Rhetorical Analysis: Wasted Talent Is A Waste I Cannot Stand By Larry Smith

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"Wasted talent is a waste I cannot stand." This is a quote by economic professor Larry Smith during an interview for the global media company Forbes. Larry Smith is an economist who works at the University of Waterloo in Canada. In the year 2011, he gave a very influential Ted talk to an audience of millions. In a brief 15 minutes, Larry Smith provides humor and blunt honesty in order to inform his audience as to why a person may fail to have a prosperous and successful career. Throughout his Ted talk, Smith adopts a humorous, but subjective tone to appeal to his audience while also using many real life examples. Smith begins his speech by describing how people have the mindset to pursue a great career, but tend to not follow the steps …show more content…

By bringing up the point that "if you don't find the highest expression of your talent, if you settle for "interesting," what the hell ever that means, do you know what will happen at the end of your long life? Your friends and family will be gathered in the cemetery, and there beside your gravesite will be a tombstone, and inscribed on that tombstone it will say, 'Here lies a distinguished engineer, who invented Velcro.' But what that tombstone should have said, in an alternative lifetime, what it should have said if it was your highest expression of talent, was, 'Here lies the last Nobel Laureate in Physics, who formulated the Grand Unified Field Theory and demonstrated the practicality of warp drive.'" This technique seems quite crude, however it is very eye-opening to the audience because they then begin to wonder if they have wasted their entire lives coming up with pity excuses. Smith tries to show people just how bad the situation has become and how right he actually is. He even goes deeper and states that "[I]n spite of all these excuses, you will find, you will find your passion. And you'll still fail." Triggering the emotions of the audience is a useful strategy for Smith due to the fact that he is trying to convince the audience exactly why they will fail. Furthermore, it makes the audience feel more like the

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