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推荐ted经典励志英文演讲稿范本一
embracing otherness. when i first heard this theme, i thought, well,embracing otherness is embracing myself. and the journey to that place ofunderstanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and its givenme an insight into the whole notion of self, which i think is worth sharing withyou today.
拥抱他类。当我第一次听说这个主题时，我心想，拥抱他类不就是拥抱自己吗。我个人懂得理解和接受他类的经历很有趣，让我对于“自己”这个词也有了新的认识，我想今天在这里和你们分享下我的心得体会。
we each have a self, but i don think that we e born with one. you knowhow newborn babies believe they e part of everything; they e not separate?well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly. its likethat initial stage is over -- oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive. its nolonger valid or real. what is real is separateness, and at some point in earlybabyhood, the idea of self starts to form. our little portion of oneness isgiven a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details,opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, ouridentity. and that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world. butthe self is a projection based on other peoples projections. is it who wereally are? or who we really want to be, or should be?
我们每个人都有个自我，但并不是生来就如此的。你知道新生的宝宝们觉得他们是任何东西的一部分，而不是分裂的个体。这种本源上的“天人合一”感在我们出生后很快就不见了，就好像我们人生的第一个篇章--和谐统一：婴儿，未成形，原始--结束了。它们似幻似影，而现实的世界是孤独彼此分离的。而在孩童期的某段时间，我们开始形成自我这个观点。宇宙中的小小个体有了自己的名字，有了自己的过去等等各种信息。这些关于自己的细节，看法和观点慢慢变成事实，成为我们身份的一部分。而那个自我，也变成我们人生路上前行的导航仪。然后，这个所谓的自我，是他人自我的映射，还是我们真实的自己呢?我们究竟想成为什么样，应该成为什么样的呢?
so this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult onefor me growing up. the self that i attempted to take out into the world wasrejected over and over again. and my panic at not having a self that fit, andthe confusion that came from my self being rejected, created an_iety, shame andhopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time. but in retrospect, thedestruction of my self was so repetitive that i started to see a pattern. theself changed, got affected, broken, destroyed, but another one would evolve --sometimes stronger, sometimes hateful, sometimes not wanting to be there at self was not constant. and how many times would my self have to die before irealized that it was never alive in the first place?
这个和自我打交道，寻找自己身份的过程在我的成长记忆中一点都不容易。我想成为的那些“自我”不断被否定再否定，而我害怕自己无法融入周遭的环境，因被否定而引起的困惑让我变得更加忧虑，感到羞耻和无望，在很长一段时间就是我存在状态。然而回头看，对自我的解构是那么频繁，以至于我发现了这样一种规律。自我是变化的，受他人影响，分裂或被打败，而另一个自我会产生，这个自我可能更坚强，可能更可憎，有时你也不想变成那样。所谓自我不是固定不变的。而我需要经历多少次自我的破碎重生才会明白其实自我从来没有存在过?
i grew up on the coast of england in the 70s. my dad is white fromcornwall, and my mom is black from zimbabwe. even the idea of us as a family waschallenging to most people. but nature had its wicked way, and brown babies wereborn. but from about the age of five, i was aware that i didn fit. i was theblack atheist kid in the all-white catholic school run by nuns. i was ananomaly, and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug e the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong. thatconfirms its e_istence and its importance. and it is important. it has ane_tremely important function. without it, we literally can interface withothers. we can hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity, of my skin color wasn right. my hair wasn right. my history wasn self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, ididn really e_ist. and i was "other" before being anything else -- even beforebeing a girl. i was a noticeable nobody.
我在70年代英格兰海边长大，我的父亲是康沃尔的白人，母亲是津巴布韦的黑人。而想象我和父母是一家人对于其他人来说总是不太自然。自然有它自己的魔术，棕色皮肤的宝宝诞生了。但从我五岁开始，我就有种感觉我不是这个群体的。我是一个全白人天主教会学校里面黑皮肤无神论小孩。我与他人是不同的，而那个热衷于归属的自我却到处寻找方式寻找归属感。这种认同感让自我感受到存在感和重要性，因此十分重要。这点是如此重要，如果没有自我，我们根本无法与他人沟通。没有它，我们无所适从，无法获取成功或变得受人欢迎。但我的肤色不对，我的头发不对，我的过去不对，我的一切都是另类定义的，在这个社会里，我其实并不真实存在。我首先是个异类，其次才是个女孩。我是可见却毫无意义的人。
another world was opening up around this time: performance and nagging dread of self-hood didn e_ist when i was dancing. id literallylose myself. and i was a really good dancer. i would put all my emotionale_pression into my dancing. i could be in the movement in a way that i wasn able to be in my real life, in myself.
这时候，另一个世界向我敞开了大门：舞蹈表演。那种关于自我的唠叨恐惧在舞蹈时消失了，我放开四肢，也成为了一位不错的舞者。我将所有的情绪都融入到舞蹈的动作中去，我可以在舞蹈中与自己相溶，尽管在现实生活中却无法做到。
and at 16, i stumbled across another opportunity, and i earned my firstacting role in a film. i can hardly find the words to describe the peace i feltwhen i was acting. my dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self,not my own, and it felt so good. it was the first time that i e_isted inside afully-functioning self -- one that i controlled, that i steered, that i gavelife to. but the shooting day would end, and id return to my gnarly, awkwardself.
16岁的时候，我遇到了另一个机会，第一部参演的电影。我无法用语言来表达在演戏的时候我所感受到的平和，我无处着落的自我可以与那个角色融为一体，而不是我自己。那感觉真棒。这是第一次我感觉到我拥有一个自我，我可以驾驭，令其富有盛名的自我。然而当拍摄结束，我又会回到自己粗糙不明，笨拙的自我。
by 19, i was a fully-fledged movie actor, but still searching fordefinition. i applied to read anthropology at university. dr. phyllis lee gaveme my interview, and she asked me, "how would you define race?" well, i thoughti had the answer to that one, and i said, "skin color." "so biology, genetics?"she said. "because, thandie, thats not accurate. because theres actually moregenetic difference between a black kenyan and a black ugandan than there isbetween a black kenyan and, say, a white norwegian. because we all stem fromafrica. so in africa, theres been more time to create genetic persity." inother words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact. on the onehand, result. right? on the other hand, my definition of self just lost a hugechunk of its credibility. but what was credible, what is biological andscientific fact, is that we all stem from africa -- in fact, from a woman calledmitochondrial eve who lived 160,000 years ago. and race is an illegitimateconcept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance.
19岁的时候，我已经是富有经验的专业电影演员，而我还是在寻找自我的定义。我申请了大学的人类学专业。phyllislee博士面试了我，她问我：“你怎么定义种族?”我觉得我很了解这个话题，我说：“肤色。”“那么生物上来说呢，例如遗传基因?”她说，“thandie肤色并不全面，其实一个肯尼亚黑人和乌干达黑人之间基因差异比一个肯尼亚黑人和挪威白人之间差异要更多。因为我们都是从非洲来的，所以在非洲，基因变异演化的时间是最久的。”换句话说，种族在生物学或任何科学上都没有事实根据。另一方面，我对于自我的定义瞬时失去了一大片基础。但那就是生物学事实，我们都是非洲后裔，一位在160 0__年前的伟大女性mitochondrialeve的后人。而种族这个无效的概念是我们基于恐惧和无知自己捏造出来的。
strangely, these revelations didn cure my low self-esteem, that feelingof otherness. my desire to disappear was still very powerful. i had a degreefrom cambridge; i had a thriving career, but my self was a car crash, and iwound up with bulimia and on a therapists couch. and of course i did. i stillbelieved my self was all i was. i still valued self-worth above all other worth,and what was there to suggest otherwise? weve created entire value systems anda physical reality to support the worth of self. look at the industry forself-image and the jobs it creates, the revenue it turns over. wed be right inassuming that the self is an actual living thing. but its not. its aprojection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from thereality of death.
奇怪的是，这个发现并没有治好我的自卑，那种被排挤的感觉。我还是那么强烈地想要离开消失。我从剑桥拿到了学位，我有份充满发展的工作，然而我的自我还是一团糟，我得了催吐病不得不接受治疗师的帮助。我还是相信自我是我的全部。我还是坚信“自我”的价值甚过一切。而且我们身处的世界就是如此，我们的整个价值系统和现实环境都是在服务“自我”的价值。看看不同行业里面对于自我的塑造，看看它们创造的那些工作，产出的那些利润。我们甚至必须相信自我是真实存在的。但它们不是，自我不过是我们聪明的脑袋假想出来骗自己不去思考死亡这个话题的幌子。
but there is something that can give the self ultimate and infiniteconnection -- and that thing is oneness, our essence. the selfs struggle forauthenticity and definition will never end unless its connected to its creator-- to you and to me. and that can happen with awareness -- awareness of thereality of oneness and the projection of self-hood. for a start, we can thinkabout all the times when we do lose ourselves. it happens when i dance, when imacting. im earthed in my essence, and my self is suspended. in those moments,im connected to everything -- the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy fromthe audience. all my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as aninfant might feel -- that feeling of oneness.
但其实我们的终极自我其实是我们的本源，合一。挣扎自我是否真实，究竟是什么永远没有终结，除非它和赋予它意义的创造者合一，就是你和我。而这点当我们意识到现实是你中有我，我中有你，和谐统一，而自我是种假象时就会体会到了。我们可以想想，什么时候我们是身心统一的，例如说我跳舞，表演的时候，我和我的本源连结，而我的自我被抛在一边。那时，我和身边的一切--空气，大地，声音，观众的反馈都连结在一起。我的知觉是敏锐和鲜活的，就像初生的婴儿那样，合一。
and when im acting a role, i inhabit another self, and i give it life forawhile, because when the self is suspended so is pisiveness and judgment. andive played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to secretaryof state in __. and no matter how other these selves might be, they e allrelated in me. and i honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and myprogress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel soan_ious and insecure. i always wondered why i could feel others pain so deeply,why i could recognize the somebody in the nobody. its because i didn have aself to get in the way. i thought i lacked substance, and the fact that i couldfeel others meant that i had nothing of myself to feel. the thing that was asource of shame was actually a source of enlightenment.
当我在演戏的时候，我让另一个自我住在我体内，我代表它行动。当我的自我被抛开，紧随的分歧和主观判断也消失了。我曾经扮演过奴隶时代的复仇鬼魂，也扮演过__年的国务卿。不管他们这些自我是怎样的，他们都在那时与我相连。而我也深信作为演员，我的成功，或是作为个体，我的成长都是源于我缺乏“自我”，那种缺乏曾经让我非常忧虑和不安。我总是不明白为什么我会那么深地感受到他人的痛苦，为什么我可以从不知名的人身上看出他人的印痕。是因为我没有所谓的自我来左右我感受的信息吧。我以为我缺少些什么，我以为我对他人的理解是因为我缺乏自我。那个曾经是我深感羞耻的东西其实是种启示。
and when i realized and really understood that my self is a projection andthat it has a function, a funny thing happened. i stopped giving it so muchauthority. i give it its due. i take it to therapy. ive become very familiarwith its dysfunctional behavior. but im not ashamed of my self. in fact, irespect my self and its function. and over time and with practice, ive tried tolive more and more from my essence. and if you can do that, incredible thingshappen.
当我真的理解我的自我不过是种映射，是种工具，一件奇怪的事情发生了。我不再让它过多控制我的生活。我学习管理它，像把它带去看医生一样，我很熟悉那些因自我而失调的举动。我不因自我而羞耻，事实上，我很尊敬我的自我和它的功能。而随着时间过去，我的技术也更加熟练，我可以更多的和我的本源共存。如果你愿意尝试，不可以思议的事情也会发生在你身上。
i was in congo in february, dancing and celebrating with women whovesurvived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways --destroyed because other brutalized, psychopathic selves all over that beautifulland are fueling our selves addiction to ipods, pads, and bling, which furtherdisconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain, their suffering, their e, hey, if we e all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life, thenwe e devaluing and desensitizing life. and in that disconnected state, yeah, wecan build factory farms with no windows, destroy marine life and use rape as aweapon of war. so heres a note to self: the cracks have started to show in ourconstructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oiland blood, rivers of it.
今年二月，我在刚果和一群女性一起跳舞和庆祝，她们都是经历过各种无法想象事情“自我”遍体鳞伤的人们，那些备受摧残，心理变态的自我充斥在这片美丽的土地，而我们仍痴迷地追逐着ipod，pad等各种闪亮的东西，将我们与他们的痛苦，死亡隔得更远。如果我们各自生活在自我中，并无以为这就是生活，那么我们是在贬低和远离生命的意义。在这种脱节的状态中，我们是可以建设没有窗户的工厂，破坏海洋生态，将__作为战争的工具。为我们的自我做个解释：这是看似完善的世界里的裂痕，海洋，河流，石油和鲜血正不断地从缝中涌出。
crucially, we haven been figuring out how to live in oneness with theearth and every other living thing. weve just been insanely trying to figureout how to live with each other -- billions of each other. only we e not livingwith each other; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating anepidemic of disconnection.
关键的是，我们还没有明白如何和自然以及其他所有生物和谐地共处。我们只是疯狂地想和其他人沟通，几十亿其他人。只有当我们不在和世界合一的时候，我们疯狂的自我却互相怜惜，并永远继续这场相互隔绝的疫症。
lets live with each other and take it a breath at a time. if we can getunder that heavy self, light a torch of awareness, and find our essence, ourconnection to the infinite and every other living thing. we knew it from the daywe were born. lets not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness. its more areality than the ones our selves have created. imagine what kind of e_istence wecan have if we honor inevitable death of self, appreciate the privilege of lifeand marvel at what comes ne_t. simple awareness is where it begins.
让我们共生共荣，并不要太过激进着急。试着放下沉重的自我，点亮知觉的火把，寻找我们的本源，我们与万事万物之间的联系。我们初生时就懂得这个道理的。不要被我们内心丰富的空白吓到，这比我们虚构的自我要真实。想象如果你能接受自我并不存在，你想要如何生活，感恩生命的可贵和未来的惊奇。简单的觉醒就是开始。
thank you for listening.
(applause) 谢谢。
推荐ted经典励志英文演讲稿范本二
简介：残奥会短跑冠军aimeemullins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。
id like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago whilewriting an article for italian wired. i always keep my thesaurus handy wheneverim writing anything, but id already finished editing the piece, and i realizedthat i had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what idfind.
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 alsohurt, useless and weak. antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." i was reading thislist out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, butid just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and i had to stop andcollect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from thesewords unleashed.
you know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so im thinking thismust be an ancient print date, right? but, in fact, the print date was the early1980s, when i would have been starting primary school and forming anunderstanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kidsand the world around me. and, needless to say, thank god i wasn using athesaurus back then. i mean, from this entry, it would seem that i was born intoa world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever goingfor them, when in fact, today im celebrated for the opportunities andadventures my life has procured.
so, i immediately went to look up the __ online edition, e_pecting to finda revision worth noting. heres the updated version of this unately, its not much better. i find the last two words under "nearantonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."
so, its not just about the words. its what we believe about people whenwe name them with these words. its about the values behind the words, and howwe construct those values. our language affects our thinking and how we view theworld and how we view other people. in fact, many ancient societies, includingthe greeks and the romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was sopowerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into e_istence. so, whatreality do we want to call into e_istence: a person who is limited, or a personwhos empowered? by casually doing something as simple as naming a person, achild, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. wouldn wewant to open doors for them instead?
one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the institute in wilmington, delaware. his name was dr. pizzutillo, anitalian american, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most americansto pronounce, so he went by dr. p. and dr. p always wore really colorful bowties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.
i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with thee_ception of my physical therapy sessions. i had to do what seemed likeinnumerable repetitions of e_ercises with these thick, elastic bands --different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and i hated thesebands 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 tryto get out of doing these e_ercises, unsuccessfully, of course. and, one day, hecame in to my session -- e_haustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and hesaid to me, "wow. aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, i thinkyou e going to break one of those bands. when you do break it, im going togive you a hundred bucks."
now, of course, this was a simple ploy on dr. ps part to get me to do thee_ercises i didn want to do before the prospect of being the richestfive-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me wasreshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising e_perience for i have to wonder today to what e_tent his vision and his declaration of meas a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as aninherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.
this is an e_ample of how adults in positions of power can ignite the powerof a child. but, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, ourlanguage isn allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want,the possibility of an inpidual to see themselves as capable. our languagehasn caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have beenbrought about by technology. certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs,laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements foraging 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 mentionsocial networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their owndescriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their ownchoosing. so, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what hasalways been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer oursociety, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.
the human ability to adapt, its an interesting thing, because people havecontinually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and im going tomake an admission: this phrase never sat right with me, and i always felt uneasytrying to answer peoples questions about it, and i think im starting to figureout why. implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea thatsuccess, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenginge_perience unscathed or unmarked by the e_perience, as if my successes in lifehave come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumedpitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as mydisability. but, in fact, we are changed. we are marked, of course, by achallenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. and im going to suggestthat this is a good thing. adversity isn an obstacle that we need to getaround in order to resume living our life. its part of our life. and i tend tothink of it like my shadow. sometimes i see a lot of it, sometimes theres verylittle, but its always with me. and, certainly, im not trying to diminish theimpact, the weight, of a persons struggle.
there is adversity and challenge in life, and its all very real andrelative to every single person, but the question isn whether or not you egoing to meet adversity, but how you e going to meet it. so, our responsibilityis not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them tomeet it well. and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel thatthey e not equipped to adapt. theres an important difference and distinctionbetween the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjectivesocietal opinion of whether or not im disabled. and, truthfully, the only realand consistent disability ive had to confront is the world ever thinking that icould be described by those definitions.
in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hardtruth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the e_pectedquality of their life, we have to make sure that we don put the first brick ina wall that will actually disable someone. perhaps the e_isting model of onlylooking at what is broken in you and how do we fi_ it, serves to be moredisabling to the inpidual than the pathology itself.
by not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging theirpotency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle theymight have. we are effectively grading someones worth to our community. so weneed to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. and,most importantly, theres a partnership between those perceived deficiencies andour greatest creative ability. so its not about devaluing, or negating, thesemore trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, butinstead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. so maybe the ideai want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is openingourselves 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 e less burdened by the presence of it.
this year we celebrate the 200th birthday of charles darwin, and it was 150years ago, when writing about evolution, that darwin illustrated, i think, atruth about the human character. to paraphrase: its not the strongest of thespecies that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is theone that is most adaptable to change. conflict is the genesis of creation. fromdarwins work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability tosurvive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit throughconflict into transformation. so, again, transformation, adaptation, is ourgreatest human skill. and, perhaps, until we e tested, we don know what we emade of. maybe thats what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of ourown power. so, we can give ourselves a gift. we can re-imagine adversity assomething more than just tough times. maybe we can see it as change. adversityis just change that we haven adapted ourselves to yet.
i think the greatest adversity that weve created for ourselves is thisidea of normalcy. now, whos normal? theres no normal. theres common, therestypical. theres no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige personif they e_isted? (laughter) i don think so. if we can change this paradigmfrom one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even alittle bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children,and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with thecommunity.
anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have alwaysrequired of our community members is to be of use, to be able to s evidence that neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly andthose with serious physical injury, and perhaps its because the life e_perienceof survival of these people proved of value to the community. they didn viewthese 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 thatred zone in northeastern pennsylvania, and i was standing over a bushel oftomatoes. it was summertime: i had shorts on. i hear this guy, his voice behindme say, "well, if it isn aimee mullins." and i turn around, and its thisolder man. i have no idea who he is.
and i said, "im sorry, sir, have we met? i don remember meetingyou."
he said, "well, you wouldn remember meeting me. i mean, when we met i wasdelivering you from your mothers womb." (laughter) oh, that guy. and, but ofcourse, actually, it did click.
this man was dr. kean, a man that i had only known about through mymothers stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, i arrivedlate for my birthday by two weeks. and so my mothers prenatal physician hadgone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to myparents. and, because i was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turnedin, 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 wouldnever walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids haveor any kind of life of independence, and youve been making liar out of me eversince." (laughter) (applause)
the e_traordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippingsthroughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee,marching with the girl scouts, you know, the halloween parade, winning mycollege scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, andintegrating it into teaching resident students, med students from hahnemannmedical school and hershey medical school. and he called this part of the coursethe _ factor, the potential of the human will. no prognosis can account for howpowerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someones life. anddr. kean went on to tell me, he said, "in my e_perience, unless repeatedly toldotherwise, 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 theres adifference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. andtheres been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at15 years old, if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, iwouldn have hesitated for a second. i aspired to that kind of normalcy backthen. but if you ask me today, im not so sure. and its because of thee_periences ive had with them, not in spite of the e_periences ive had withthem. and perhaps this shift in me has happened because ive been e_posed tomore people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and castshadows on me.
see, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your ownpower, and you e 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 forsomeone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. you eteaching them to open doors for themselves. in fact, the e_act meaning of theword "educate" comes from the root word "educe." it means "to bring forth whatis within, to bring out potential." so again, which potential do we want tobring out?
there was a case study done in 1960s britain, when they were moving fromgrammar schools to comprehensive schools. its called the streaming trials. wecall it "tracking" here in the states. its separating students from a, b, c, dand 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 themas, told them they were "as," told them they were bright, and at the end ofthis three-month period, they were performing at a-level.
and, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that theytook the "a students" and told them they were "ds." and thats what happened atthe 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 wasthat the teachers were duped too. the teachers didn know a switch had beenmade. they were simply told, "these are the a-students, these are thed-students.\" and thats how they went about teaching them and treatingthem.
so, i think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spiritthats been crushed doesn have hope, it doesn see beauty, it no longer hasour 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 andothers, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and newways of being.
id like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century persian poetnamed hafiz that my friend, jacques dembois told me about, and the poem iscalled "the god who only knows four words": "every child has known god, not thegod of names, not the god of don s, but the god who only knows four words andkeeps repeating them, saying, come dance with me. come, dance with me. come,dance with me.\"
thank you. (applause)
推荐ted经典励志英文演讲稿范本三
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, im 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 sisters 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 sisters 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 amys 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 even see it coming -- i was trying as hard as i could to be on mybest behavior.
and i saw my sisters face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprisethreatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from thelong winters 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, youve seen this hundreds of times before. i said, "amy, amy,wait. don cry. don cry. did you see how you landed? no human lands on allfours like that. amy, i think this means you e 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 im 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 even mean anything;its fake data. what we found is --
(laughter)
if i got this data back studying you here in the room, i would be thrilled,because theres very clearly a trend thats going on there, and that means thati can get published, which is all that really matters. the fact that theres oneweird red dot thats up above the curve, theres one weirdo in the room -- iknow who you are, i saw you earlier -- thats no problem. thats no problem, asmost of you know, because i can just delete that dot. i can delete that dotbecause thats clearly a measurement error. and we know thats a measurementerror because its 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 im trying to find out how many advil theaverage person should be taking -- two. but if im interested in potential, ifim interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy orcreativity, what we e doing is we e 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 e either depressed or you have a disorder,or hopefully both. we e 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. well 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 itsnegative. most of its about murder, corruption, diseases, natural very quickly, my brain starts to think thats the accurate ratio of negativeto positive in the world. what thats doing is creating something called themedical school syndrome -- which, if you know people whove 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 e finding is its not necessarily the reality that shapes us,but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your 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 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 even apossibility became a reality. when i went there, i assumed everyone else wouldsee it as a privilege as well, that theyd be e_cited to be there. even ifyou e in a classroom full of people smarter than you, youd 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 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 theyd come to visit me, theyd look around, theydsay, "this freshman dining hall looks like something out of hogwarts from themovie "harry potter," which it does. this is hogwarts from the movie "harrypotter" and thats 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 e so e_cited. monday night we have the worlds leading e_pert coming in tospeak about adolescent depression. tuesday night its school violence andbullying. wednesday night is eating disorders. thursday night is elicit druguse. and friday night we e trying to decide between risky se_ or happiness."(laughter) i said, "thats most peoples friday nights." (laughter) (applause)which im glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. silence on thephone. and into the silence, i said, "id be happy to speak at your school, butjust so you know, thats not a wellness week, thats a sickness week. whatyouve done is youve outlined all the negative things that can happen, but nottalked about the positive."
the absence of disease is not health. heres how we get to health: we needto reverse the formula for happiness and success. in the last three years, ivetraveled 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, ill bemore successful. and if im more successful, then ill be happier. thatundergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that wemotivate our behavior.
and the problem is its 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 e going to change your sales target. and if happiness is on theopposite side of success, your brain never gets there. what weve done is wevepushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. and thats because wethink we have to be successful, then well be happier.
but the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. if you canraise somebodys 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 weve found is that every single business outcome brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain atnegative, neutral or stressed. you e 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 e 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 e 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.
weve 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. weve done these things in researchnow in every single company that ive worked with, getting them to write downthree new things that they e 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 youve 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 weve 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 weve 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)
