detectTED英语演讲稿：改善工作的快乐之道

TED

英语演讲稿：改善工作的快乐之道

when i was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were

playing on top of a bunk bed. i was two years older than my sister at the time -- i

mean, i'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to

do everything that i wanted to do, and i wanted to play war. so we were up on top of

our bunk beds. and on one side of the bunk bed, i had put out all of my g.i. joe

soldiers and weaponry. and on the other side were all my sister's my little

ponies ready for a cavalry charge.

there are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since

my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story -- (laughter) -- which

is my sister's a little bit on the clumsy side. somehow, without any help or push

from her older brother at all, suddenly amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk

bed and landed with this crash on the floor. now i nervously peered over the side of

the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed

painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.

i was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my

sister and i played as safely and as quietly as possible. and seeing as how i had

accidentally broken amy's arm just one week before ... (laughter) ... heroically

pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (laughter) for

which i have yet to be thanked, i was trying as hard as i could -- she didn't even

see it coming -- i was trying as hard as i could to be on my best behavior.

and i saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise

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threatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from the

long winter's nap for which they had settled. so i did the only thing my little

frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. and if you have

children, you've seen this hundreds of times before. i said,

don't cry. don't cry. did you see how you landed? no human lands on all

fours like that. amy, i think this means you're a unicorn.

(laughter)

now that was cheating, because there was nothing in the world my sister would

want more than not to be amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but amy the special

unicorn. of course, this was an option that was open to her brain at no point in the

past. and you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little

brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise

she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. and the

latter won out. instead of crying, instead of ceasing our play, instead of waking my

parents, with all the negative consequences that would have ensued for me, instead

a smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed

with all the grace of a baby unicorn ... (laughter) ... with one broken leg.

what we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no

idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of a scientific

revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain.

what we had stumbled across is something called positive psychology, which is the

reason that i'm here today and the reason that i wake up every morning.

when i first started talking about this research outside of academia, out with

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companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is to start your talk

with a graph. the very first thing i want to do is start my talk with a graph. this graph

looks boring, but this graph is the reason i get excited and wake up every morning.

and this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. what we found

is --

(laughter)

if i got this data back studying you here in the room, i would be thrilled, because

there's very clearly a trend that's going on there, and that means that i

can get published, which is all that really matters. the fact that there's one

weird red dot that's up above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room --

i know who you are, i saw you earlier -- that's no problem. that's no

problem, as most of you know, because i can just delete that dot. i can delete that

dot because that's clearly a measurement error. and we know that's a

measurement error because it's messing up my data.

so one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statistics and

business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate

the weirdos. how do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit?

which is fantastic if i'm trying to find out how many advil the average person

should be taking -- two. but if i'm interested in potential, if i'm interested

in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, what

we're doing is we're creating the cult of the average with science.

if i asked a question like,

classroom?

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how to read in that classroom?

average. now if you fall below the average on this curve, then psychologists get

thrilled, because that means you're either depressed or you have a disorder, or

hopefully both. we're hoping for both because our business model is, if you

come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave

knowing you have 10, so you keep coming back over and over again. we'll go

back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually what we want to do is make you

normal again. but normal is merely average.

and what i posit and what positive psychology posits is that if we study what is

merely average, we will remain merely average. then instead of deleting those

positive outliers, what i intentionally do is come into a population like this one and

say, why? why is it that some of you are so high above the curve in terms of your

intellectual ability, athletic ability, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, your

resiliency in the face of challenge, your sense of humor? whatever it is, instead of

deleting you, what i want to do is study you. because maybe we can glean

information -- not just how to move people up to the average, but how we can move

the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.

the reason this graph is important to me is, when i turn on the news, it seems

like the majority of the information is not positive, in fact it's negative. most of

it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. and very quickly, my

brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world.

what that's doing is creating something called the medical school syndrome --

which, if you know people who've been to medical school, during the first year

of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that

could happen, suddenly you realize you have all of them.

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i have a brother in-law named bobo -- which is a whole other story. bobo

married amy the unicorn. bobo called me on the phone from yale medical school,

and bobo said,

extraordinarily rare. but i had no idea how to console poor bobo because he had just

gotten over an entire week of menopause.

(laughter)

see what we're finding is it's not necessarily the reality that shapes

us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.

and if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can

change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.

when i applied to harvard, i applied on a dare. i didn't expect to get in, and

my family had no money for college. when i got a military scholarship two weeks

later, they allowed me to go. suddenly, something that wasn't even a possibility

became a reality. when i went there, i assumed everyone else would see it as a

privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. even if you're in a

classroom full of people smarter than you, you'd be happy just to be in that

classroom, which is what i felt. but what i found there is, while some people

experience that, when i graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight

years living in the dorms with the students -- harvard asked me to; i wasn't that

guy. (laughter) i was an officer of harvard to counsel students through the difficult

four years. and what i found in my research and my teaching is that these students,

no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school,

two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on

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