Jimmy Tan

Activist, Brainstormer, Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Connector, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Event planner, Filmmaker, Global soul, Marketer, Producer, Writer/Editor

I'm the founder and director of Good Idea Presents, a video and creative production studio. We make films, commercials, and documentaries, and we help people tell stories worth telling. I was born and raised in Guiyang, in the southwest of China, where the food runs heavy on spice. In high school I fell hard for journalism. I never became a journalist, but the pull of it stayed with me, and over the years I came to understand why. Living in China taught me that good information is not always easy to come by, especially for people without the means to find it. A healthy society depends on a well-informed public. Putting worthwhile ideas and information within everyone's reach has driven me ever since, and it ties together everything I do, from the films I produce to the TEDx events I organize, the speakers I coach, and the podcasts I make.

Journalism, education, music, film, good stories, and giving people more options.

One of the surest ways to change the world is to make information and ideas easy for anyone to reach. Give people good information, and more often than not they will make good decisions.

Audio, Communication, Directing, Documentary, Marketing, Photography, Producing, Storytelling, Video

The first time I watched a TED Talk was in an intensive English class in high school. Everyone in the room was laughing except me, because I didn't understand a word. A few years and many talks later, I found out you could run your own event called TEDx, and I jumped on it. That was 2011, and I have been part of this world ever since. In 2014 I took out my own licence and started TEDxXiguan in Guangzhou. Over the years it grew into TEDxGuangzhou, and with a team of volunteers we put on more than twenty conferences, salons and workshops across nearly a decade. Along the way I also served as a TEDx Ambassador, supporting other organizers as they built their own events. Every TEDx licence runs in cycles, and ours eventually came to a close. The TEDxGuangzhou chapter is finished, but the ideas from those stages are still echoing around. Now I've made Singapore home and joined the team at TEDxSingapore.

Eating ferociously spicy food without flinching.