Life can be so awkward. Here's how to embrace the embarrassing

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And I hate to do this to you, but we are going to start the show back in the painfully awkward days of middle school. If you think about a cafeteria, there was the cool kid table, there's the athlete table, and maybe the edgy alternative table, but there was always a table of nerds. This is Tai Teshiro. The socially awkward kids who were the furthest thing from cool, who were maybe a little physically clumsy, who dressed frumpy. And, yeah, that was Ty. I sat at that table. So it was the first week of school. He had just started seventh grade. And at my table were three other guys. One was Hassan. He's kind of this math prodigy who ended up taking classes at the high school. There was Will. He spent his time building model pine cars. Cars. He apparently dominated the car racing circuit. And Eddie, he was the funny one. But he had this dry humor, kind of a Wes Anderson humor that nobody really got. And we were all, you know, nice kids. We were good kids, but we were definitely not cool. And as the four looked around, they knew that they weren't cool, but they didn't understand why gossipy people wearing torn jeans or aviator sunglasses were. And no one played tag or King of the Mountain or Foursquare or any of these other things we thought were really cool. Instead, kids just stood around. Tay, Hassan, Will and Eddie thought this was boring and absurd. And so they were going to do something about it. They were going to play. We were gonna bring back the good old days of recess and inspire other kids to rediscover the wonders of play. So after some deliberation, we decided to kick it off with one of our favorite playtime activities, which were reenactments of wrestling matches from the Worldwide Wrestling Federation. They staked out a corner of the schoolyard between a chain link fence and a soccer goal and got down to the important decision of deciding who would play who. Will declared that he'd play Hulk Hogan, who is the current champion. Someone else was Randy Macho Man Savage. Hassan selected the Iron Sheik. And keeping with these kinda semi offensive racial stereotypes, I chose to be mister Fuji, who was the lone Japanese American wrestler in the federation. And …