Imagine you’ve published a string of highly successful books, that have been acclaimed as both profound and accessible. You’ve presented tie-in TV series that did very well in the ratings.

You’ve got a big house in a fashionable part of London. And as if that weren’t enough, before you even started to climb the ladder of success, you had a trust fund of £200m (that’s more than $300m), thanks to your banker father.

You’re happy, right?

Not if you’re philosopher Alain de Botton.

In his presentation to TED Global 2009 in Oxford in June, he confessed that the gap between his hopes for his life and the reality are so divergent, he ends up weeping into his pillow – usually on a Sunday evening, as the sun goes down.

Sound familiar?

De Botton’s talk, A Kindler, Gentler Philosophy of Success, is humourous, entertaining and highly practical. In a world that spins ever faster, with success seemingly forever beyond our grasp, he injects a welcome note of reality into our frenzied lives.

It’s 16 minutes long, and you’ll feel better after watching it. I guarantee it (or your money back).

If you’re reading this in an email message, click here to view the talk.

Find out more:

• Of course there’s a tie-in book: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (for the US edition, click here) by Alain de Botton will help make your job more meaningful. No, really.
• So what do you do? The Brain Surgeon sketch from the BBC series That Mitchell & Webb Look.
• Office affairs: Lynn Barber interviews Alain de Botton at guardian.co.uk.

Related posts:

1. What’s your success-recovery plan?
2. Tell me what to do
3. Dare to fail. It’s the only way to succeed.
4. What sort of mind do you have?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and since 1984, they’ve been bringing together some of the world’s brightest thinkers and doers for an annual conference. Speakers are challenged to give ‘the talk of their lives’ – in just 18 minutes.

Malcolm Gladwell is a New Yorker magazine columnist, whose book The Tipping Point became a worldwide bestseller. His follow-up, Blink, was an equally compelling mix of fact, anecdote and quirky ideas.

His TED presentation on the pursuit of happiness takes him from Pepsi to coffee to spaghetti sauce – and teaches us a thing or two about human behaviour and customer surveys.

Sir Ken Robinson is a creativity expert whose message is simple: schools kill creativity. And as the former head of the UK government’s advisory committee on creative and cultural education, he should know.

It’s an intelligent and thought-provoking presentation, but above all, it’s very, very funny, jumping with effortless ease from the Royal Ballet Company to nativity plays to Shakespeare’s father.

I thought a friend of mine would enjoy it as an ex-drama teacher. And she did – more than I suspected, since it turned out she knows him.

“Sir Ken? When I worked with him in the 80s, he was just plain old Ken,” she said, with just a hint of title envy.

Enjoy.

• Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
• Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Related posts:

1. The fun way to be more creative
2. Add more power to your PowerPoint
3. It’s the way you tell ‘em
4. Learning, communicating and inventing
5. Two links and an iPod