Jia Jiang ventures boldly into a territory so many of us fear: rejection. By seeking out rejection for 100 days -- from asking a stranger to lend him $100, to requesting a "burger refill" at a restaurant -- Jiang desensitized himself to the pain and shame that rejection often brings and, in the process, discovered that simply asking for what you want can open up possibilities where you’d expect to find dead ends.

"Great dreams aren't just visions," says Astro Teller. "They're visions coupled to strategies to make them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory”, where his team seek to solve the world's biggest problems through experimental projects like balloon-powered Internet and wind turbines that sail through the air. They have found a way to balance the paradox of enthusiastic skepticism and boundless optimism to comfortably work on big, risky projects and explore audacious ideas.

Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress" devastated by rejection letters.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 carry on, regardless of outcomes.

The world is changing much more rapidly than most people realise, says business educator Eddie Obeng. 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’.

International aid groups make the same mistakes over and over again. David Damberger analyzes his own engineering failure in India -- and calls for his friends in the development sector to publicly admit, scrutinize and learn from their missteps.