Seth Godin’s books can help you avert a lifetime of unfulfilling wheel-spinning.  Don’t have time to read his latest, Tribes? Watch the interview at www.tedfellows.posterous.com and get the gist.  Don’t have the time or $ to attend a TED conference? Watch the TED Talks free online at www.ted.com.

When I spoke via Skype at SoCon2009 and talked about how TED Curator Chris Anderson had made the previously hush-hush super-exclusive TED more accessible, I got pushback from someone who says a $6000 conference pricetag is still  elitist.  The Palm Springs satellite conference is cheaper. As for the Long Beach event, if you are chosen as a TED Fellow, you don’t pay. If you are invited as a guest of TED, you don’t pay. There are ways to go to the in-person events without paying.  But my larger point was that before Chris bought TED from the founder, Richard Saul Wurman, it was deliberately small and secretive. Back then, your high-priced ticket bought exclusive info and access.  Now, the fee helps underwrite the worldwide dissemination of TED’s “ideas worth spreading.” Big difference.

I admire Chris for his willingness to trade comfortably smug exclusivity for risky, less personal outreach. If it’s an idea worth sharing at TED, it’s an idea worth spreading. It’s Chris’s great gift to the world, putting his own comfort, his own resources of time, cash, energy, skill, and talent, in the service of this work. And to his further credit, he acknowledges that the TED community has agreed with this shift and is willing to help him by giving up their precious little club of insiders in order to offer the ideas and sense of community to all. To YOU.  You are inviTED. Are you interesTED?

Confession: Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling Eat Pray Love did not engender a desire to befriend the author. When I saw she would be presenting at TED, I thought it was the one talk I’d be willing to miss. Good thing I don’t always listen to myself.  Her talk was a true highlight, and you can see it for yourself because it’s already up on the TED website.

You should see it if you are a creative person. Gilbert’s talk underscores one of my big life lessons. For years, I’ve been telling my clients that they need not feel bad or beat themselves up if they can’t get it together to write that book, start that company, or produce whatever creative output they feel they “should.”  I’ve learned that ideas come to more than one person at a time, demanding life. If you can’t get the idea out there, don’t worry – it’s nagging someone else, too.  Somebody will do it. You’re not the only one the idea is pestering.

So the pressure’s off. If an idea’s time has come, the idea will find at least one, and possibly many, humans through which to be born. You don’t have to do it – you’re off the hook. (Don’t say you weren’t warned, though. How will you feel when you see “your” idea with someone else’s name on it?)

And the pressure’s off me, too. I don’t have to translate that entire pad full of TED notes for you. Ethan Zuckerman’s contemporaneous notes are already published. The TED Blog and other bloggers and Tweeters (Laurel Touby’s were among my faves – disclosure, I love her) did a fantastic job of sharing the experience live.

There is one thing all those others can’t do: be me. Same for you. So if you ever do get around to following through with that idea, the expression of it will be uniquely yours. What is the one step you can take to move it forward today?