TED英语演讲稿范文(精选12篇)
I'm a lifelong traveler. Even as a little kid, I was actually working out that it would be cheaper to go to boarding school in England than just to the best school down the road from my parents' house in California.
我这辈子都是个旅行者。 即使还是一个小孩子的时候, 我便了解,事实上, 去读英国寄宿学校会比 去加州父母家附近 最好的学校就读还来得便宜。
So, from the time I was nine years old I was flying alone several times a year over the North Pole, just to go to school. And of course the more I flew the more I came to love to fly, so the very week after I graduated from high school, I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend every season of my 18th year on a different continent.
所以,当我 9 岁时, 我在一年中,会独自飞行几回, 穿越北极,就只是去上学。 当然,飞得越频繁, 我越是爱上旅行, 所以就在我高中毕业后一周, 我找到一份清理桌子的工作, 为了让自己可以在 18 岁那年, 在地球不同的大陆上, 分别待上一季。
And then, almost inevitably, I became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one.
接着,几乎不可避免地 我成了一个旅游作家, 使我的工作和志趣 可以结合在一块儿。
And I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life.
我真的开始发觉 如果你可以幸运地 漫步于西藏的烛光寺庙, 或者在音乐的缭绕间 悠然信步于哈瓦那海岸, 你便能将那声音、天际 与靛蓝海洋的闪烁光芒 带给你家乡的朋友, 真确地捎来些许神奇, 点亮自身生命。
Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it.
除了,如你们所知, 当旅行时,你学到的第一件事情是 你必须以正确的视角看世界, 否则大地依然黯淡无光。
You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food. And I found that the best way that I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly, by going nowhere, just by sitting still.
你带一个易怒的男人爬喜马拉雅山, 他只会抱怨那儿的食物。 我发现,有点怪异的是, 最好的让自己可以培养 更专注和更珍惜世界的视角的诀窍是 哪儿都不去,静止于原处即可。
And of course sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives, a break. But it was also the only way that I could find to sift through the slideshow of my experience and make sense of the future and the past.
当然呆在原地正是我们许多人 寻常所得到的东西, 我们都渴望在快速的生活中获得休息。 但那却是我唯一的方法, 让自己可以重历自身的经验幻灯, 理解未来与过去。
And so, to my great surprise, I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba.
如此,我惊异地发现, 我发现无所去处 和游览西藏或古巴一样,令人兴奋。
And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions.
无所去处,只不过意谓着 每天花几分钟, 或每季花几天, 甚至,如同有些人所做的, 在生命中花上几年 长久地静思于某处, 寻找感动你最多的一瞬, 回忆你最真实的幸福时刻, 同时记住, 有时候,谋生与生活 彼此是处于光谱线上的两端的。
And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us.
当然,这是明智的众生历经几百年 从每个传统中所告诉我们的。
It's an old idea. More than 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were reminding us it's not our experience that makes our lives, it's what we do with it.
这是一个古老的概念。 早在两千多年前, 斯多葛学派提醒我们 并不是我们的经验 成就了我们的生命, 而是我们用那经验做了什么。
Imagine a hurricane suddenly sweeps through your town and reduces every last thing to rubble. One man is traumatized for life.
想象一下,一阵飓风 迅速扑向你的城市, 将所有一切化为废墟。 某个人身心遭受终身顿挫
But another, maybe even his brother, almost feels liberated, and decides this is a great chance to start his life anew. It's exactly the same event, but radically different responses. There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in "Hamlet," but thinking makes it so.
但另一个人,也许甚至是他的兄弟, 却几乎感觉释怀, 并认定,这是一个可以 使自己重获新生的重要机会。 这是同样的事件, 截然不同的回应。 没有什么是绝对的好坏, 正如莎士比亚 在《哈姆雷特》中所告诉我们的, 好坏由思维决定。
And this has certainly been my experience as a traveler. Twenty-four years ago I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. But the trip lasted a few days.
I encourage you to look up the scene on YouTube – but not right now – because it’s still a very funny piece. And it’s funny because it’s ridiculous, but also because it contains a kernel of truth. And the truth applies not only to college presidents, but to all of us. How many times have we decided we’re against an idea before we’ve even heard it? How guilty are we of deciding “I’m against it” without even knowing what “it” is?
Many times, we know what we’re against based on who is saying it. If an idea comes from a certain public figure, politician, or media outlet, we already know how we feel. Partly this is because our public discourse has become so predictable. We’ve lost the capacity for surprise, for revelation. Speaking of predictable, here is the moment where an ambassador of an older generation – that would be me – tells millennials – most of you – about the evils of social media! But hear me out…
Obviously, social media has transformed our lives and our relationships. It obviously has many advantages, allowing us to share news and information quickly with people around the world. But it also heightens our sense of outrage and speeds up arguments, depriving us of the time and space for careful reflection. Bombarded with notifications, pressured to respond before the media cycle turns over, we tap out our position – our opposition – in seconds. It’s easy to be against something in fewer than 280 characters. It’s far more difficult to articulate what you are for – and to do it at warp speed.
Have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it becomes part of how you think? Maybe even part of who you are as a person? Well I’ve had a question in my mind for many, many years and that is: how can you speed up learning? Now, this is an interesting question because if you speed up learning you can spend less time at school. And if you learn really fast, you probably wouldn’t have to go to school at all.
Now, when I was young, school was sort of okay but I found quite often that school got in the way of learning so I had this question in mind: how do you learn faster? And this began when I was very, very young, when I was about eleven years old I wrote a letter to researchers in the Soviet Union, asking about hypnopaedia, this is sleep learning, where you get a tape recorder, you put it beside your bed and it turns on in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping, and you’re supposed to be learning from this.
A good idea, unfortunately it doesn’t work. But, hypnopaedia did open the doors to research in other areas and we’ve had incredible discoveries about learning that began with that first question. I went on from there to become passionate about psychology and I have been involved in psychology in many ways for the rest of my life up until this point. In 1981 I took myself to China and I decided that I was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years.
Now, you need to understand that in 1981, everybody thought Chinese was really, really difficult and that a westerner could study for ten years or more and never really get very good at it. And I also went in with a different idea which was: taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point and applying them to the learning process. What was really cool was that in six months I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese and took a little bit longer to get up to native. But I looked around and I saw all of these people from different countries struggling terribly with Chinese, I saw Chinese people struggling terribly to learn English and other languages, and so my question got refined down to: how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively?
Now this a really, really important question in today’s world. We have massive challenges with environment we have massive challenges with social dislocation, with wars, all sorts of things going on and if we can’t communicate we’re really going to have difficulty solving these problems. So we need to be able to speak each other’s languages, this is really, really important.
The question then is how do you do that. Well, it’s actually really easy. You look around for people who can already do it, you look for situations where it’s already working and then you identify the principles and apply them. It’s called modelling and I’ve been looking at language learning and modelling language learning for about fifteen to twenty years now.
And my conclusion, my observation from this is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside six months. Now when I say this, most people think I’m crazy, this is not possible. So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, it’s all about expanding our limits.
In 1950 everybody believed that running one mile in four minutes was impossible and then Roger Bannister did it in 1956 and from there it’s got shorter and shorter. 100 years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesn’t fly. Except it does and we all know this. How does heavy stuff fly? We reorganise the materials using principles that we have learned from observing nature, birds in this case. And today we’ve gone ever further, so you can fly a car. You can buy one of these for a couple hundred thousand US dollars. We now have cars in the world that can fly. And there’s a different way to fly that we’ve learned from squirrels. So all you need to do is copy what a flying squirrel does, build a suit called a wing suit and off you go, you can fly like a squirrel.
No, most people, a lot of people, I wouldn’t say everybody but a lot of people think they can’t draw. However there are some key principles, five principles that you can apply to learning to draw and you can 2 actually learn to draw in five days. So, if you draw like this, you learn these principles for five days and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this. Now I know this is true because that was my first drawing and after five days of applying these principles that was what I was able to do. And I looked at this and I went ‘wow,’ so that’s how I look like when I’m concentrating so intensely that my brain is exploding. So, anybody can learn to draw in five days and in the same way, with the same logic, anybody can learn a second language in six months.
When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
当我九岁的时候 我第一次去参加夏令营 我妈妈帮我整理好了我的行李箱 里面塞满了书 这对于我来说是一件极为自然的事情 因为在我的家庭里 阅读是主要的家庭活动 听上去你们可能觉得我们是不爱交际的 但是对于我的家庭来说这真的只是接触社会的另一种途径 你们有自己家庭接触时的温暖亲情 家人静坐在你身边 但是你也可以自由地漫游 在你思维深处的冒险乐园里我有一个想法 野营会变得像这样子,当然要更好些 (笑声) 我想象到十个女孩坐在一个小屋里 都穿着合身的女式睡衣惬意地享受着读书的过程
(Laughter)
(笑声)
Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.
野营这时更像是一个不提供酒水的派对聚会 在第一天的时候呢 我们的顾问把我们都集合在一起 并且她教会了我们一种今后要用到的庆祝方式 在余下夏令营的每一天中 让“露营精神”浸润我们 之后它就像这样继续着 R-O-W-D-I-E 这是我们拼写“吵闹"的口号 我们唱着“噪音,喧闹,我们要变得吵一点” 对,就是这样 可我就是弄不明白我的生活会是什么样的 为什么我们变得这么吵闹粗暴 或者为什么我们非要把这个单词错误地拼写 (笑声) 但是我可没有忘记庆祝。我与每个人都互相欢呼庆祝了 我尽了我最大的努力 我只是想等待那一刻 我可以离开吵闹的聚会去捧起我挚爱的书
But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.
但是当我第一次把书从行李箱中拿出来的时候 床铺中最酷的那个女孩向我走了过来 并且她问我:“为什么你要这么安静?” 安静,当然,是R-O-W-D-I-E的反义词 “喧闹”的反义词 而当我第二次拿书的时候 我们的顾问满脸忧虑的向我走了过来 接着她重复了关于“露营精神”的要点并且说我们都应当努力 去变得外向些
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them.But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.
于是我放好我的书 放回了属于它们的行李箱中 并且我把它们放到了床底下 在那里它们度过了暑假余下的每一天 我对这样做感到很愧疚 不知为什么我感觉这些书是需要我的 它们在呼唤我,但是我却放弃了它们 我确实放下了它们,并且我再也没有打开那个箱子 直到我和我的家人一起回到家中 在夏末的时候
Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it --all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of beingwas not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, 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 assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.
现在,我向你们讲述这个夏令营的故事 我完全可以给你们讲出其他50种版本就像这个一样的故事-- 每当我感觉到这样的时候 它告诉我出于某种原因,我的宁静和内向的风格 并不是正确道路上的必需品 我应该更多地尝试一个外向者的角色 而在我内心深处感觉得到,这是错误的内向的人们都是非常优秀的,确实是这样 但是许多年来我都否认了这种直觉 于是我首先成为了华尔街的一名律师 而不是我长久以来想要成为的一名作家 一部分原因是因为我想要证明自己 也可以变得勇敢而坚定 并且我总是去那些拥挤的酒吧 当我只是想要和朋友们吃一顿愉快的晚餐时 我做出了这些自我否认的抉择 如条件反射一般 甚至我都不清楚我做出了这些决定
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 20__ online edition, expecting 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 existence. So, what reality do we want to call into existence: 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 exception of my physical therapy sessions. I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises 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 exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. And, one day, he came in to my session -- exhaustive 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 exercises 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 experience for me. And I have to wonder today to what extent 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 example 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.
Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." (Laughter) So -- (Laughter)
So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think you're immortal, on surveys, but -- (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.
While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece.
Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on.
So there you go. That's the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now let's see whether we can set you free. I don't promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think I've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. It's been a ride, man. This has been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. There's many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time I've worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that.
So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like "lifesaving." I really apologize to everybody for doing that, because obviously, we don't. What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.
And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then.
So what's happening now is there's been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what they're dying of now isn't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the '80s and '90s.
So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we haven't really squared with you guys about what's really happening now, and it's about time we did. I kind of woke up to this bit in the late '90s when I met this guy. This guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this. I was called down to the ward to see him. His is the little hand. I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician. He said, "Look, there's a guy down here. He's got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care. His daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done." Which is a familiar phrase to us. So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this. You can see his bones through the skin. He's very, very thin, and he is, indeed, very sick with pneumonia, and he's too sick to talk to me, so I talk to his daughter Kathleen, and I say to her, "Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation?" And she looked at me and said,
"No, of course not!" I thought, "Okay. Take this steady." And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to me, "You know, we always thought there'd be time."
Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here. There wasn't this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening. So a group of us started doing survey work, and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in Newcastle, in the Newcastle area, and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating. One in a hundred. And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill. And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large.
When you are a kid, you get asked this one particular question a lot, it really gets kind of annoying. What do you want to be when you grow up? Now, adults are hoping for answers like, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a neurosurgeon, you’re adults in your imaginations.
Kids, they’re most likely to answer with pro-skateboarder, surfer or minecraft player. I asked my little brother, and he said, seriously dude, I’m 10, I have no idea, probably a pro-skier, let’s go get some ice cream.
See, us kids are going to answer something we’re stoked on, what we think is cool, what we have experience with, and that’s typically the opposite of what adults want to hear.
But if you ask a little kid, sometimes you’ll get the best answer, something so simple, so obvious and really profound. When I grow up, I want to be happy.
For me, when I grow up, I want to continue to be happy like I am now. I’m stoked to be here at TedEx, I mean, I’ve been watching Ted videos for as long as I can remember, but I never thought I’d make it on the stage here so soon. I mean, I just became a teenager, and like most teenage boys, I spend most of my time wondering, how did my room get so messy all on its own.
Did I take a shower today? And the most perplexing of all, how do I get girls to like me? Neurosciences say that the teenage brain is pretty weird, our prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, but we actually have more neurons than adults, which is why we can be so creative, and impulsive and moody and get bummed out.
But what bums me out is to know that, a lot of kids today are just wishing to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe, not bullied, and be loved for who they are. So it seems to me when adults say, what do you want to be when you grow up? They just assume that you’ll automatically be happy and healthy.
Well, maybe that’s not the case, go to school, go to college, get a job, get married, boom, then you’ll be happy, right? You don’t seem to make learning how to be happy and healthy a priority in our schools, it’s separate from schools. And for some kids, it doesn’t exists at all? But what if we didn’t make it separate? What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy, because that’s what it is, a practice, and a simple practice at that?
Education is important, but why is being happy and healthy not considered education, I just don’t get it. So I’ve been studying the science of being happy and healthy. It really comes down to practicing these eight things. Exercise, diet and nutrition, time in nature, contribution, service to others, relationships, recreation, relaxation and stress management, and religious or spiritual involvement, yes, got that one.
So these eight things come from Dr. Roger Walsh, he calls them Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLCs for short. He is a scientist that studies how to be happy and healthy. In researching this talk, I got a chance to ask him a few questions like; do you think that our schools today are making these eight TLCs a priority? His response was no surprise, it was essentially no. But he did say that many people do try to get this kind of education outside of the traditional arena, through reading and practices such as meditation or yoga.
But what I thought was his best response was that, much of education is oriented for better or worse towards making a living rather than making a life.
In 20__, Sir Ken Robinson gave the most popular Ted talk of all time. Schools kill creativity. His message is that creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
A lot of parents watched those videos, some of those parents like mine counted it as one of the reasons they felt confident to pull their kids from traditional school to try something different. I realized I’m part of this small, but growing revolution of kids who are going about their education differently, and you know what? It freaks a lot of people out.
Even though I was only nine, when my parents pulled me out of the school system, I can still remember my mom being in tears when some of her friends told her she was crazy and it was a stupid idea.
Looking back, I’m thankful she didn’t cave to peer pressure, and I think she is too. So, out of the 200 million people that have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, why aren’t there more kids like me out there?
Shane McConkey is my hero. I loved him because he was the world’s best skier. But then, one day I realized what I really loved about Shane, he was a hacker. Not a computer hacker, he hacked skiing. His creativity and inventions made skiing what it is today, and why I love to ski. A lot of people think of hackers as geeky computer nerds who live in their parent’s basement and spread computer viruses, but I don’t see it that way.
How many of you are tired of seeingcelebrities adopting kids from the African continent?
你们之中有多少人已经对那些从非洲领养小孩的明星而感到厌倦了?
Well, it's not all that bad. I was adopted.I grew up in rural Uganda, lost both my parents when I was very, very young.And when my parents passed, I experienced all the negative effects of poverty,from homelessness, eating out of trash piles, you name it.
嗯,那也不全是坏事。我就是被其中领养的一员。我在乌干达的郊区长大,在我很小的时候,我的父母就去世了。在我父母离世之后,我经历了所有贫困带来的困难,从无家可归,到捡食路边的垃圾,所有你能想得到的。
But my life changed when I got acceptedinto an orphanage. Through one of those sponsor-an-orphan programs, I wassponsored and given an opportunity to acquire an education. I started off inUganda. I went through school, and the way this particular program worked, youfinished high school and after high school, you go learn a trade -- to become acarpenter, a mechanic or something along those lines.
但自从我被一家孤儿院收养 我的生活就发生了巨变。通过孤儿院的一个补助项目,我获得了接受教育的机会,以及相应的资助。一开始是在乌干达。我去了学校念书,而根据这个项目的运作流程,他们会在你读完高中以后,送你去学一门手艺,比如木匠,或者机修工或者其他的一些专业技术。
My case was a little different. The sponsorfamily that was sending these 25 dollars a month to this orphanage to sponsorme, which -- I had never met them -- said, "Well ... we would like to sendyou to college instead." Oh -- it gets better.
而我的情况却有所不同。每个月我会在孤儿院收到25美元补助。这钱来自资助我的家庭,我从未见过他们他们说,“我们希望资助你去上大学” 哦,那再好不过了。
And they said, "If you get thepaperwork, we'll send you to school in America instead." So with theirhelp, I went to the embassy and applied for the visa. I got the visa.
他们还说:“如果你能通过申请 我们会把你送到美国的大学读书。“ 所以,在他们的帮助下,我去大使馆申请了签证。并且通过了签证。
I remember this day like it was yesterday.I walked out of the embassy with this piece of paper in my hand, a hop in mystep, smile on my face, knowing that my life is about to change. I went homethat night, and I slept with my passport, because I was afraid that someonemight steal it.
那一天对我来说就像昨天一样。我拿着手里的文件走出大使馆,一路蹦跳,难掩笑意,我明白我的生活将不复从前。那天晚上我回到家里,抱着我的护照睡着了,因为我担心有人会把它偷走。
I couldn't fall asleep. I kept feeling it.I had a good idea for security. I was like, "OK, I'm going to put it in aplastic bag, and take it outside and dig a hole, and put it in there." Idid that, went back in the house. I could not fall asleep. I was like,"Maybe someone saw me." I went back --
而我辗转反侧。那念头依然挥之不去。我突然想到了一个万全的主意。我说:”好吧,我可以把它放进一个塑料袋里然后在外面地上挖一个洞,把袋子放进去。” 我真的做了,然后又回到屋子里。但我依然无眠,我想,“也许有人看到我了。” 我又回去了
I pulled it out, and I put it with me theentire night -- all to say that it was an anxiety-filled night.
我把袋子拿出来,然后抓着它度过了一宿 我只想说那真是焦虑的一晚。
Going to the US was, just like anotherspeaker said, was my first time to see a plane, be on one, let alone sit on itto fly to another country. December 15, 20xx. 7:08pm. I sat in seat 7A. FlyEmirates. One of the most gorgeous, beautiful women I've ever seen walked up,red little hat with a white veil. I'm looking terrified, I have no idea whatI'm doing. She hands me this warm towel -- warm, steamy, snow white. I'mlooking at this warm towel; I don't know what to do with my life, let alonewith this damn towel --
来到美国的感受,和其他初来乍到的人一样 那是我第一次坐飞机,坐在座位上,飞向另一个国家。20xx年12月15日 晚上7点08分 我坐在7A座位上。乘坐阿联酋航班。一个我有生以来见过的最美的女人朝我走来,她戴着红色的帽子和白色的口罩。我真的吓坏了,我简直手足无措。她递给我一张温热的纸巾 温暖,湿润,白净如雪。我盯着这张温暖的纸巾; 我都不知道我该拿我的生活怎么办,更别说这张纸巾了
I did one of the -- you know, anythinganyone could do in that situation: look around, see what everyone else isdoing. I did the same. Mind you, I drove about seven hours from my village tothe airport that day. So I grab this warm towel, wipe my face just likeeveryone else is doing, I look at it -- damn.
我做了一件——你懂的,任何人都会做的事:我环顾四周,看其他人的举动。然后我也跟着他们做。顺便一提,从村子到机场,那一天我开了7个小时的车。所以我拿起那张温暖的纸,效仿着别人擦拭了自己的脸,我看了看纸巾——该死。
It was all dirt brown.I remember being so embarrassed that whenshe came by to pick it up, I didn't give mine.I still have it.
已经变成屎黄色了。我记得我是那么的尴尬,以至于当她来回收纸巾的时候,我没好意思给她。我现在都还带着它。
Going to America opened doors for me tolive up to my full God-given potential. I remember when I arrived, the sponsorfamily embraced me, and they literally had to teach me everything from scratch:this is a microwave, that's a refrigerator -- things I'd never seen before. Andit was also the first time I got immersed into a new and different culture.These strangers showed me true love. These strangers showed me that I mattered,that my dreams mattered.Thank you.
美国向我敞开了大门让我能够发挥自己最大的潜力。我记得我刚到的时候,我的资助家庭迎接了我,然后他们就把一切从头开始教给我:这是一个微波炉,那是一个冰箱——那些都是我以前闻所未闻的东西。那也是我第一次 被放置在全新的文化环境当中。这些陌生人向我展示了真正的关爱。这些陌生人让我明白,我很重要 我的梦想很重要。谢谢。
These individuals had two of their ownbiological children. And when I came in, I had needs. They had to teach meEnglish, teach me literally everything, which resulted in them spending a lotof time with me. And that created a little bit of jealousy with their children.So, if you're a parent in this room, and you have those teenager children whodon't want anything to do with your love and affection -- in fact, they find itrepulsive -- I got a solution: adopt a child.
他们有两个亲生孩子。当我走进他们家庭的时候,我急需帮助。他们要教我英文,教我几乎所有的事情,这导致他们要在我的身上 花费很多的精力。而这致使他们的亲生孩子对我产生了一丝妒忌。所以,如果你们有人是家长,而你又有这样一群青少年小孩 他们对你们的爱和关心置若罔闻 事实上,还对你们很冷淡 我有一个办法: 领养一个孩子。
It will solve the problem.
问题就会迎刃而解。
I went on to acquire two engineeringdegrees from one of the best institutions in the world. I've got to tell you:talent is universal, but opportunities are not. And I credit this to theindividuals who embrace multiculturalism, love, empathy and compassion forothers. We live in a world filled with hate: building walls, Brexit, xenophobiahere on the African continent. Multiculturalism can be an answer to many ofthese worst human qualities.
在一所世界一流学府中 我习得了两个工程师学位。我必须要说: 天赋人人都有,但机会一缘难求。我想要赞美 那些拥抱多元文化的人,那些关爱,理解并且同情他人的人。我们生活在一个充满憎恨的世界上:高筑围墙,英国脱欧,非洲大陆的仇外心理。而这些人类最负面的东西 都可以被多元文化海涵。
Today, I challenge you to help a youngchild experience multiculturalism. I guarantee you that will enrich their life,and in turn, it will enrich yours. And as a bonus, one of them may even give aTED Talk.
今天,我挑战你们在座的观众们 去帮助一个年轻的孩子 感受多元文化的魅力。我保证那会充实他的生活,作为回报,你们的生活也会得到升华。而作为奖励,他们其中之一也许还会在TED演讲。
We may not be able to solve the bigotry andthe racism of this world today, but certainly we can raise children to create apositive, inclusive, connected world full of empathy, love and compassion.
我们也许无力解决 当今社会的种族歧视与偏见,但我们完全可以引导我们的孩子 去创建一个积极的,包容的,紧密相连的世界。那里将充满理解,关爱,同情。
Love wins.Thank you.
真爱无敌。谢谢
People returning to work after a career break: I call them relaunchers. These are people who have taken career breaks for elder care, for childcare reasons, pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. Closely related are career transitioners of all kinds: veterans, military spouses, retirees coming out of retirement or repatriating expats. Returning to work after a career break is hard because of a disconnect between the employers and the relaunchers. Employers can view hiring people with a gap on their resume as a high-risk proposition, and individuals on career break can have doubts about their abilities to relaunch their careers, especially if they've been out for a long time. This disconnect is a problem that I'm trying to help solve.
有些人经过离职长假之后重新投入到工作中来,我称他们为“再从业者”。这些人选择休离职长假,有些是要照顾老人,有些是要照顾孩子,也有些是追求个人爱好,或是健康因素。各行各业转业的人都与之紧密相关:退伍军人、军嫂,退休返聘的人,或遣返回国者。离职长假后重返工作是非常困难的,因为雇主和再从业者之间有了隔阂。雇主们认为,雇佣这些简历上工作时间不连贯的人是风险极高的决策,而正在离职长假中的人可能对自己再从业的能力产生疑虑,特别是那些离职时间较长者。两者间的缺乏联系是我在尝试解决的问题。
Now, successful relaunchers are everywhere and in every field. This is Sami Kafala. He's a nuclear physicist in the UK who took a five-year career break to be home with his five children. The Singapore press recently wrote about nurses returning to work after long career breaks. And speaking of long career breaks, this is Mimi Kahn. She's a social worker in Orange County, California, who returned to work in a social services organization after a 25-year career break. That's the longest career break that I'm aware of. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took a five-year career break early in her career.
如今,我们在各行各业都能见到成功的再从业者。这位是萨米·科法拉,他是英国的一位核物理学家,因为要在家照顾五个孩子而度过了五年的离职长假。新加坡的媒体最近发表了文章,内容是有关离职长假后再从业的护士。提到长时间的离职假期,这位是米米·卡恩,她是加州奥兰治县的一位社工,她在度过20xx年的离职长假后回到了一个社会服务组织工作。这是据我所知最长的离职假期。最高法院法官桑德拉·戴·奥康纳,在其职业生涯早期度过了五年离职长假。
And this is Tracy Shapiro, who took a 13-year career break. Tracy answered a call for essays by the Today Show from people who were trying to return to work but having a difficult time of it. Tracy wrote in that she was a mom of five who loved her time at home, but she had gone through a divorce and needed to return to work, plus she really wanted to bring work back into her life because she loved working. Tracy was doing what so many of us do when we feel like we've put in a good day in the job search. She was looking for a finance or accounting role, and she had just spent the last nine months very diligently researching companies online and applying for jobs with no results.
这位是特蕾西·莎碧罗,她度过了20xx年的离职长假。特蕾西答复了从“今日秀”节目观众中征集到的问题,他们想要重返工作,却发现很难做到。特蕾西写道:自己是五个孩子的母亲,也很享受居家的时间,但是她历经了一次离婚,并且急需回到工作状态,另外,她很想把工作带回她的生活中,因为她也很享受工作。特蕾西也曾做过我们很多人所做的事,每天不停的搜寻合适的工作。她找过财经、会计领域的职位,她在那之前花掉了九个月时间,很努力地调查网上的公司,然后投放简历,却一无所获。
I met Tracy in June of 20xx, when the Today Show asked me if I could work with her to see if I could help her turn things around. The first thing I told Tracy was she had to get out of the house. I told her she had to go public with her job search and tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. I also told her, "You are going to have a lot of conversations that don't go anywhere. Expect that, and don't be discouraged by it. There will be a handful that ultimately lead to a job opportunity."
我在20xx年六月见到了特蕾西,那时“今日秀”节目问我可否与她合作,看我能不能帮她走出困境。我告诉特蕾西的第一件事,就是她必须走出家门。我告诉她,她必须公开自己求职的想法,然后告诉她认识的所有人,自己再从业的强烈意愿。我还告诉她,“有很多你参与的对话是对你完全没有帮助的。你要做好心理准备,别因为那些而灰心丧气。找到工作机会之前,确实要经历很多琐事。”
I'll tell you what happened with Tracy in a little bit, but I want to share with you a discovery that I made when I was returning to work after my own career break of 11 years out of the full-time workforce. And that is, that people's view of you is frozen in time. What I mean by this is, when you start to get in touch with people and you get back in touch with those people from the past, the people with whom you worked or went to school, they are going to remember you as you were before your career break. And that's even if your sense of self has diminished over time, as happens with so many of us the farther removed we are from our professional identities. So for example, you might think of yourself as someone who looks like this. This is me, crazy after a day of driving around in my minivan. Or here I am in the kitchen. But those people from the past, they don't know about any of this. They only remember you as you were, and it's a great confidence boost to be back in touch with these people and hear their enthusiasm about your interest in returning to work.
我稍后再告诉你们特蕾西是如何处理的,我想先跟大家分享我的一个发现,那时我刚刚回到工作中,结束了自己离开全职工作大军20xx年的长假。这个发现就是,人们对你的印象凝固在过去。我的意思是,当你再次开始与人打交道,与曾经合作过的人重新接触,例如跟你一起上学、工作过的人,他们对你的印象是离职长假之前的你。我们的自我意识随着时间推移逐渐淡化,我们很多人都会这样,我们距离我们的职业身份也就越来越远。举个例子,你可能把你自己看成这样。这就是我,开了一天小面包车,整个人感觉很疯狂。这是我在厨房里的样子。但是从前的那些人,他们对这些一无所知。他们只记得你曾经的样子,当你重新与这些人沟通时,真是大大的增强了自信心,而且他们对你有再从业的兴趣感到非常的开心。
There's one more thing I remember vividly from my own career break. And that was that I hardly kept up with the business news. My background is in finance, and I hardly kept up with any news when I was home caring for my four young children. So I was afraid I'd go into an interview and start talking about a company that didn't exist anymore. So I had to resubscribe to the Wall Street Journal and read it for a good six months cover to cover before I felt like I had a handle on what was going on in the business world again.
我还清晰地记得发生在我离职长假中的一件事。那时我几乎完全不关注经济新闻。我曾是财经行业出身,然而我在家照顾四个孩子时,我几乎不关注任何的新闻。所以我很害怕,自己去参加面试的时候,会讲到一个不复存在的公司。所以我重新订阅了华尔街日报,然后连续看了六个月,之后我才觉得自己对经济又有了点解了。
I believe relaunchers are a gem of the workforce, and here's why. Think about our life stage: for those of us who took career breaks for childcare reasons, we have fewer or no maternity leaves. We did that already. We have fewer spousal or partner job relocations. We're in a more settled time of life. We have great work experience. We have a more mature perspective. We're not trying to find ourselves at an employer's expense. Plus we have an energy, an enthusiasm about returning to work precisely because we've been away from it for a while.
我相信再从业者是劳动大军中的精英,原因如下。想想我们人生的阶段:对于那些因为要照顾孩子而休离职假期的人,大都没有产假,或是产假很短。我们早就做过这些了。我们离婚率较低,也很少因伴侣而调整工作。我们的生活更稳定。我们有很棒的工作经历,更成熟的眼光,我们不会成为雇主的牺牲品。此外,我们有一种能量-重返岗位的热情,正是因为我们离职一段时间了。另外,我也跟雇主讨论,On the flip side, I speak with employers, and here are two concerns that employers have about hiring relaunchers.
以下是雇主们关于雇佣再从业者的两个担忧。
The first one is, employers are worried that relaunchers are technologically obsolete. Now, I can tell you, having been technologically obsolete myself at one point, that it's a temporary condition. I had done my financial analysis so long ago that I used Lotus 1-2-3. I don't know if anyone can even remember back that far, but I had to relearn it on Excel. It actually wasn't that hard. A lot of the commands are the same. I found PowerPoint much more challenging, but now I use PowerPoint all the time. I tell relaunchers that employers expect them to come to the table with a working knowledge of basic office management software. And if they're not up to speed, then it's their responsibility to get there. And they do.
其一,雇主担心这些再从业者技术方面比较落后。我可以告诉各位,虽然有段时间我自己技术确实落后,但那只是暂时的。很早以前我用“莲花123”软件来做财经分析,我不知道有没有人还记得那么早以前的事了,这些技能我得在Excel上重新拾起。其实这并并非难事,很多的操作指令是一样的。我发现PowerPoint更具挑战性,但现在我对PowerPoint驾轻就熟。我告诉再从业者们,雇主希望找工作的人对基本的办公管理软件有实践经验。如果他们操作速度不够快,那他们就必须变得更高效。而他们确实做得到。
The second area of concern that employers have about relaunchers is they're worried that relaunchers don't know what they want to do. I tell relaunchers that they need to do the hard work to figure out whether their interests and skills have changed or have not changed while they have been on career break. That's not the employer's job. It's the relauncher's responsibility to demonstrate to the employer where they can add the most value.
雇主对再从业者的第二种忧虑,就是他们担心再从业者不清楚他们想要做什么。我告诉再从业者,他们必须仔细研究,了解自己的爱好或者技能在离职长假的过程中是否发生了变化。这不是雇主的职责。这个是再从业者的责任,把自己展现给雇主,来充分展示自己可创造的价值。
Back in 20xx I started noticing something. I had been tracking return to work programs since 20xx, and in 20xx, I started noticing the use of a short-term paid work opportunity, whether it was called an internship or not, but an internship-like experience, as a way for professionals to return to work. I saw Goldman Sachs and Sara Lee start corporate reentry internship programs. I saw a returning engineer, a nontraditional reentry candidate, apply for an entry-level internship program in the military, and then get a permanent job afterward. I saw two universities integrate internships into mid-career executive education programs.
20xx年,我开始注意到一件事。我从20xx年开始追踪人们重返岗位的情况,然而在20xx年,我开始注意到,一种短期、带薪的工作机会开始出现,不论它是不是名叫“实习”,但总之是一个很像实习的经历,这为重回岗位的专业人士开辟了一条道路。我看到高盛和莎莉集团都开始了此类二次从业的实习项目。我看到一个再从业的工程师,算是不太传统的再从业人士,申请了一个军方的初级实习项目,后来他获得了一个永久的工作。我看到两所大学将实习项目整合到职业中期管理学教育项目中。
So I wrote a report about what I was seeing, and it became this article for Harvard Business Review called "The 40-Year-Old Intern." I have to thank the editors there for that title, and also for this artwork where you can see the 40-year-old intern in the midst of all the college interns. And then, courtesy of Fox Business News, they called the concept "The 50-Year-Old Intern."
于是,就我所观察到的现象,我写了一篇报告,后来它发表在了《哈佛商业评论》中,名字叫《40岁的实习生》。我必须得感谢编者拟的标题,还有这个很棒的配图,你们可以看到那个40岁的实习生出现在一群大学实习生中。后来,还得感谢福克斯商业新闻,他们把这个概念称为“50岁的实习生”。
So five of the biggest financial services companies have reentry internship programs for returning finance professionals. And at this point, hundreds of people have participated. These internships are paid, and the people who move on to permanent roles are commanding competitive salaries. And now, seven of the biggest engineering companies are piloting reentry internship programs for returning engineers as part of an initiative with the Society of Women Engineers. Now, why are companies embracing the reentry internship? Because the internship allows the employer to base their hiring decision on an actual work sample instead of a series of interviews, and the employer does not have to make that permanent hiring decision until the internship period is over. This testing out period removes the perceived risk that some managers attach to hiring relaunchers, and they are attracting excellent candidates who are turning into great hires.
五家最大的金融服务公司都设立了再从业实习项目,专为重回岗位的金融精英。截至目前,数百人参与了这些项目。这些实习项目是带薪的,而且那些晋升到永久岗位的人,都有极具竞争力的薪资。现在,七家最大的工程公司,也在推行再从业实习项目,来帮助重返岗位的工程师,这也是女性工程师协会新方案的一部分。那么,为什么这些企业大力支持再从业实习呢?因为这种实习可以让雇主基于参与者实际工作成效来做出雇佣决策,而非一系列的'面试,而且雇主不必在实习结束之前就做出永久雇佣的决定。这段试验期消除了一定的风险,这关乎某些经理人对雇佣再从业者的担忧,同时,这也吸引了大量再从业人士,他们成为了出色的雇佣对象。
Think about how far we have come. Before this, most employers were not interested in engaging with relaunchers at all. But now, not only are programs being developed specifically with relaunchers in mind, but you can't even apply for these programs unless you have a gap on your résumé.
各位,想一想我们取得的进步,在此之前,大多数雇主根本没兴趣与再从业者打交道。然而现在,有许多项目在开展实施,特别是针对再从业者的项目,如果简历上没有一段空档期,你根本不能申请这些项目。
This is the mark of real change, of true institutional shift, because if we can solve this problem for relaunchers, we can solve it for other career transitioners too. In fact, an employer just told me that their veterans return to work program is based on their reentry internship program. And there's no reason why there can't be a retiree internship program. Different pool, same concept.
这标志着一种实质变化,一种真正的制度变革,因为如果我们可以为再从业者解决这个问题,我们亦可为其他的职业转型者解决同样的问题。事实上,一位雇主刚刚告诉我,他们的“退伍军人再从业项目”,就是基于他们的再从业实习项目。我们也没有理由不去设立一个“退休人士实习项目”。不同的对象,相同的概念。
So let me tell you what happened with Tracy Shapiro. Remember that she had to tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. Well, one critical conversation with another parent in her community led to a job offer for Tracy, and it was an accounting job in a finance department. But it was a temp job. The company told her there was a possibility it could turn into something more, but no guarantees. This was in the fall of 20xx. Tracy loved this company, and she loved the people and the office was less than 10 minutes from her house. So even though she had a second job offer at another company for a permanent full-time role, she decided to take her chances with this internship and hope for the best. Well, she ended up blowing away all of their expectations, and the company not only made her a permanent offer at the beginning of 20xx, but they made it even more interesting and challenging, because they knew what Tracy could handle.
让我告诉你们特蕾西·莎碧罗最后发生了什么。各位回想一下,她必须告诉她认识的每一个人,自己对重返工作岗位很有兴趣。结果,她与自己社区里的长辈进行了一次关键的谈话,这让她找到了一份工作邀请。那是一个金融部门的会计工作。但那是临时的。公司告诉她,有可能有岗位晋升的机会,但是不能保证。那是20xx年的秋天。特蕾西很爱那个公司,而且她喜欢那里的员工,从办公室去她家只需10分钟。所以即使她后来得到了第二份工作邀请,来自另一家公司,而且有永久、全职的保证,她决定在这份实习项目中冒冒险,尽人事,听天命。最后,她的业绩远远超出了所有人的期望值,公司不但提供了她永久岗位,那是在20xx年初,而且他们还让她的工作更加有趣、有挑战性,因为他们知道特蕾西可以办得到。
Fast forward to 20xx, Tracy's been promoted. They've paid for her to get her MBA at night. She's even hired another relauncher to work for her. Tracy's temp job was a tryout, just like an internship, and it ended up being a win for both Tracy and her employer.
时间快进到20xx年,特蕾西获得了晋升。公司为她的夜校工商管理课程买单。她甚至雇佣了另一位再从业者为她工作。特蕾西的临时工作像是一个试验,就像实习项目,而最终,特蕾西和她的雇主达到了双赢局面。
Now, my goal is to bring the reentry internship concept to more and more employers. But in the meantime, if you are returning to work after a career break, don't hesitate to suggest an internship or an internship-like arrangement to an employer that does not have a formal reentry internship program. Be their first success story, and you can be the example for more relaunchers to come.
我的目标是将这种再从业实习的概念推荐给越来越多的雇主。但是与此同时,如果你在离职长假后重返岗位,别犹豫向雇主提议设立实习项目,或者类似实习项目的想法,特别是那些没有正式的再从业实习项目的公司。争当他们的第一个成功故事,而你们都可以成为未来更多再从业者的楷模。
Thank you.
谢谢大家。
Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? I think those are interesting ideas, if you could. I mean, for me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually it's often the things that are right in front of us that are the hardest things to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.
For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? Great. Double-check. Make sure you still have them on you. I was doing some shopping beforehand. Now you've looked at them probably a few times today, but I'm going to ask you a question about them. Without looking at your cell phone directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? Bring them out, check, and see how accurate you were. How'd you do? Show of hands. Did we get it?
Now that you're done looking at those, close them down, because every phone has something in common. No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? You just looked at your clock, right? It's an interesting idea. Now, I'll ask you to take that a step further with a game of trust. Close your eyes. I realize I'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes.
Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. With your eyes closed, what am I wearing? Make your best guess. What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? Now open your eyes. By a show of hands, were you right?
It's interesting, isn't it? Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others. It seems that way. But I have a different theory about that, that model of attention. They have fancy models of attention, Posner's trinity model of attention. For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank. So Frank is sitting at a desk. He's got all sorts of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. But attention is what steers your perceptions, is what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind. If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. That's why there's the cocktail effect: When you're in a party, you're having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name and you didn't even realize you were listening to that.
Now, for my job, I have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your little security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? What just happened? Do you have a wallet? Do you have an American Express in your wallet? And when I do that, your Frank turns around. He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. And what's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data.
Now, I mean, this sounds like a good theory, but I could talk for a long time and tell you lots of things, and they may be true, a portion of them, but I think it's better if I tried to show that to you here live. So if I come down, I'm going to do a little bit of shopping. Just hold still where you are.
Hello, how are you? It's lovely to see you. You did a wonderful job onstage. You have a lovely watch that doesn't come off very well. Do you have your ring as well? Good. Just taking inventory. You're like a buffet. It's hard to tell where to start, there's so many great things.
Hi, how are you? Good to see you.
Hi, sir, could you stand up for me, please? Just right where you are. Oh, you're married. You follow directions well. That's nice to meet you, sir. You don't have a whole lot inside your pockets. Anything down by the pocket over here? Hopefully so. Have a seat. There you go. You're doing well.
人有了钱就会变坏?社会心理学家Paul Piff通过操纵大富翁游戏做了一个有趣的实验,测试人们感到富有时会如何表现。
I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly, except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that help earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand。 You've got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources。 And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself, how might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard that other player?
So we ran a study on the U。C。 Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question。 We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game。 They got two times as much money。 When they passed Go, they collected twice the salary, and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more。 (Laughter) And over the course of 15 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened。 And what I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw。 You're going to have to pardon the sound quality, in some cases, because again, these were hidden cameras。 So we've provided subtitles。 Rich Player: How many 500s did you have? Poor Player: Just one。
Rich Player: Are you serious。 Poor Player: Yeah。
Rich Player: I have three。 (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much。
Paul Piff: Okay, so it was quickly apparent to players that something was up。 One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players。 The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around。 We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players。
We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side。 It's on the bottom right corner there。 That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior。 So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat。
Rich Player: Are those pretzels a trick?
Poor Player: I don't know。
PP: Okay, so no surprises, people are onto us。 They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place。 One even asks, like you just saw, is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick? And yet, despite that, the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate, and those rich players start to eat more pretzels。
Rich Player: I love pretzels。
(Laughter)
PP: And as the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they're doing。 Rich Player: I have money for everything。 Poor Player: How much is that? Rich Player: You owe me 24 dollars。 You're going to lose all your money soon。 I'll buy it。 I have so much money。 I have so much money, it takes me forever。 Rich Player 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board。 Rich Player 3: You're going to run out of money soon。 I'm pretty much untouchable at this point。
PP: Okay, and here's what I think was really, really interesting, is that at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game。 And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly —— (Laughter) — they talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game, and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation, including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place。 And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage。
Now this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don't。 They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources。 And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies。 What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self—interest increases。 In surveys, we found that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self—interest is favorable and moral。 Now what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self—interest, talk about why we should care about those implications, and end with what might be done。
01. Remember to say thank you
Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine.
And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. And I asked myself, why? I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? So, I decided to investigate.
I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them. But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it.
So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. I know a woman who's good at this. She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids." And he goes, "Oh, this is great, this is great." And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. And she said, "
But before I show you what’s inside,
I will tell you that’s going to do incredible things for you .
It will bring all of your family together.
You will feel loved and appreciated like never before.
And reconnect to friends and acquaintances you haven’t heard from in years.
Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you.
It will recalibrate what’s important in your life.
It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith.
You’ll have a new understanding and trust in your body.
You’ll have unsurpassed vitality and energy.
You’ll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you’ll have a healthier lifestyle. And get this, you’ll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing.
You’ll eat countless gourmet meals.
Flowers will arrive by the truck load.
People will say to you: “you look great! Have you had any work done?”
And you’ll have a life-time supply of good drugs.
You’ll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled.
Your life will have new meaning: peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana.
The price?
Fifty-five thousand dollars.
And that’s an incredible deal.
By now, I know you’re dying to know what it is and where you can get one.
Does Amazon carry it?
Dose it have the Apple logo on it?
Is there a waiting list?
Not likely.
This gift came to me about five months ago.
And looked more like this when it was all wrapped up.
Not quite so pretty.
And this.
And then this.
It was a rare jam.
A brain tumor.
Hemangioblastoma.
The gift that keeps on giving.
And while I’m ok now.
I wouldn’t wish this gift for you.
I’m not sure you’d want it.
But I would’t change my experience.
It profoundly altered my life in ways it didn’t expect.
In all the ways I just shared with you.
So the next time you are faced with something that’s unexpected, unwanted and uncertain. Consider that it just may be a gift.