TIME Business Careers & Workplace Top 10 Inspiring TED Talks for 2014 Justin SullivanGetty Images Bill Gates, Edward Snowden, Larry Page, and the inventor of the World Wide Web converged on the year's hottest topics

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If youve yet to accumulate enough frequent-flier miles to dash off to this innovation conference, you can get inspired at home by watching the following top TED Talks of the year.

In 1993, Bill and Melinda Gates took a trip to Africa that changed the way they viewed what was truly valuable. The extreme poverty they witnessed then instigated a lifelong commitment to give back 95 percent of their wealth.

In this TED Talk, the mega-philanthropists talk to Chris Anderson about marrying Bills affinity for big data with Melindas global-minded intuition to help save millions of children from hunger and disease around the world. The always-ambitious Gates are now trying to persuade other business leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs to give back. Warren Buffett recently donated 80 percent of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.

These are people who have created their own businesses, put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas. If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy, they can change the world, Melinda Gates said.

Using the plight of painters, archers, and Arctic explorers as an extended metaphor, art historian Sarah Lewis makes a case for celebrating the near win: missing the mark but never losing sight of the target.

Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. Its in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be, Lewis said.

Lewiss near win theory has been the driving force behind some of our cultures greatest minds, from Michelangelo to Franz Kafka. Almost succeeding gives leaders and competitors the focus and tenacity required to try again. According to Lewis, it is by harnessing these near wins that we can master a more fulfilling path.

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Top 10 Inspiring TED Talks for 2014

The word "risky" is thrown around often in the film world, usually when personalities embark on a new direction or a commercially challenging project.

But Oscar-nominated director Laura Poitras faced a different type of hazard with her latest film, "Citizenfour": the possibility of arrest, attack and harassment.

The filmmaker, after all, was making a documentary about one of the most-wanted fugitives: secret-spilling National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

"I'd worked in conflict zones, and there's a kind of fear there," Poitras, who has made movies in places such as Iraq and Yemen, said in an interview Saturday. "But this is a different kind of fear. The intelligence world operates in the shadows. You don't know where the dangers lie."

Poitras was a key person Snowden reached out to when he decided to go public with documents detailing massive U.S. and British surveillance operations. She was one of three journalists who traveled to Hong Kong to hole up in a hotel room over eight days in June 2013 as Snowden revealed much of what he knew as a high-level NSA consultant. She also shot the 12-minute video of Snowden that went viral at the time and in turn made him, at 29, perhaps the most important and polarizing figure of his kind since Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

"Citizenfour," which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival over the weekend to a standing ovation and will hit theaters Oct. 24, is Poitras' original video writ large. The movie is a look at how Snowden decided to pull back the curtain on the government surveillance operations and what happened to him when he did, often through never-before-seen footage. The film could reignite the debate over how Snowden should be viewed and shine a light anew on the surveillance apparatus.

Whether Snowden is a whistle-blower or a traitor is a question that has captivated security and foreign-policy thinkers since his leaks reached the public. With "Citizenfour," Poitras has made a movie that argues for his heroism, emphasizing the risks he took to step forward.

She also lays out in often startling detail the extensive surveillance operations of the U.S. and British governments including facilities that are believed to process data (possibly emails, phone calls or other information) of millions of citizens also layering in voices such as those of former NSA official-turned-critic William Binney and activist Jacob Appelbaum. Clips from the strange bedfellows of President Obama and former George W. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer decrying Snowden are meant primarily to show an establishment's panic and defensiveness about Snowden's actions.

Telling at once a story both broad and personal, the film begins with Poitras' voice-over describing how she had been contacted anonymously by a man identifying himself as "Citizenfour," who claimed to have proof of illegal government surveillance.

The source turns out to be Snowden, but before Poitras gets to him, she details the extensive national security apparatus that he will soon expose. The director has activists explain how the government uses so-called metadata to track phone calls and movements of ordinary citizens, and she shows clips of James Clapper, director of national intelligence for the NSA, testifying before Congress that the government does not spy on millions of Americans.

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In 'Citizenfour,' Laura Poitras feels heat of telling Snowden's story