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.

An early employee at Google, Matt Cutts works to modernize the US government as an administrator at U.S. Digital Service (USDS).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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."

Success requires taking risks. Watch as Anja Blacha, renowned mountaineer and VP of Youth at PMI, sits down with TED's current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers to talk about how climbing the world's tallest peaks translates to the professional challenges we all face.

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.

Listening to both customers and colleagues to gather insights and information is a key ability that successful people possess. Tony Salvador shares some strategies for being a better listener: to lose preconceptions, be vulnerable and open to new ideas, and to not be afraid to hear what we'd rather not hear.

With tart humor, Hayley Yeates makes the case that investing in cultural diversity is just as important as fostering gender diversity.

What does it take to cultivate a culture of innovation and reinvention at work? Tracing his journey from math teacher to honesty-seeking executive, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings describes three key elements of a successful work culture, sharing how to design a company around inspiration, creativity and candor. (This discussion, hosted by head of ...

Trips to a bakery always ends with a cookie and a smile -- but at the bakery run by Mike Brady and Dion Drew, the extra icing is their goal of serving up a second chance. The recipe for the success of their enterprise includes a commitment to employing a range of chronically unemployed people, including former convicts and recovering addicts.

Valorie Kondos Field knows a lot about winning. As the longtime coach of the UCLA women's gymnastics team, she won championship after championship and has been widely acclaimed for her leadership. In this inspiring, brutally honest and, at times, gut-wrenching talk, she shares the secret to her success. Hint: it has nothing to do with "winning."

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 audience to what s...

Timothy Graf's experiences moving from America to England sparked some fresh ideas about immigration. Our exacting border policies often ignore the significant benefits delivered by the new perspectives of immigrants, fresh ideas that are vital for future success. He argues that smart countries should be lowering roadblocks and setting both caps...

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 ...

The unique challenges of integrating millennials into the workplace have been well explored. But what about the other side of the coin? Gen Y'er Patrice Thompson explores the issue from the Gen Y perspective. She charts the differences between Gen X and Gen Y, and maps out a few ways that organizations can create environments where workers of al...

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...

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

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.

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...

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 factors as aver...

These days, even big corporations are joining the open-source movement (ie. Tesla Motors sharing their patents with anyone interested in adapting and advancing the technology). How does this sharing concept compare with our current competition-trumps-all economic model? Jay Cousins explains that success today is often based on investing in not o...