a career. It's given me permission to explore my fantasies.
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