演讲稿是在一定的场合，面对一定的听众，演讲人围绕着主题讲话的文稿。在现实社会中，我们都可能会用到演讲稿，那么，怎么去写演讲稿呢？
大家好！
让我们来问自己一个问题，如果上天给你一次重新选择的机会，你会愿意做谁？是自己还是别人？
记得在小学的一节心理课上，我们的心理老师也这么问过我们。当时我们都不假思索地写在了纸上。统计结果是，全班30个人，29个人是愿意做别人，只有1个人愿意做自己。
为什么不愿意做自己？也许你觉得自己太过于平凡了，但是，万物不都是这样吗？一棵小草是平凡的，它只是默默地生长，任人践踏。野花是平凡的，也许它一直是个被忽略的角色，它比其他的花更不起眼，它没有玫瑰的娇艳，没有百合的清香，也没有玉兰这般的高贵，可它同样能开出属于自己的一片天。平凡，不等于我们不可以创造自己的不平凡，平凡，不等于我们不幸福。幸福的人不一定愿意做自己，但愿意做自己的人一定很幸福。
既然知道我永远是我，不可能是别人，那么就快乐地做自己。做自己，本就是一种幸福！
亲爱的同学们：
大家好！
今天我国旗下演讲的题目是《健康饮食从我做起》。
每一家的健康与食品息息相关，随着经济社会不断进步，人们饮食文化日益多样化，食品卫生与安全成为备受关注的话题。
要健康饮食，就要做到以下几点：
1.不购买街边小吃或街边小店的垃圾食品，去一些正规超市购买食物。
2.买所需食品时，要注意生产日期、保质期、QS生产许可标志等等。
3.认准品牌购买，尽量买一些有品牌的食品。
4.少吃油炸食品及零食，多吃蔬菜水果等有营养的食品。
5.不买价格明显过低的食品，不要贪小失大。
注意以上几点，就大致能做到安全饮食了。俗话说：“民以食为天”。说得通俗一点就是人们每天要吃和喝，食物是人类赖以生存的物质。食品的质量决定了人类生命的质量。因此，食品必须是安全的并且有益健康的。
同时，也呼吁食品安全，关系你我他，但愿生产者不再为食品安全脸红，国人不再为食品安全担心，国家不再为食品安全丢脸。现在，让我们一起行动起来，杜绝有害食品，倡导绿色食品！希望同学们听了我这次的讲话后都健康饮食，健康地成长。
谢谢大家！
少年pi的全名叫：派西尼。莫利托。帕特尔，方便起见，就叫他派好了。
派是一个从小生活在动物园的孩子，一次，为了搬去加拿大，派一家与动物们登上了开往大洋彼岸的货船“齐姆楚姆号”。
天有不测风云，在一个风雨交加的早晨，船沉了。睡梦中的人们还不知道发生了什么，就沉入了这蔚蓝色的海洋。只有派与一只斑马，一只红猩猩，一只鬣狗，还有一只名叫理查德。帕克的成年孟加拉虎乘上了救生艇，
弱肉强食的生存法则毫不意外地在这里被印证。
一艘小小的救生艇自然无法满足他们的生存需求，所以自然而然的，鬣狗吃掉了斑马与红猩猩，有被老虎吃掉。只剩下派与理查德。帕克了。
我本以为派也会被老虎吃掉，之后老虎死于缺水，在之后全剧终。可看着剩下200多页纸的厚度，我便打消了这可笑的念头。
不出所料，奇迹发生了。
派与这只孟加拉虎，在这条长仅26英尺的小艇上和谐共存了几个月，直至获救。
看到这里，我不得不对派肃然起敬。他是如此的勇敢，坚强。换做是我，或许早就因老虎的利爪或缺水而死了，但他却能用自己仅有的一切，与一只老虎在一望无边的太平洋上共存，这需要多么强烈的求生意志，多么强大的自信心啊！
在对比一下自己，整日无所事事，得过且过，无抱负无追求，为什么派可以超越自己的极限？我想，是压力的缘故吧。
派的压力来自于死亡，为了生存下来，他可以发挥出自己的全部潜质，是死亡的压力拯救了他。
而我的压力主要来自父母和老师。只要成绩有些进步，就可以说失去了压力，一个失去压力的人一定不会有什么大成就，因为压力就像燃油，是我们前进时不可缺少的动力。没有了动力，我们只能停下，倒退，最终被淘汰。
有压力是好事，但也要适度。就像汽车超速了会被罚款，压力过大了，也会使我们不负重担。只有适当的压力加上灿烂的微笑，美好的未来才会向我们挥手。
所以，朋友们，让我们用双手去拥抱这可爱的压力吧。
无压力，不动力！
try something new for 30 days 小计划帮你实现大目标
a few years ago, i felt like i was stuck in a rut, so i decided to follow in the footsteps of the great american philosopher, morgan spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. the idea is actually pretty simple. think about something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for the ne_t 30 days. it turns out, 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit — like watching the news — from your life.
几年前， 我感觉对老一套感到枯燥乏味， 所以我决定追随伟大的美国哲学家摩根·斯普尔洛克的脚步，尝试做新事情30天。这个想法的确是非常简单。考虑下，你常想在你生命中做的一些事情 接下来30天尝试做这些。 这就是，30天刚好是这么一段合适的时间 去养成一个新的习惯或者改掉一个习惯——例如看新闻——在你生活中。
there’s a few things i learned while doing these 30-day challenges. the first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. this was part of a challenge i did to take a picture everyday for a month. and i remember e_actly where i was and what i was doing that day. i also noticed that as i started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. i went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work — for fun. even last year, i ended up hiking up mt. kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in africa. i would never have been that adventurous before i started my 30-day challenges.
当我在30天做这些挑战性事情时，我学到以下一些事。第一件事是，取代了飞逝而过易被遗忘的岁月的是 这段时间非常的更加令人难忘。挑战的一部分是要一个月内每天我要去拍摄一张照片。我清楚地记得那一天我所处的位置我都在干什么。我也注意到随着我开始做更多的，更难的30天里具有挑战性的事时，我自信心也增强了。我从一个台式计算机宅男极客变成了一个爱骑自行车去工作的人——为了玩乐。甚至去年，我完成了在非洲最高山峰乞力马扎罗山的远足。在我开始这30天做挑战性的事之前我从来没有这样热爱冒险过。
i also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. have you ever wanted to write a novel? every november, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000 word novel from scratch in 30 days. it turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. so i did. by the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you’ve written your words for the day. you might be sleep-deprived, but you’ll finish your novel. now is my book the ne_t great american novel? no. i wrote it in a month. it’s awful. but for the rest of my life, if i meet john hodgman at a ted party, i don’t have to say, “i’m a computer scientist.” no, no, if i want to i can say, “i’m a novelist.”
我也认识到如果你真想一些槽糕透顶的事，你可以在30天里做这些事。你曾想写小说吗？每年11月，数以万计的人们在30天里，从零起点尝试写他们自己的5万字小说。这结果就是，你所要去做的事就是每天写1667个字要写一个月。所以我做到了。顺便说一下，秘密在于除非在一天里你已经写完了1667个字，要不你就甭想睡觉。你可能被剥夺睡眠，但你将会完成你的小说。那么我写的书会是下一部伟大的美国小说吗？不是的。我在一个月内写完它。它看上去太可怕了。但在我的余生，如果我在一个ted聚会上遇见约翰·霍奇曼，我不必开口说，“我是一个电脑科学家。”不，不会的，如果我愿意我可以说，“我是一个小说家。”
(laughter)
（笑声）
so here’s one last thing i’d like to mention. i learned that when i made small, sustainable changes, things i could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. there’s nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges. in fact, they’re a ton of fun. but they’re less likely to stick. when i gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.
我这儿想提的最后一件事。当我做些小的、持续性的变化，我可以不断尝试做的事时，我学到我可以把它们更容易地坚持做下来。这和又大又疯狂的具有挑战性的事情无关。事实上，它们的乐趣无穷。但是，它们就不太可能坚持做下来。当我在30天里拒绝吃糖果，31天后看上去就像这样。
(laughter)
（笑声）
so here’s my question to you: what are you waiting for? i guarantee you the ne_t 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot for the ne_t 30 days.
所以我给大家提的问题是：大家还在等什么呀？我保准大家在未来的30天定会经历你喜欢或者不喜欢的事，那
thanks.
谢谢。
(applause)
（掌声）
you will no longer fear making new sounds, showing new facial expressions, using your body in new ways,approaching new people, and asking new questions. you will live every single day of your life with absolute passion, and you will show your passion through the words you speak and the actions you take. you will focus all your time and effort on the most important goals of your life. you will never succumb to challenges of hardships. you will never waver in your pursuit of excellence. after all,you are the best, and you deserve the best!
as your coach and friend, i can assure you the door to all the best things in the world will open to you, but the key to that door is in your hand. you must do your part, you must faithfully follow the plans you make and take the actions you plan, you must never quit, you must never fear. i know you must do it, you can do it, you will do it, and you will succeed!
TED演讲-论生物多样性
爱德华·威尔逊
生物多样性之感
潘俞宏
I was appreciated by Edward Wilson’s on biological diversity. He introduce the biological diversity and wish we could build up the Encyclopedia of Life to preserve lift. That’s also my wish. We all know that many species disappear every years and Human-forced climate change alone again, if unabated could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades. In normal, one specie would turn into a different form or disappear on the earth finally, but it may take a long time. However it become faster because of the environment pollution.
What I want to say is that biological diversity is a valuable wealth of all human beings and provide a good environment for the survival of mankind. It is the foundation of human society's survival and development. At the same time, people rely on the ecological system to purify air, water, etc.
All nature Creatures are interdependent and mutually restricted. The vast of one specie indicates that many species are about to die, but we could do nothing. Now it’s time for us to do something, not only the Encyclopedia of Life, just all what we can do. To search for life, to understand it and finally, above all, to preserve it.
尊敬的老师们，亲爱的同学们：
大家好！
到底是剪短头发呢，还是继续留长发？我在镜子前来回踱步。
“当然是短发方便啦！”妈妈笑着说，“你头发越来越长了，打理起来也越来越麻烦。再说，尝试改变也是一件很美好的事哦！”
我又抬起头，望着镜中踌躇不安的自己和头上有些凌乱的长发，心想：改变为什么一定意味着失去呢？每天清晨，为了这一头长发，我常常要在镜前花费很多宝贵的时间。但是如果剪成了短发，不仅能节约时间，而且我还可以迎接一个崭新的模样，一个崭新的自我……
我下定了决心：改变！
于是，我坐在了理发店的转椅上，镜中的我露出心满意足的微笑。看着满地的碎发，我“如释重负”，一下子觉得世界焕然一新。看来，之前的担忧真是多余！
出了理发店，冬日的暖阳从云朵中露出微笑脸庞。我一边迈着欢快的步伐，一边在想：“改变，真好！”
这让我想起了另一件事。
以前，最让我焦虑的事情，就是在书房那“茫茫书海”中寻找一本急需的作业本。妈妈十分关心我，总是抽空帮我整理书房。但整理之后的日子里，书房总会时不时传来一连串问号：“妈妈，我的课外书呢？”“咦，我的练习册哪去了？”
于是，我尝试改变。从给每一本书归类到把书柜分格，从为每一本作业本“安家”，到给每一支笔找到“住所”……很快，我的书房中的每一位成员都有了“新家”。
从此，我都自己收拾房间。忙碌过后，我每次都感到疲倦，但内心却是无比快乐。因为我体验了“改变”： 我的房间越来越整洁，我也在改变中成长，越来越独立了。
生命中有许多需要改变的东西，我们要对改变充满信心，不能让多余的担心阻挡我们成长的步伐，因为改变让我们收获自信，收获希望，收获人生的多姿多态！改变，真好！
简介：残奥会短跑冠军aimee mullins天生没有腓骨，从小就要学习靠义肢走路和奔跑。如今，她不仅是短跑选手、演员、模特，还是一位稳健的演讲者。她不喜欢字典中 “disabled”这个词，因为负面词汇足以毁掉一个人。但是，坦然面对不幸，你会发现等待你的是更多的机会。
i'd like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago while writing an article for italian wired. i always keep my thesaurus handy whenever i'm writing anything, but i'd already finished editing the piece, and i realized that i had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what i'd find.
let me read you the entry. "disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." i was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but i'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and i had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed.
you know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so i'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? but, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when i would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. and, needless to say, thank god i wasn't using a thesaurus back then. i mean, from this entry, it would seem that i was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today i'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured.
so, i immediately went to look up the __ online edition, e_pecting to find a revision worth noting. here's the updated version of this entry. unfortunately, it's not much better. i find the last two words under "near antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."
so, it's not just about the words. it's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. it's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. in fact, many ancient societies, including the greeks and the romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into e_istence. so, what reality do we want to call into e_istence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? by casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead?
one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the a.i. dupont institute in wilmington, delaware. his name was dr. pizzutillo, an italian american, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most americans to pronounce, so he went by dr. p. and dr. p always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.
i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the e_ception of my physical therapy sessions. i had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of e_ercises with these thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and i hated these bands more than anything -- i hated them, had names for them. i hated them. and, you know, i was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with dr. p to try to get out of doing these e_ercises, unsuccessfully, of course. and, one day, he came in to my session -- e_haustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and he said to me, "wow. aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, i think you're going to break one of those bands. when you do break it, i'm going to give you a hundred bucks."
now, of course, this was a simple ploy on dr. p's part to get me to do the e_ercises i didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising e_perience for me. and i have to wonder today to what e_tent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.
this is an e_ample of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. but, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. so, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.
the human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and i'm going to make an admission: this phrase never sat right with me, and i always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and i think i'm starting to figure out why. implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging e_perience unscathed or unmarked by the e_perience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. but, in fact, we are changed. we are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. and i'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. it's part of our life. and i tend to think of it like my shadow. sometimes i see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. and, certainly, i'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle.
there is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. so, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. there's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not i'm disabled. and, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability i've had to confront is the world ever thinking that i could be described by those definitions.
in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the e_pected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. perhaps the e_isting model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fi_ it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself.
by not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. we are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. so we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. and, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. so it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. so maybe the idea i want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. and, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it.
this year we celebrate the 200th birthday of charles darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that darwin illustrated, i think, a truth about the human character. to paraphrase: it's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. conflict is the genesis of creation. from darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. so, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. and, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. so, we can give ourselves a gift. we can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. maybe we can see it as change. adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet.
i think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. now, who's normal? there's no normal. there's common, there's typical. there's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they e_isted? (laughter) i don't think so. if we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community.
anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. there's evidence that neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life e_perience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. they didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.
a few years ago, i was in a food market in the town where i grew up in that red zone in northeastern pennsylvania, and i was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. it was summertime: i had shorts on. i hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "well, if it isn't aimee mullins." and i turn around, and it's this older man. i have no idea who he is.
and i said, "i'm sorry, sir, have we met? i don't remember meeting you."
he said, "well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. i mean, when we met i was delivering you from your mother's womb." (laughter) oh, that guy. and, but of course, actually, it did click.
this man was dr. kean, a man that i had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, i arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. and so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. and, because i was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer -- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.
he said to me, "i had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." (laughter) (applause)
the e_traordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the girl scouts, you know, the halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from hahnemann medical school and hershey medical school. and he called this part of the course the _ factor, the potential of the human will. no prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. and dr. kean went on to tell me, he said, "in my e_perience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve."
see, dr. kean made that shift in thinking. he understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. and there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, i wouldn't have hesitated for a second. i aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. but if you ask me today, i'm not so sure. and it's because of the e_periences i've had with them, not in spite of the e_periences i've had with them. and perhaps this shift in me has happened because i've been e_posed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me.
see, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. if you can hand somebody the key to their own power -- the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. you're teaching them to open doors for themselves. in fact, the e_act meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." it means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." so again, which potential do we want to bring out?
there was a case study done in 1960s britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. it's called the streaming trials. we call it "tracking" here in the states. it's separating students from a, b, c, d and so on. and the "a students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. well, they took, over a three-month period, d-level students, gave them a's, told them they were "a's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at a-level.
and, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "a students" and told them they were "d's." and that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. a crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. the teachers didn't know a switch had been made. they were simply told, "these are the 'a-students,' these are the 'd-students.'" and that's how they went about teaching them and treating them.
so, i think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. if instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. when a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being.
i'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century persian poet named hafiz that my friend, jacques dembois told me about, and the poem is called "the god who only knows four words": "every child has known god, not the god of names, not the god of don'ts, but the god who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'come dance with me. come, dance with me. come, dance with me.'"
thank you. (applause)
i started my journey in california with a uc berkley 30-year
longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. by measuring their student smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subjects marriage will be, how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. in another yearbook, i stumbledupon barry obamas picture. when i first saw his picture, i thought that these superpowers came from his super collar. but now i know it was all in his smile. nother aha! moment came from a 20xx wayne state university research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of major league players. the researchers found that the span of a players smile could actually predict the span of his life. players who didnt smile in their pictures lived an average of only years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.
the night before i was heading for scotland, i was invited to host the final of “china’s got talent” show in shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium. guess who was the performing guest? susan boyle. and i told her, “i’m going to scotland the next day.” she sang beautifully, and she even managed to say a few words in chinese. [chinese] soit’s not like “hello” or “thank you,” that ordinary stuff. it means “greenonion for free.” why did she say that? because it was a line from our chinese parallel susan boyle — a 50-some year-old woman, a vegetable vendor inshanghai, who loves singing western opera, but she didn’t understand anyenglish or french or italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in chinese. (laughter) and the last sentence of nessun dormathat she was singing in the stadium was “green onion for free.” so [as] susanboyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together. that was hilarious.
so i guess both susan boyle and this vegetable vendor in shanghai belonged to otherness. they were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought themthrough. and a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams.well, being different is not that difficult. we are all different from different perspectives. but i think being different is good, because you present a different point of view. you may have the chance to make a difference.
my generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of china that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30 years. i remember that in the year of 1990, when i was graduating from college, i was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in beijing, great wall sheraton — it’s still there. so after being interrogated by this japanese manager for a half an hour,he finally said, “so, miss yang, do you have any questions to ask me?” i summoned my courage and poise and said, “yes, but could you let me know, what actually do you sell?” i didn’t have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel. that was the first day i set my foot in a five-star hotel.
around the same time, i was going through an audition —the first ever open audition by national television in china — with another thousand college girls. the producer told us they were looking for some sweet,innocent and beautiful fresh face. so when it was my turn, i stood up and said,“why [do] women’s personalities on television always have to be beautiful,sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive? why can’t they have their own ideas and their own voice?” i thought i kind of offended them. but actually, they were impressed by my words. and so i was in the second round of competition,and then the third and the fourth. after seven rounds of competition, i was the last one to survive it. so i was on a national television prime-time show. and believe it or not, that was the first show on chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script.(applause) and my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people.
well after a few years, i decided to go to the u.s. and columbia university to pursue my postgraduate studies, and then started my ownmedia company, which was unthought of during the years that i started mycareer. so we do a lot of things. i’ve interviewed more than a thousand peoplein the past. and sometimes i have young people approaching me say, “lan, you changed my life,” and i feel proud of that. but then we are also so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country. i was in beijing’s bidding for the olympic games. i was representing the shanghai expo. i saw china embracing the world and vice versa. but then sometimes i’m thinking, what are today’s young generation up to? how are they different, and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of china, or at large,the world?
so today i want to talk about young people through the platform of social media. first of all, who are they? [what] do they look like?well this is a girl called guo meimei — 20 years old, beautiful. she showed offher expensive bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the chinese version of twitter. and she claimed to be the general manager of red cross at the chamber of commerce. she didn’t realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning, almost a turmoil, against the credibility of red cross. the controversy was so heated that the red cross had to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going on.
so far, as of today, we know that she herself made up that title — probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity.all those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend, who used to be a board member in a subdivision of red cross at chamber of commerce. it’s very complicated to explain. but anyway, the public still doesn’t buy it. it is still boiling. it shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions, which lacked transparency in the past. and also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog.
microblog boomed in the year of , with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled. a major news portal, alone hasmore than 140 million microbloggers. on tencent, 200 million. the most popular blogger — it’s not me — it’s a movie star, and she has more than 9.5 million followers, or fans. about 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people,under 30 years old. and because, as you know, the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government, social media offers an opening to let thesteam out a little bit. but because you don’t have many other openings, theheat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.
so through microblogging, we are able to understand chinese youth even better. so how are they different? first of all, most of them were born in the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy. and because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls, now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women. that could pose a potential danger to the society, but who knows; we’re in a globalized world, so they can look for girlfriends from other countries. most of them have fairly good education.the illiteracy rate in china among this generation is under one percent. incities, 80 percent of kids go to college. but they are facing an aging china with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent this year, and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030. and you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially, and taking care of them when they’re sick. so it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old.
so making a living is not that easy for young graduates are not in short supply. in urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 u.s. dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500. so what do they do? they have to share space — squeezed invery limited space to save money — and they call themselves “tribe of ants.”and for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment, they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their firstapartment. that ratio in america would only cost a couple five years to earn,but in china it’s 30 to 40 years with the skyrocketing real estate price.
among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are young people. they find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas. most of them don’t want to go back to the countryside, but they don’t have the sense of belonging. they work for longer hours with less income, less social welfare. and they’re more vulnerable to joblosses, subject to inflation, tightening loans from banks, appreciation of the renminbi, or decline of demand from europe or america for the products theyproduce. last year, though, an appalling incident in a southern oemmanufacturing compound in china: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide, just one by one like causing a contagious disease. but they died because of all different personal reasons. but this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation, both physical and mental, ofthese migrant workers.
for those who do return back to the countryside, they find themselves very welcome locally, because with the knowledge, skills and networks they have learned in the cities, with the assistance of the internet,they’re able to create more jobs, upgrade local agriculture and create newbusiness in the less developed market. so for the past few years, the coastal areas, they found themselves in a shortage of labor.
these diagrams show a more general social background. the first one is the engels coefficient, which explains that the cost of dailynecessities has dropped its percentage all through the past decade, in terms offamily income, to about 37-some percent. but then in the last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost. the gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4. now it’s 0.5 — even worse than that in america — showing us the income inequality. and so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility. and also, the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful isquite widespread. so any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even unrest.
so through some of the hottest topics on microblogging,we can see what young people care most about. social justice and governmentaccountability runs the first in what they demand. for the past decade or so, amassive urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports onthe forced demolition of private property. and it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation. sometimes people get killed, and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest. so when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the internet, people cry for thegovernment to take actions to stop this.
so the good news is that earlier this year, the state council passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passedthe right to order forced demolition from local governments to the court.similarly, many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the internet. we heard about polluted air, polluted water, poisoned food. and guesswhat, we have faked beef. they have sorts of ingredients that you brush on apiece of chicken or fish, and it turns it to look like beef. and then lately,people are very concerned about cooking oil, because thousands of people have been found [refining] cooking oil from restaurant slop. so all these things have aroused a huge outcry from the internet. and fortunately, we have seen the government responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns.
while young people seem to be very sure about their participation in public policy-making, but sometimes they’re a little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life. china is soon to pass the u.s. as the number one market for luxury brands — that’s not including the chinese expenditures in europe and elsewhere. but you know what, half of those consumers are earning a salary below 2,000 u.s. dollars. they’re not rich atall. they’re taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status. and this is a girl explicitly saying on a tv dating show that she would rather cry in a bmw than smile on a bicycle. but of course, we do have young people who would still prefer to smile, whether in a bmw or [on] a bicycle.
so in the next picture, you see a very popular phenomenon called “naked” wedding, or “naked” marriage. it does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding, but it shows that these young couples are ready to get married without a house, without a car, without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet, to show their commitment to true love. and also, people are doing good through social media. and the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped dogs for food processing was spotted andstopped on the highway with the whole country watching through microblogging.people were donating money, dog food and offering volunteer work to stop that truck. and after hours of negotiation, 500 dogs were rescued. and here also people are helping to find missing children. a father posted his son’s picture onto the internet. after thousands of [unclear], the child was found, and we witnessed the reunion of the family through microblogging.
so happiness is the most popular word we have heardthrough the past two years. happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values, but also, it’s about the environment. people are thinking about the following questions: are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher gdp? how are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth, to keep sustainability and stability? and also, how capable is the system ofself-correctness to keep more people content with all sorts of friction goingon at the same time? i guess these are the questions people are going to answer. and our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves.
thank you very much.
译文：
来苏格兰(做ted讲演)的前夜，我被邀请去上海做”中国达人秀“决赛的评委。在装有八万现场观众的演播厅里，在台上的表演嘉宾居然是(来自苏格兰的，因参加英国达人秀走红的)苏珊大妈(susan boyle)。我告诉她，“我明天就要启程去苏格兰。”她唱得很动听，还对观众说了几句中文，她并没有说简单的”你好“或者”谢谢“，她说的是——“送你葱”。为什么？这句话其实来源于中国版的“苏珊大妈”——一位五十岁的以卖菜为生，却对西方歌剧有出奇爱好的上海中年妇女(蔡洪平)。这位中国的苏珊大妈并不懂英文，法语或意大利文，所以她将歌剧中的词汇都换做中文中的蔬菜名，并且演唱出来。在她口中，歌剧《图兰朵》的最后一句便是“song ni cong”。当真正的英国苏珊大妈唱出这一句“中文的”《图兰朵》时，全场的八万观众也一起高声歌唱，场面的确有些滑稽。
我想susan boyle和这位上海的买菜农妇的确属于人群中的少数。她们是最不可能在演艺界成功的，而她们的勇气和才华让她们成功了，这个节目和舞台给予了她们一个实现个人梦想的机会。这样看来，与众不同好像没有那么难。从不同的方面审视，我们每个人都是不同的。但是我想，与众不同是一件好事，因为你代表了不一样的观点，你拥有了做改变的机会。
我这一代中国人很幸运的目睹并且参与了中国在过去二三十年中经历的巨变。我记得1990年，当我刚大学毕业时，我申请了当时北京的第一家五星级酒店——长城喜来登酒店的销售部门的工作。这家酒店现在仍在北京。当我被一位日本籍经理面试了一个半小时之后，他问到，“杨小姐，你有什么想问我的吗？”，我屏住呼吸，问道“是的，你能告诉我，具体我需要销售些什么吗？”当时的我，对五星级酒店的销售部门没有任何概念，事实上，那是我第一次进到一家五星级酒店。
我当时也在参加另一场“面试”，中国国家电视台的首次公开试镜，与我一起参与选拔的还有另外1000名大学女毕业生。节目制作人说，他们希望找到一位甜美，无辜(lol)，漂亮的新鲜面孔。轮到我的时候，我问道“为什么在电视屏幕上，女性总应该表现出甜美漂亮，甚至是服从性的一面？为什么她们不能有她们自己的想法和声音？“我觉得我的问题甚至有点冒犯到了他。但实际上，他们对我的表现印象深刻。我进入了第二轮选拔，第三轮，第四轮，直至最后的第七场选拔，我是唯一一个走到最后的试镜者。我从此走上了国家电视台黄金时段的荧幕。你可能不相信，但在当时，我所主持的电视节目是中国第一个，不让主持人念已经审核过的稿件的节目(掌声)。我每周需要面对两亿到三亿左右的电视观众。
几年以后，我决定来美国哥伦比亚大学继续深造，之后也开始运营自己的媒体公司，这也是我在职业生涯初始时所没有预料到的。我的公司做很多不同的业务，在过去这些年里，我访谈过一千多人。经常有年轻人对我说，“杨澜，你改变了我的人生”，我对此感到非常自豪。我也幸运的目睹了整个国家的转变：我参与了北京申奥和上海世博会。我看到中国在拥抱这个世界，而世界也进一步的接受中国。但有时我也在想，今天的。年轻人的生活是什么样的？他们(与我们相比)有什么不同？他们将带给中国，甚至整个世界的未来一些怎样的变化？
我想通过社交媒体来谈一谈中国的年轻人们。首先，他们是谁，他们是什么样子？这是一位叫郭美美的女孩儿，20岁，年轻漂亮。她在中国版的twitter上——新浪微博上，炫耀她所拥有的奢侈品，衣服，包和车。她甚至宣称她是中国红十字会的工作人员。她没有意识到她的行为触及了中国民众极为敏感的神经，这引发了一场全民大讨论，民众开始质疑红十字会的公信力。中国红十字会为了平息这场争议甚至举办了一场记者会来澄清，直至今日，对于”郭美美事件“的调查仍在继续。
时至今日，我们所知道的事实是，她谎报了她的头衔，可能是因为她的虚荣心，希望把自己和慈善机构联系起来。所有那些奢侈品都是她的男朋友给她买的，而那位”男朋友“的确曾经是红十字会的工作人员。这解释起来很复杂，总之，公众对他们的解释仍然不满意，这仍然是在风口浪尖的一件事。这件事体现出(中国社会)对长期不透明的政府机关的不信任，同时也表现出社交媒体(微博)巨大的社会影响力。
微博在XX年得到了爆炸性的增长，微博的访问用户增长了一倍，用户的访问时间是XX年的三倍。一个最主要的微博平台，拥有1.4亿的微博用户，而腾讯拥有两亿用户。(在中国)最有名的微博主——不是我——是一位电影明星，她拥有近九百五十万”粉丝“。接近80%的微博用户是年轻人，三十岁以下。因为传统媒体还在政府的强力控制之下，社交媒体提供了一个开放的平台进行了一些(民众观点的)分流。因为这样分流的渠道并不多，从这个平台上爆发出的能量往往非常强烈，有时候甚至过于强烈。
通过微博，我们可以更好的了解到中国的年轻一代。首先，他们中的大多数都出生在八零九零年代，在独生子女的生育政策的大背景下长大。因为偏好男孩的家庭会选择性的堕胎，现在(中国)的年轻男性的数量多过年轻女性三千万，这可能带来社会的不稳定(危险)，但是我们知道，在这个全球化的社会中，他们可能可以去其他国家找女朋友。大多数人都拥有良好的教育。这一代中国人中的文盲率已经低于1%。在城市中，80%的孩子可以上大学，但他们将要面对的是一个，有接近7%的人口都是老年人的社会，这个数字在2030年会增长到15%。在这个国家，传统是让年轻人来从经济上和医疗上来支持老年人，这意味着，一对年轻的夫妻将需要支持四个平均年龄是73岁的老人。
所以对于年轻人而言，生活并不是容易。本科毕业生也不在是紧缺资源。在城市中，本科生的月起薪通常是400美元(2500人民币)，而公寓的平均月租金却是500美元。所以他们的解决方式是合租——挤在有限的空间中以节省开支，他们叫自己”蚁族。“对于那些准备好结婚并希望购买一套公寓的中国年轻夫妇而言，他们发现他们必须要不间断的工作30到40年才可以负担得起一套公寓。对于同样的美国年轻夫妇而言，他们只需要五年时间。
在近两亿的涌入城市的农民工中，他们中的60%都是年轻人。他们发现自己被夹在了城市和农村中，大多数人不愿意回到农村，但他们在城市也找不到归属感。他们工作更长的时间却获得更少的薪水和社会福利。他们也更容易面临失业，受到通货膨胀，银行利率，人民币升值的影响，甚至美国和欧盟对于中国制造产品的抵制也会影响到他们。去年，在中国南方的一个制造工厂里，有十三位年轻的工人选择了结束自己的生命，一个接一个，像一场传染病。他们轻生的原因各有不同，但整个事件提醒了中国社会和政府，需要更多的关注这些在精神上和生理上都与外界脱节的年轻农民工人。
对于那些回到农村的年轻人，他们所经历的城市生活，所学到的知识，技巧和建立的社会网络，让他们通常更受欢迎。特别是在互联网的帮助下，他们更有可能获得工作，提升农村的农业水平和发展新的商业机会。在过去的一些年中，一些沿海的城镇甚至出现了劳动力短缺。
这些图片展现出整体的社会背景。第一张图片是恩格斯系数(食品支出占总消费支出的比例)，可以看到在过去的十年中，食物和生活必需品在家庭消费中的比例有所下降(37%)，然后在过去的两年中，这项指数上升到39%，说明近两年中生活成本的攀升。基尼系数早已越过了危险的0.4，到达0.5——这甚至高过了美国——体现出极大的贫富差距，所以我们才看到整个社会的失衡。同时，“仇富心态”也开始在整个社会蔓延，任何与腐败和走后门相关的政府或商业丑闻都会引发社会危机和不稳定。
通过微博上很火的话题，我们可以看到年轻人的关注点。社会公正和政府的公信力是他们首要需求的。在过去的十年中，急速的城市化让民众读到太多强制私人住户拆迁的新闻，这引发了年轻一代的愤怒和不理解。有时候，被拆迁的住户以自杀和自焚的方式来抗议(强制拆迁行为)。当这些事件越来越常在互联网上被揭露出来，人们期待政府可以采取一些更积极的制止行动。
好消息是，今年早些时候，人民代表大会通过了一项关于房屋征用和拆迁的新法规，将征用和拆迁的权利从当地政府移交到了法庭。相同的，很多其他与公共安全相关的问题也在互联网上被热烈讨论。我们听到有太多空气污染，水污染，有毒食品的报道。你甚至都想不到，我们还有假牛肉。人们用一种特殊的材料加入鸡肉和鱼肉中，然后以牛肉的价格进行出售。最近，人们对食用油也很担忧，大量的餐馆被发现在使用“地沟油“。所有这些事件引发了互联网上民众观点的大爆发。幸运的是，我们看到了政府正在更积极和更及时的对这些民众的质疑给予回应。
一方面，年轻人越来越积极的参与到公共事务中；另一方面，他们也在寻找或者说迷失与个人生活的价值和定位。中国很快就要超过美国，成为世界上第一大奢侈品消费国——这还不包括中国人在国外的消费。但你知道吗，超过半数中国的奢侈品消费者的(年)收入都低于两千美元。他们其实并不富裕，他们用那些奢侈品牌的服装和包体现身份和社会地位。这是一位在电视节目上公然表明，自己宁愿在宝马车里哭也不坐在自行车后笑的年轻女孩。当然，我们也有更多的年轻人，喜欢微笑，不管是在宝马还是在自行车上。
在下一幅图中，你看到的是现在非常流行的”裸婚“，这并不代表这“裸露出席婚礼”，这体现的是年轻人愿意接受结婚不买房，不买车，不买钻戒，甚至不办婚宴的这个现实，作为对纯朴的真爱的致敬。但同时，人们也在通过社交媒体做一些善事。这副图片里，这辆车上装有500只被”绑架“来，准备被送去屠宰的狗，这辆车被网友们发现后，人们开始通过微博关注事态的进展，并且通过捐钱，捐食物和做义工来试图拦截该车。在几个小时的周旋后，这500条狗获救并被放生。有更多的人在通过微博寻找丢失的孩子。一位父亲将他失散的儿子的照片发布到微博上，在几千条”转发“之后，他的儿子被找到，家庭的团聚也在微博上被报道出来。
“幸福(感)”是近两年中国的流行词汇。幸福感不仅仅与个人体验和价值观相关，更多的，它与环境息息相关。人们在思考：我们是否要牺牲环境来提升gdp?我们要怎样进行社会和政治体制的改革来应对经济的发展，保持稳定性和可持续性发展？同时，这个系统的自我修正能力是否足够强大，是否能够让生活在其中的人民接受在前进过程中的各种压力和困难？我想这些都是中国人民需要回答的问题，而中国的年轻一代将在改变这个国家的过程中也改变自己。
非常感谢。
Today is World Book Day, let us work together to remember the reader's festival. April 23 is the mean day of world literature, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Vega and many other world-famous writers born or died that day. In 1995, UNESCO this day each year as "World Book Day" to encourage people to discover the pleasure of reading.
In recent years, the "World Book Day" has become a holiday country many readers. Bacon said: "Reading is to create a complete personality." For this reason, all countries regardless of level or civilian, regarded as a part of school life, and is a very important part. Even in highly developed network of the United States, the number of public library cardholders still as high as 148 million, that is one person every two Americans to hold reader card; According to statistics, the American people to the number of public libraries who are watching football, basketball, baseball, hockey combined total of more than five times the number of people.
Human world famous love of reading in the Moscow subway, readily visible intellectuals who look carefully read intently. Moreover, these holding readers are reading voluminous care Weng Weng Tuo Soviet masters classics. The Japanese love of reading is universally acknowledged, tram in Japan, on the bus, whether it is well-dressed office workers or students wearing uniforms, not much difference in concentration reading.
Jews love reading. In every Jewish home, when the kids a little naive, and the mother will open the "Bible", drop a little honey on top, then called the children honey to kiss the "Bible" on. This ceremony is not evident intent: the book is sweet. Jewish cemetery often placed books, as "in the dead of night, the dead will come out of reading." Of course, this type of approach has some sense of meaning, that there is the end of life, knowledge was endless. There is also a Jewish family tradition from generation to generation, and that is to put bedside bookcase, if placed end of the bed, it will is considered disrespectful to the book.
Our world-famous cultural thing big country, the importance of education and reading ages. There are a lot of hard studying ancient touching story, such as "cutting the wall to steal light" Kuangheng, "capsule firefly Yingxue" car Yin, cantilever Cigu the Sun Jing and Su, Ouyang Xiu, "the three" reading, studying hard Zhongyan stories, etc., for their book was born, and died for the book, for books and music, for the book and bitter, for the book and the poor, for the book and thin, how many thousands of years to the interpretation of the epic, awe-inspiring story .
Another World Book Day has arrived, Book Day is to guide people to consciously name suggests reading, and develop reading habits. Reading is not just a matter of personal accomplishment and healthy personality progress, but the progress of the whole nation should be thinking big literate.
To this end, our school this initiative: open book, read it; read the book, Liaoba! Hope to see all students take positive action to make their own to develop a love of reading good habits to life every day as a school day.
when i was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we wereplaying on top of a bunk bed. i was two years older than my sister at the time-- i mean, i'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she hadto do everything that i wanted to do, and i wanted to play war. so we were up ontop of our bunk beds. and on one side of the bunk bed, i had put out all of myg.i. joe soldiers and weaponry. and on the other side were all my sister's mylittle ponies ready for a cavalry charge.
there are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, butsince my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story --(laughter) -- which is my sister's a little bit on the clumsy side. somehow,without any help or push from her older brother at all, suddenly amy disappearedoff of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. now inervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallensister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fourson the ground.
i was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that mysister and i played as safely and as quietly as possible. and seeing as how ihad accidentally broken amy's arm just one week before ... (laughter) ...heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet,(laughter) for which i have yet to be thanked, i was trying as hard as i could-- she didn't even see it coming -- i was trying as hard as i could to be on mybest behavior.
and i saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprisethreatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from thelong winter's nap for which they had settled. so i did the only thing my littlefrantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. and if youhave children, you've seen this hundreds of times before. i said, "amy, amy,wait. don't cry. don't cry. did you see how you landed? no human lands on allfours like that. amy, i think this means you're a unicorn."
(laughter)
now that was cheating, because there was nothing in the world my sisterwould want more than not to be amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but amythe special unicorn. of course, this was an option that was open to her brain atno point in the past. and you could see how my poor, manipulated sister facedconflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the painand suffering and surprise she just e_perienced, or contemplating her new-foundidentity as a unicorn. and the latter won out. instead of crying, instead ofceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negativeconsequences that would have ensued for me, instead a smile spread across herface and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of ababy unicorn ... (laughter) ... with one broken leg.
what we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we hadno idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of ascientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at thehuman brain. what we had stumbled across is something called positivepsychology, which is the reason that i'm here today and the reason that i wakeup every morning.
when i first started talking about this research outside of academia, outwith companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is tostart your talk with a graph. the very first thing i want to do is start my talkwith a graph. this graph looks boring, but this graph is the reason i gete_cited and wake up every morning. and this graph doesn't even mean anything;it's fake data. what we found is --
(laughter)
if i got this data back studying you here in the room, i would be thrilled,because there's very clearly a trend that's going on there, and that means thati can get published, which is all that really matters. the fact that there's oneweird red dot that's up above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- iknow who you are, i saw you earlier -- that's no problem. that's no problem, asmost of you know, because i can just delete that dot. i can delete that dotbecause that's clearly a measurement error. and we know that's a measurementerror because it's messing up my data.
so one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statisticsand business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do weeliminate the weirdos. how do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the lineof best fit? which is fantastic if i'm trying to find out how many advil theaverage person should be taking -- two. but if i'm interested in potential, ifi'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy orcreativity, what we're doing is we're creating the cult of the average withscience.
if i asked a question like, "how fast can a child learn how to read in aclassroom?" scientists change the answer to "how fast does the average childlearn how to read in that classroom?" and then we tailor the class right towardsthe average. now if you fall below the average on this curve, then psychologistsget thrilled, because that means you're either depressed or you have a disorder,or hopefully both. we're hoping for both because our business model is, if youcome into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leaveknowing you have 10, so you keep coming back over and over again. we'll go backinto your childhood if necessary, but eventually what we want to do is make younormal again. but normal is merely average.
and what i posit and what positive psychology posits is that if we studywhat is merely average, we will remain merely average. then instead of deletingthose positive outliers, what i intentionally do is come into a population likethis one and say, why? why is it that some of you are so high above the curve interms of your intellectual ability, athletic ability, musical ability,creativity, energy levels, your resiliency in the face of challenge, your senseof humor? whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what i want to do is studyyou. because maybe we can glean information -- not just how to move people up tothe average, but how we can move the entire average up in our companies andschools worldwide.
the reason this graph is important to me is, when i turn on the news, itseems like the majority of the information is not positive, in fact it'snegative. most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters.and very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negativeto positive in the world. what that's doing is creating something called themedical school syndrome -- which, if you know people who've been to medicalschool, during the first year of medical training, as you read through a list ofall the symptoms and diseases that could happen, suddenly you realize you haveall of them.
i have a brother in-law named bobo -- which is a whole other story. bobomarried amy the unicorn. bobo called me on the phone from yale medical school,and bobo said, "shawn, i have leprosy." (laughter) which, even at yale, ise_traordinarily rare. but i had no idea how to console poor bobo because he hadjust gotten over an entire week of menopause.
(laughter)
see what we're finding is it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us,but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.and if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we canchange every single educational and business outcome at the same time.
when i applied to harvard, i applied on a dare. i didn't e_pect to get in,and my family had no money for college. when i got a military scholarship twoweeks later, they allowed me to go. suddenly, something that wasn't even apossibility became a reality. when i went there, i assumed everyone else wouldsee it as a privilege as well, that they'd be e_cited to be there. even ifyou're in a classroom full of people smarter than you, you'd be happy just to bein that classroom, which is what i felt. but what i found there is, while somepeople e_perience that, when i graduated after my four years and then spent thene_t eight years living in the dorms with the students -- harvard asked me to; iwasn't that guy. (laughter) i was an officer of harvard to counsel studentsthrough the difficult four years. and what i found in my research and myteaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with theiroriginal success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains werefocused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or theirphysics. their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles,the stresses, the complaints.
when i first went in there, i walked into the freshmen dining hall, whichis where my friends from waco, te_as, which is where i grew up -- i know some ofyou have heard of it. when they'd come to visit me, they'd look around, they'dsay, "this freshman dining hall looks like something out of hogwart's from themovie "harry potter," which it does. this is hogwart's from the movie "harrypotter" and that's harvard. and when they see this, they say, "shawn, why do youwaste your time studying happiness at harvard? seriously, what does a harvardstudent possibly have to be unhappy about?"
embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science ofhappiness. because what that question assumes is that our e_ternal world ispredictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if i know everything aboutyour e_ternal world, i can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness.90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the e_ternal world,but by the way your brain processes the world. and if we change it, if we changeour formula for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way that wecan then affect reality. what we found is that only 25 percent of job successesare predicted by i.q. 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimismlevels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challengeinstead of as a threat.
i talked to a boarding school up in new england, probably the mostprestigious boarding school, and they said, "we already know that. so everyyear, instead of just teaching our students, we also have a wellness week. andwe're so e_cited. monday night we have the world's leading e_pert coming in tospeak about adolescent depression. tuesday night it's school violence andbullying. wednesday night is eating disorders. thursday night is elicit druguse. and friday night we're trying to decide between risky se_ or happiness."(laughter) i said, "that's most people's friday nights." (laughter) (applause)which i'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. silence on thephone. and into the silence, i said, "i'd be happy to speak at your school, butjust so you know, that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. whatyou've done is you've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but nottalked about the positive."
the absence of disease is not health. here's how we get to health: we needto reverse the formula for happiness and success. in the last three years, i'vetraveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in themidst of an economic downturn. and what i found is that most companies andschools follow a formula for success, which is this: if i work harder, i'll bemore successful. and if i'm more successful, then i'll be happier. thatundergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that wemotivate our behavior.
and the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for tworeasons. first, every time your brain has a success, you just changed thegoalpost of what success looked like. you got good grades, now you have to getbetter grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a betterschool, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your salestarget, we're going to change your sales target. and if happiness is on theopposite side of success, your brain never gets there. what we've done is we'vepushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. and that's because wethink we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
but the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. if you canraise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their braine_periences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain atpositive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral orstressed. your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levelsrise. in fact, what we've found is that every single business outcome improves.your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain atnegative, neutral or stressed. you're 37 percent better at sales. doctors are 19percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis whenpositive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. which means we can reversethe formula. if we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then ourbrains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and moreintelligently.
what we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start tosee what our brains are actually capable of. because dopamine, which floods intoyour system when you're positive, has two functions. not only does it make youhappier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you toadapt to the world in a different way.
we've found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able tobecome more positive. in just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in arow, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually workmore optimistically and more successfully. we've done these things in researchnow in every single company that i've worked with, getting them to write downthree new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three newthings each day. and at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a patternof scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.
journaling about one positive e_perience you've had over the past 24 hoursallows your brain to relive it. e_ercise teaches your brain that your behaviormatters. we find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural adhdthat we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows ourbrains to focus on the task at hand. and finally, random acts of kindness areconscious acts of kindness. we get people, when they open up their inbo_, towrite one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social supportnetwork.
and by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we trainour bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness andsuccess, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create areal revolution.
thank you very much.
(applause)
I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." "What do you mean?"She said, "Youre giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions.
I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself,"Wow, if its me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk.
Maybe God wants us to meet a few wrong people before meeting the right one so that when we finally meet the right person, we will know how to be grateful for that gift.
When the door of happiness closes, another opens, but often times we look so long at the closed door that we don't see the one which has been opened for us.
The best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch and swing with, never say a word, and then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you've ever had.
It's true that we don't know what we've got until we lose it, but it's also true that we don't know what we've been missing until it arrives.
Giving someone all your love is never an assurance that they'll love you back! Don't expect love in return; just wait for it to grow in their heart but if it doesn't, be content it grew in yours. It takes only a minute to get a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone, but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.
Don't go for looks; they can deceive. Don't go for wealth; even that fades away. Go for someone who makes you smile because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright. Find the one that makes your heart smile.
We've all been taught that we should help people. It is the right thing to do and will make us popular with others. It may even win us favors in return. However, we must be realistic. We can't say yes to every request. If we did, we would fail or go crazy for sure. Sometimes we simply don't have the time to help. In this case, we must know how to say no politely.
When we need to say no, here is one method we can try. First, we should tell the truth. If we really can't do something, we should just say so. Second, we should remember to refuse requests politely. We must communicate clearly, but must also be sincere and sympathetic. A true friend will understand. Finally, we must not feel guilty about saying no. Sometimes refusing others is the right thing to do. It can save ourselves, and them, a lot of trouble. In short, we cannot please everyone all the time. Refusing favors is a part of life.
from cancer, a cancer that can’t becured. He was 18 years old and he could die anytime. All his life, he was stuckin his house being taken cared by his mother. He never went outside but he wassick of staying home and wanted to go out for once. So he asked his mother andshe gave him permission.
He walked down his block and found a lot of stores. He passed a CD storeand looked through the front door for a second as he walked. He stopped and wentback to look into the store. He saw a beautiful girl about his age and he knewit was love at first sight. He opened the door and walked in, not looking atanything else but her. He walked closer and closer until he was finally at thefront desk where she sat.
She looked up and asked, “Can I help you?
She smiled and he thought it was the most beautiful smile he has ever seenbefore and wanted to kiss her right there.
He said, “Uh... Yeah... Umm... I would like to buy a CD.
He picked one out and gave her money for it.
“Would you like me to wrap it for you? she asked, smiling her cute smileagain.
He nodded and she went to the back. She came back with the wrapped CD andgave it to him. He took it and walked out of the store.
He went home and from then on, he went to that store every day and bought aCD, and she wrapped it for him. He took the CD home and put it in his closet. Hewas still too shy to ask her out and he really wanted to but he couldn’t. Hismother found out about this and told him to just ask her. So the next day, hetook all his courage and went to the store as usual. He bought a CD like he didevery day and once again she went to the back of the store and came back with itwrapped. He took it and when she wasn’t looking, he left his phone number on thedesk and ran out...
RRRRRING!!!
One day the phone rang, and the mother picked it up and said, “Hello?
It was the girl!!! The mother started to cry and said, “You don’t know? Hepassed away yesterday...
The line was quiet except for the cries of the boy’s mother. Later in theday, the mother went into the boy’s room because she wanted to remember him. Shethought she would start by looking at his clothes. So she opened the closet.
She was face to face with piles and piles and piles of unopened CDs. Shewas surprised to find all these CDs and she picked one up and sat down on thebed and she started to open one. Inside, there was a CD and as she took it outof the wrapper, out fell a piece of paper. The mother picked it up and startedto read it. It said: Hi... I think U R really cute. Do u wanna go out with me?Love, Jocelyn.
The mother was deeply moved and opened another CD...
Again there was a piece of paper. It said: Hi... I think U R really cute.Do u wanna go out with me? Love, Jocelyn.
Love is... when you’ve had a huge fight but then decide to put aside youregos, hold hands and say, “I Love You.
And actually, Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate, but they werent whale lovers. A few of them certainly were. But were talking about a lot of people who were just really interested and really caught up in this great meme, and in fact someone from Greenpeace came back on the site and thanked Reddit for its participation. But this wasnt really out of altruism. This was just out of Interest in doing something cool.
And this is kind of how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. Because the Internet provides this level playing field. Your link is just as good as your link, which is just as good as my link. As long as we have a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter how big a budget you have.
The other important thing is that it costs nothing to get that content online now. There are so many great publishing tools that are available, it only takes a few minutes of your time now to actually produce something. And the cost of iteration is so cheap that you might as well give it a go.
And if you do, be genuine about it. Be honest. Be up front. And one of the great lessons that Greenpeace actually learned was that its okay to lose control. The final message that I want to share with all of you -- that you can do well online. If you want to succeed youve got to be okay to just lose control. Thank you.
in a funny, rapid-fire 4 minutes, ale_is ohanian of reddit tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale's rise to web stardom. the lesson of mister splashy pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the facebook age.
这段有趣的4分钟演讲，来自 reddit 网站创始人 ale_is ohanian。他讲了一个座头鲸在网上一夜成名的真实故事。“溅水先生”的故事是脸 ”）制造者和传播者共同创造的经典案例。
演讲的开头，ale_is ohanian 介绍了“溅水先生”的故事。“绿色和平”环保组织为了阻止日本的捕鲸行为，在一只鲸鱼体内植入新片，并发起一个为这只座头鲸起名的活动。“绿色和平”组织希望起低调奢华有内涵的名字，但经过 reddit 的宣传和推动，票数最多的却是非常不高大上的“溅水先生”这个名字。经过几番折腾，“绿色和平”接受了这个名字，并且这一行动成功阻止了日本捕鲸活动。
演讲内容节选（ale_ ohanian 从社交网络的角度分析这个事件）
and actually, redditors in the internet community were happy to participate, but they weren't whale lovers. a few of them certainly were. but we're talking about a lot of people who were just really interested and really caught up in this great meme, and in fact someone from greenpeace came back on the site and thanked reddit for its participation. but this wasn't really out of altruism. this was just out of interest in doing something cool.
事实上，reddit 的社区用户们很高兴参与其中，但他们并非是鲸鱼爱好者。当然，他们中的一小部分或许是。我们看到的是一群人积极地去参与到这个米姆（社会活动）中，实际上 “绿色和平”中的人登陆 ，感谢大家的参与。网友们这么做并非是完全的利他主义。他们只是觉得做这件事很酷。
and this is kind of how the internet works. this is that great big secret. because the internet provides this level playing field. your link is just as good as your link, which is just as good as my link. as long as we have a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter how big a budget you have.
这就是互联网的运作方式。这就是我说的秘密。因为互联网提供的是一个机会均等平台。你分享的链接跟他分享的链接一样有趣，我分享的链接也不赖。只要我们有一个浏览器，不论你的财富几何，你都可以去到想浏览的页面。
the other important thing is that it costs nothing to get that content online now. there are so many great publishing tools that are available, it only takes a few minutes of your time now to actually produce something. and the cost of iteration is so cheap that you might as well give it a go.
另外，从互联网获取内容不需要任何成本。如今，互联网有各种各样的发布工具，你只需要几分钟就可 这种行为的成本非常低，你也可以试试。
and if you do, be genuine about it. be honest. be up front. and one of the great lessons that greenpeace actually learned was that it's okay to lose control. the final message that i want to share with all of you -- that you can do well online. if you want to succeed you've got to be okay to just lose control. thank you.
如果你真的决定试试，那么请真挚、诚实、坦率地去做。“绿色和平”在这个故事中获得的教训是，有时候失控并不一定是坏事。最后我想告诉你们的是——你可以在网络上做得很好。如果你想在网络上成功，你得经得起一点失控。谢谢。
Theproblemisthat—let'ssayshegotpregnantthatday,thatday—ninemonthsofpregnancy,threemonthsofmaternityleave,sixmonthstocatchyourbreath—Fast-forwardtwoyears,moreoften—andasI'veseenit—womenstartthinkingaboutthiswayearlier—whentheygetengaged,ormarried,whentheystartthinkingabouthavingachild,whichcantakealongtime.Onewomancametoseemeaboutthis.Shelookedalittleyoung.AndIsaid,"Soareyouandyourhusbandthinkingabouthavingababy?"Andshesaid,"Ohno,I'mnotmarried."Shedidn'tevenhaveaboyfriend.
A Brother Like That A Brother Like That A friend of mine named Paul received an automobile from his brother as a Christmas present. On Christmas Eve when Paul came out of his office, a street urchin was walking around the shiny new car, admiring it. "Is this your car, Mister?" he said. Paul nodded. "My brother gave it to me for Christmas."
The boy was astounded. "You mean your brother gave it to you and it didn’t cost you nothing? Boy, I wish . . ."
He hesitated. Of course Paul knew what he was going to wish for. He was going to wish he had a brother like that. But what the lad said jarred Paul all the way down to his heels. "I wish," the boy went on, "That I could be a brother like that."
Paul looked at the boy in astonishment, then impulsively he added, "Would you like to take a ride in my car?"
"Oh yes, Id love that."
After a short ride, the boy turned with his eyes aglow, said, "Mister, would you mind driving in front of my house?"
Paul smiled a little. He thought he knew what the lad wanted. He wanted to show his neighbors that he could ride home in a big automobile. But Paul was wrong again. "Will you stop where those two steps are?" the boy asked. He ran up the steps. Then in a little while Paul heard him coming back, but he was not coming fast. He was carrying his little crippled brother. He sathim down on the bottom step, then sort of squeezed up against him and pointed to the car. "There she is, Buddy, just like I told you upstairs. His brother gave it to him for Christmas and it didn’t cost him a cent. And some day Im gonna give you one just like it . . . then you can see for yourself all the pretty things in the Christmas windows that Ive been trying to tell you about."
Paul got out and lifted the lad to the front seat of his car. The shining-eyed older brother climbed in beside him and the three of them began a memorable holiday ride. That Christmas Eve, Paul learned what Jesus meant when he said: "It is more blessed to give . . . "
when i was nine years old i went off to summer camp for the first time. andmy mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like aperfectly natural thing to do. because in my family, reading was the primarygroup activity. and this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was reallyjust a different way of being social. you have the animal warmth of your familysitting right ne_t to you, but you are also free to go roaming around theadventureland inside your own mind. and i had this idea that camp was going tobe just like this, but better. (laughter) i had a vision of 10 girls sitting ina cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
(laughter)
camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. and on the very firstday our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that shesaid we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill campspirit. and it went like this: "r-o-w-d-i-e, that's the way we spell , rowdie, let's get rowdie." yeah. so i couldn't figure out for the lifeof me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this wordincorrectly. (laughter) but i recited a cheer. i recited a cheer along witheverybody else. i did my best. and i just waited for the time that i could gooff and read my books.
but the first time that i took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girlin the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "why are you being so mellow?" --mellow, of course, being the e_act opposite of r-o-w-d-i-e. and then the secondtime i tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned e_pression on herface and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all workvery hard to be outgoing.
and so i put my books away, back in their suitcase, and i put them under mybed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. and i felt kind of guiltyabout this. i felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling outto me and i was forsaking them. but i did forsake them and i didn't open thatsuitcase again until i was back home with my family at the end of thesummer.
now, i tell you this story about summer camp. i could have told you 50others just like it -- all the times that i got the message that somehow myquiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go,that i should be trying to pass as more of an e_trovert. and i always senseddeep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty e_cellent just asthey were. but for years i denied this intuition, and so i became a wall streetlawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that i had always longed to be --partly because i needed to prove to myself that i could be bold and assertivetoo. and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would havepreferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. and i made theseself-negating choices so refle_ively, that i wasn't even aware that i was makingthem.
now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it isalso our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. and at the risk of soundinggrandiose, it is the world's loss. because when it comes to creativity and toleadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. a third to a half of thepopulation are introverts -- a third to a half. so that's one out of every twoor three people you know. so even if you're an e_trovert yourself, i'm talkingabout your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sittingne_t to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deepand real in our society. we all internalize it from a very early age withouteven having a language for what we're doing.
now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is.it's different from being shy. shyness is about fear of social judgment.introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including socialstimulation. so e_troverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereasintroverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their mostcapable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. not all the time --these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. so the key then toma_imizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulationthat is right for us.
but now here's where the bias comes in. our most important institutions,our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for e_troverts and fore_troverts' need for lots of stimulation. and also we have this belief systemright now that i call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity andall productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
so if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: when i was going toschool, we sat in rows. we sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most ofour work pretty autonomously. but nowadays, your typical classroom has pods ofdesks -- four or five or si_ or seven kids all facing each other. and kids areworking in countless group assignments. even in subjects like math and creativewriting, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are nowe_pected to act as committee members. and for the kids who prefer to go off bythemselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or,worse, as problem cases. and the vast majority of teachers reports believingthat the ideal student is an e_trovert as opposed to an introvert, even thoughintroverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according toresearch. (laughter)
okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. now, most of us work in openplan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gazeof our coworkers. and when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinelypassed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be verycareful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we mightall favor nowadays. and interesting research by adam grant at the wharton schoolhas found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than e_trovertsdo, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likelyto let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an e_trovert can, quiteunwittingly, get so e_cited about things that they're putting their own stamp onthings, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to thesurface.
now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have beenintroverts. i'll give you some e_amples. eleanor roosevelt, rosa parks, gandhi-- all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy.and they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies wastelling them not to. and this turns out to have a special power all its own,because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm, not because theyenjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; theywere there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what theythought was right.
now i think at this point it's important for me to say that i actually lovee_troverts. i always like to say some of my best friends are e_troverts,including my beloved husband. and we all fall at different points, of course,along the introvert/e_trovert spectrum. even carl jung, the psychologist whofirst popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pureintrovert or a pure e_trovert. he said that such a man would be in a lunaticasylum, if he e_isted at all. and some people fall smack in the middle of theintrovert/e_trovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. and i oftenthink that they have the best of all worlds. but many of us do recognizeourselves as one type or the other.
and what i'm saying is that culturally we need a much better balance. weneed more of a yin and yang between these two types. this is especiallyimportant when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because whenpsychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find arepeople who are very good at e_changing ideas and advancing ideas, but who alsohave a serious streak of introversion in them.
and this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity.so darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned downdinner party invitations. theodor geisel, better known as dr. seuss, he dreamedup many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had inthe back of his house in la jolla, california. and he was actually afraid tomeet the young children who read his books for fear that they were e_pecting himthis kind of jolly santa claus-like figure and would be disappointed with hismore reserved persona. steve wozniak invented the first apple computer sittingalone in his cubical in hewlett-packard where he was working at the time. and hesays that he never would have become such an e_pert in the first place had henot been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.
now of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating --and case in point, is steve wozniak famously coming together with steve jobs tostart apple computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for somepeople it is the air that they breathe. and in fact, we have known for centuriesabout the transcendent power of solitude. it's only recently that we'vestrangely begun to forget it. if you look at most of the world's majorreligions, you will find seekers -- moses, jesus, buddha, muhammad -- seekerswho are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then haveprofound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of thecommunity. so no wilderness, no revelations.
this is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporarypsychology. it turns out that we can't even be in a group of people withoutinstinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. even about seemingly personaland visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping thebeliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you'redoing.
and groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismaticperson in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the besttalker and having the best ideas -- i mean zero. so ... (laughter) you might befollowing the person with the best ideas, but you might not. and do you reallywant to leave it up to chance? much better for everybody to go off bythemselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of groupdynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in awell-managed environment and take it from there.
now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? why are wesetting up our schools this way and our workplaces? and why are we making theseintroverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of thetime? one answer lies deep in our cultural history. western societies, and inparticular the u.s., have always favored the man of action over the man ofcontemplation and "man" of contemplation. but in america's early days, we livedin what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point,valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. and if you lookat the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like"character, the grandest thing in the world." and they featured role models likeabraham lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. ralph waldoemerson called him "a man who does not offend by superiority."
but then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture thathistorians call the culture of personality. what happened is we had evolved anagricultural economy to a world of big business. and so suddenly people aremoving from small towns to the cities. and instead of working alongside peoplethey've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in acrowd of strangers. so, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism andcharisma suddenly come to seem really important. and sure enough, the self-helpbooks change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "how towin friends and influence people." and they feature as their role models reallygreat salesmen. so that's the world we're living in today. that's our culturalinheritance.
now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and i'm alsonot calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. the same religions who sendtheir sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. and theproblems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are sovast and so comple_ that we are going to need armies of people coming togetherto solve them working together. but i am saying that the more freedom that wegive introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up withtheir own unique solutions to these problems.
so now i'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. guess what?books. i have a suitcase full of books. here's margaret atwood, "cat's eye."here's a novel by milan kundera. and here's "the guide for the perple_ed" bymaimonides. but these are not e_actly my books. i brought these books with mebecause they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors.
my grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a smallapartment in brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when i was growingup, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence andpartly because it was filled with books. i mean literally every table, everychair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as asurface for swaying stacks of books. just like the rest of my family, mygrandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.
but he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in thesermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. he wouldtakes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricatetapestries of ancient and humanist thought. and people would come from all overto hear him speak.
but here's the thing about my grandfather. underneath this ceremonial role,he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he deliveredthese sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregationthat he had been speaking to for 62 years. and even away from the podium, whenyou called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely forfear that he was taking up too much of your time. but when he died at the age of94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodatethe crowd of people who came out to mourn him. and so these days i try to learnfrom my grandfather's e_ample in my own way.
so i just published a book about introversion, and it took me about sevenyears to write. and for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because i wasreading, i was writing, i was thinking, i was researching. it was my version ofmy grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. but now all of a suddenmy job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talkingabout introversion. (laughter) and that's a lot harder for me, because ashonored as i am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my naturalmilieu.
so i prepared for moments like these as best i could. i spent the last yearpracticing public speaking every chance i could get. and i call this my "year ofspeaking dangerously." (laughter) and that actually helped a lot. but i'll tellyou, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes toour attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poisedon the brink on dramatic change. i mean, we are. and so i am going to leave younow with three calls for action for those who share this vision.
number one: stop the madness for constant group work. just stop it.(laughter) thank you. (applause) and i want to be clear about what i'm saying,because i deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chattycafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people cometogether and serendipitously have an e_change of ideas. that is great. it'sgreat for introverts and it's great for e_troverts. but we need much moreprivacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. school, samething. we need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also needto be teaching them how to work on their own. this is especially important fore_troverted children too. they need to work on their own because that is wheredeep thought comes from in part.
okay, number two: go to the wilderness. be like buddha, have your ownrevelations. i'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our owncabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but i am saying that wecould all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.
number three: take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and whyyou put it there. so e_troverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. ormaybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. whatever it is,i hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with yourenergy and your joy. but introverts, you being you, you probably have theimpulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. and that'sokay. but occasionally, just occasionally, i hope you will open up yoursuitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs thethings you carry.
so i wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speaksoftly.
thank you very much.
(applause)
thank you. thank you.
I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our rooma couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours — and our little blue notebooks — yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class."
chinese restaurants have played an important role in american history, as a matter of fact. the cuban missile crisis was resolved in a chinese restaurant called yenching palace in washington, d.c.， which unfortunately is closed now, and about to be turned into walgreen's. and the house that john wilkes booth planned the assassination of abraham lincoln is actually also now a chinese restaurant called wok 'n roll, on h street in washington.
事实上，中国餐馆在美国历史上发挥了很重要的作用。古巴导弹危机是在华盛顿一家名叫“燕京馆”的中餐馆里解决的。很不幸，这家餐馆现在关门了，即将被改建成沃尔格林连锁药店。而约翰·威尔克斯·布斯刺杀林肯总统的那所房子现在也成了一家中餐馆，就是位于华盛顿的“锅和卷”。
and if you think about it, a lot of the foods that you think of or we think of or americans think of as chinese food are barely recognizable to chinese, for e_ample: beef with broccoli, egg rolls, general tso's chicken, fortune cookies, chop suey, the take-out bo_es.
如果你仔细想想，就会发现很多你们所认为或我们所认为，或是美国人所认为的中国食物，中国人并不认识。比如西兰花牛肉、蛋卷、左宗棠鸡、幸运饼干、杂碎、外卖盒子。
so, the interesting question is, how do you go from fortune cookies being something that is japanese to being something that is chinese? well, the short answer is, we locked up all the japanese during world war ii, including those that made fortune cookies, so that's the time when the chinese moved in, kind of saw a market opportunity and took over.
所以有趣的是，幸运饼干是怎么从日本的东西变成中国的东西的呢？简单地说，我们在二战时扣押了所以的日本人，包括那些做幸运饼干的。这时候，中国人来了，看到了商机，自然就据为己有了。
general tso's chicken -- which, by the way, in the us naval academy is called admiral tso's chicken. i love this dish. the original name in my book was actually called the long march of general tso, and he has marched very far indeed, because he is sweet, he is fried, and he is chicken -- all things that americans love.
左宗棠鸡，在美国海军军校被称为左司令鸡。我很喜欢这道菜。在我的书里，这道菜实际上叫左将军的长征，它确实在美国很受欢迎 ，因为它是甜的，油炸的，是鸡肉做的——全部都是美国人的最爱。
so, you know, i realized when i was there, general tso is kind of a lot like colonel sanders in america, in that he's known for chicken and not war. but in china, this guy's actually known for war and not chicken.
我意识到左宗棠将军有点像美国的桑德斯上校（肯德基创始人），因为他是因鸡肉而出名的而不是战争。而在中国，左宗棠确实是因为战争而不是鸡肉闻名的。
so it's kind of part of the phenomenon i called spontaneous self-organization, right, where, like in ant colonies, where little decisions made by -- on the micro-level actually have a big impact on the macro-level.
这就有点像我所说的自发组织现象。就像在蚂蚁群中，在微观层面上做的小小决定会在宏观层面上产生巨大的影响。
and the great innovation of chicken mcomuggets was not nuggetfying them, because that's kind of an easy concept, but the trick behind chicken mcomuggets was, they were able to remove the chicken from the bone in a cost-effective manner, which is why it took so long for other people to copy them.
麦乐鸡块的发明并没有给他们带来切实收益，因为这个想法很简单，但麦乐鸡背后的技巧是如何用一种划算的方式来把鸡肉从骨头上剔出来。这就是为什么过了这么久才有人模仿他们。
we can think of chinese restaurants perhaps as linu_: sort of an open source thing, right, where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system, that there can be specialized versions of chinese food, you know, depending on the region.
我们可以把中餐馆比作linu_：一种开源系统。一个人的想法可以在整个系统中被复制，被普及。在不同的地区，就有特别版本的中国菜。
大家好！
有位哲人说得好：如果你不能成为大道，那就当一条小路；如果你不能成为太阳，那就当一颗星星。决定成败的不是尺寸的大小，而在于做一个的你。
也许你常常抱怨自己没有怡人的相貌，没有动人的歌喉，没有惊人的壮举，没有骄人的成绩，没有……也许我们每个人都有自己无法实现的梦想，也许理想和现实总存在着差距。那么，面对这些，你是无奈，是悲痛，还是积极进取？我想每一位有上进心的人都是不甘沉沦的。
再次回顾哲人那段话，我想，大道固然引人注目，但小路也自有小路的风味；太阳虽然被人高歌，受人关注，但哪一颗星星不是“太阳”?只不过它距离我们太遥远罢了，而实际上，它或许比太阳更大，更亮。
总之，社会需要各种人才，每个人都有适合自己的位置。我们不必去追求那些遥不可及的梦想，只要做一个真实的、的你就可以了，不是吗？