The Best Lecture ever

 

First of all I would like to emphasize that draftpad is a mainly a Science and Technology site .. some posts will be a step out of this context .

There are lectures excellent , lectures that can inspire millions of people and change their lives.  Surely we all have to prioritize our values meaning we have to look for what is important to us and we can never change this hierarchy because then we will be unhappy .... / A amazing lecture is the Last Lecture  from Randy Pausch : Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

.. that helps us to define to find our values.

Αn  ideal example to see the role that the hierarchy of priorities (values) play in our lives is from Doctor Bouradas: ""Understanding ourselves means, among other things, the conscious formation of our personal values and how they are linked to life choices. On values depends what choices we make, how we behave, who we want to be and how we want to live.

Values determine what is important and unimportant to us and, consequently, our priorities. To understand this for yourself, do the following exercise as shown in the figure.

On either side of the river, there are five people: On one side, Mrs. L, the boatman B and Mr. S. On the other side, M, who is Mrs. L's husband, and F, who is a "close" friend of Mr. M's husband. The river is impossible to cross without a boat, for many reasons. Mrs. L is on the right bank lost and her husband, M, does not know that his wife is there to pick her up. For this lady, nothing else in her life is worth anything in her life as much as her love for her husband. If she can't find him again, her life isn't worth anything either and she is determined to kill herself. So she goes to Mr. B, the boatman, and begs him, begs him to take her across the river to find her husband. The boatman refuses, saying: "Listen, lady, I have the boat to earn money and support my family. If you don't pay me, I'm not going to take you across." The lady, who had no money or anything else to give him, felt desperate and hopeless, as her life was not worth living without her husband. Fortunately, Mr. S learned of the lady's problem and offered to give her money to give to the boatman and take her across to where her husband was, but on the condition that she have sex with him once, because she needed it badly. To the lady, indeed, nothing else in her life was worth anything but her love for her husband. So she went with S, took the money, gave it to the boatman and crossed over to find her husband. Unfortunately, however, Mr. F found out that the lady had sex with S to get the money and, because of her deep friendship with her husband, she couldn't hide it and told him. So, when the lady went to her husband he sent her away because she had had sex with S.

Now, I am going to ask you, on a rough piece of paper, to rank these five people in order of how much, in your opinion, each of them did the right thing. That is, put first the person who, in your opinion, did most right, second the next person who did most right, and so on. After you have put them in order, think about what determined which one you put first and which one you put second, third, fourth and fifth. Why did you do this ranking? Logically, the order you put them in depended on your code of personal values. Those who placed Mrs. L first, means that for you the most important value is love (Love). Those who placed boatman B first, for you the most important value is work and money (Business money). Those who placed Mr S first, for you the most important value is Sex. Those who placed Mr M first, for you the most important value is Moral, in the limited sense of the specific example, i.e. marital relations. Finally, those who placed F first, for you the most important value is friendship.

So, the implication is that our priorities in life are determined by how we are positioned vis-à-vis some central oppositional pairs - such as personal life versus career, money versus leisure, individual versus group, fame versus social contribution, luxury consumption versus essential consumption, etc. Our priorities, then, are determined by our values and how we prioritize the latter. Thus, if we don't have clear values, we cannot have clear priorities. In such a case, it is only by chance that we will not regret the choices we make in our lives, since in order to ask the right questions, evaluate the alternatives and choose the best one for me, a prerequisite is that I have clear in my mind what is worthwhile for me.""

A different story from Professor Buranda is the story of the shipwreck.  From this story we will see that depending on the values we have set we give different solutions and perhaps have a different definition of the problem. 

Finally the best lecture is ..