Success can mean: feeling that tingle of excitement about what you do, sticking with what matters through hard times, living a life you can feel proud of in retrospect. These talks say it all.

What defines success -- and what is a failure, exactly? Readjust your expectations with these novel, refreshing perspectives on what it means to “win” and “lose”.

Pearl Arredondo worked her way up from humble East L.A. beginnings, and as a high school teacher she now inspires other kids to do the same. Here are the talks that she thinks capture that spirit of drive and determination.

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success.

Why do people succeed? Is it because they're smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.

No one takes the same life path to personal success. These talks can help you examine and identify the unique passions and perspectives that make you, you.

In his typically candid style, Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street, but a constant journey. He uses the story of his business' rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson -- when we stop trying, we fail.

Matt Cutts is an engineer at Google, where he fights linkspam and helps webmasters understand how search works.

Failure isn’t fun, but it is an opportunity to learn, reflect and regroup. These insightful talks can help you pick yourself up after a setback and grow toward success.

At age 12, Freeman Hrabowski marched with Martin Luther King. Now he's president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he works to create an environment that helps under-represented students -- specifically African-American, Latino and low-income learners -- get degrees in math and science. He shares the four pillars of U...

Is there something you've always meant to do, wanted to do, but just ... haven't? Matt Cutts suggests: Try it for 30 days. This short, lighthearted talk offers a neat way to think about setting and achieving goals.

Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe wants to make meditation accessible to everybody: for a happier, healthier you.

Africa needs engineers, but its engineering students often end up working at auditing firms and banks. Why? Kamau Gachigi suspects it's because they don't have the spaces and materials needed to test their ideas and start businesses. To solve this problem, Gachigi started Gearbox, a makerspace and hardware accelerator that provides a rapid proto...

Popular business author Dan Pink picks his 5 favorite TED Talks on how to find greater success at work.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Lee Duckworth studies intangible concepts such as self-control and grit to determine how they might predict both academic and professional success.

Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

A record-setting long-distance swimmer, Diana Nyad writes and thinks deeply about motivation.

Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers ...

About this talk: Typically financial parameters like return on equity, cash flow or relative market share indicate to investors if a company is fundamentally healthy, but millennial Lena Bieber wants a new measure of a company's long-term prospects. What if companies instead used happiness as an additional indicator of success? By measuring such...

About this talk: Millennials are frequently stereotyped as entitled or lazy for moving from one job to the next. Millennial Daniela Zamudio believes quitting is sorely misjudged, and can be a sign of strength and ultimately a path to happiness. Over the last decade, she has discovered the secret to personal success and introduces the TED@Tommy a...

Simon Sinek explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change. He's the author of the classic "Start With Why"; his latest book is "Leaders Eat Last."

In the 1970s, Diana Nyad set long-distance swim records that are still unbroken. Thirty years later, at 60, she attempted her longest swim yet, from Cuba to Florida. In this funny, powerful talk at TEDMED, she talks about how to prepare mentally to achieve an extreme dream, and asks: What will YOU do with your wild, precious life?

Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple -- though hard -- way to ...

From work and happiness, to love and success (and everything else in between), these talks offer insights on some of life's biggest secrets.

Our leaders and institutions are failing us, but it's not always because they're bad or unethical, says venture capitalist John Doerr -- often, it's simply because they're leading us toward the wrong objectives. In this practical talk, Doerr shows us how we can get back on track with "Objectives and Key Results," or OKRs -- a goal-setting system...

The world is changing much more rapidly than most people realize, says business educator Eddie Obeng -- and creative output cannot keep up. In this spirited talk, he highlights three important changes we should understand for better productivity, and calls for a stronger culture of “smart failure."

How do we find fulfillment in a world that's constantly changing? Raymond Tang struggled with this question until he came across the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching. In it, he found a passage comparing goodness to water, an idea he's now applying to his everyday life. In this charming talk, he shares three lessons he's learned so ...

These brilliant people have shaped their fields -- from inventing the World Wide Web to changing the world of dance. They share their work in their own words.

Tim Harford's writings reveal the economic ideas behind everyday experiences.

Professional Arab women juggle more responsibilities than their male counterparts, and they face more cultural rigidity than Western women. What can their success teach us about tenacity, competition, priorities and progress? Tracing her career as an engineer, advocate and mother in Abu Dhabi, Leila Hoteit shares three lessons for thriving in th...