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.
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.
What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.
Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.
Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.
"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.
But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps."
What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.
Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.
Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter)
The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of
Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.
The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.
What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.
But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.
Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equiavlent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.
So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.
One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.
So when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that.
(Laughter)
If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. It sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.
Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.
Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.
So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep? So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.
So most of us, of course, ask the question, "Well, how do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.
What do you do? Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Okay. That's some facts. What about some myths?
Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.
We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that.
Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.
And the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Okay. So for the last part, the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. It's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics.
So what's going on? Lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. Their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed.
So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.
Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.
So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.
So let me just finish. What I started by saying is take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.
Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
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.
Hackers are innovators, hackers are people who challenge and change the systems to make them work differently, to make them work better, it’s just how they think, it’s a mindset.
I’m growing up in a world that needs more people with the hacker mindset, and not just for technology, everything is up for being hacked, even skiing, even education. So whether it’s Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Shane McConkey having the hacker mindset can change the world.
Healthy, happy, creativity in the hacker mindset are all a large part of my education. I call it Hackschooling, I don’t use any one particular curriculum, and I’m not dedicated to any one particular approach, I hack my education.
I take advantage of opportunities in my community, and through a network of my friends and family. I take advantage of opportunities to experience what I’m learning, and I’m not afraid to look for shortcuts or hacks to get a better faster result. It’s like a remix or a mash-up of learning. It’s flexible, opportunistic, and it never loses sight of making happy, healthy and creativity a priority.
And here is the cool part, because it’s a mindset, not a system. Hackschooling can be used anyone, even traditional schools. Soo what does my school look like? Well, it looks like Starbucks a lot of the time, but like most kids I study lot of math, science, history and writing. I didn’t used to like to write because my teachers made me write about butterflies and rainbows, and I wanted to write about skiing.
It was a relief for my good friend’s mom, started the Squaw Valley Kids Institute, where I got to write through my experiences and my interests, while, connecting with great speakers from around the nation, and that sparked my love of writing.
I realized that once you’re motivated to learn something, you can get a lot done in a short amount of time, and on your own, Starbucks is pretty great for that. Hacking physics was fun, we learned all about Newton and Galileo, and we experienced some basic physics concepts like kinetic energy through experimenting and making mistakes.
My favorite was the giant Newton’s cradle that we made out of bowling balls, no bocce balls. We experimented with lot of other things like bowling balls and event giant jawbreakers.
Project Discovery’s ropes course is awesome, and slightly stressful. When you’re 60 feet off the ground, you have to learn how to handle your fears, communicate clearly, and most importantly, trust each other.
Community organizations play a big part in my education, High Fives Foundation’s Basics Program being aware and safe in critical situations. We spent a day with the Squaw Valley Ski Patrol to learn more about mountain safety, then the next day we switched to science of snow, weather and avalanches.
But most importantly, we learned that making bad decisions puts you and your friends at risk. Young should talk, well brings history to life. You study a famous character in history, and so that you can stand on stage and perform as that character, and answer any question about their lifetime.
In this photo, you see Al Capone and Bob Marley getting grilled with questions at the historical Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, the same stage where Harry Houdini got his start.
Time and nature is really important to me, it’s calm, quiet and I get to just log out of reality. I spend one day a week, outside all day. At my Fox Walkers classes, our goal is to be able to survive in the wilderness with just a knife. We learn to listen to nature, we learn to sense our surroundings, and I’ve gained a spiritual connection to nature that, I never knew existed.
But the best part is that we get to make spears, bows and arrows, fires with just a bow drill and survival shelters for the snowy nights when we camp out. Hanging out at the Moment Factory where they hand make skis and design clothes, has really inspired me to one day have my own business. The guys at the factory showed me why I need to be good at math, be creative and get good at selling.
So I got an internship at Big Shark Print to get better at design and selling. Between fetching lunch, scrubbing toilets and breaking their vacuum cleaner, I’m getting to contribute to clothing design, customizing hats and selling them. The people who work there are happy, healthy, creative, and stoked to be doing what they are doing, this is by far my favorite class.
So, this is why I’m really happy, powder days, and it’s a good metaphor for my life, my education, my hackschooling. If everyone ski this mountain, like most people think of education, everyone will be skiing the same line, probably the safest and most of the powder would go untouched.
I look at this, and see a thousand possibilities, dropping the corners, shredding the spine, looking for a churning from cliff-to-cliff. Skiing to me is freedom, and so is my education, it’s about being creative; doing things differently, it’s about community and helping each other. It’s about being happy and healthy among my very best friends.
So I’m starting to think, I know what I might want to do when I grow up, but if you ask me what do I want to be when I grow up? I’ll always know that I want to be happy. Thank you.
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.
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。
When Dorothy was a little girl, she wasfascinated by her goldfish. Her father explained to her that fish swim byquickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. Withouthesitation, little Dorothy responded, "Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwardsby wagging their heads."
当多萝西还是一个小女孩的时候，她被她的金鱼迷住了。她的父亲向她解释，鱼是通过快速摇尾推动自己在水中前进。毫无犹豫地，小多萝西回答道，“是的，爸爸，而且鱼会通过摇头来后退。”
In her mind, it was a fact as true as anyother. Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. She believed it.
在她的心里，这是一个确切的事实。鱼通过摇头来后退。她坚信如此。
Our lives are full of fish swimmingbackwards. We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. We harbor bias. Weknow that we are right, and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We strive forunattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In ourminds, fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads and we don'teven notice them.
我们的生活中充满着倒游的鱼。我们制造假设和错误跳跃的逻辑。我们心怀偏见。我们知道我们是对的，而他们是错的。我们害怕最糟糕的。我们力求无法获得的完美。我们告诉自己什么是我们能做的和不能做的。在我们心里，鱼是通过往相反方向疯狂摇头来游泳的，而我们甚至不曾察觉过它们。
I'm going to tell you five facts aboutmyself. One fact is not true. One: I graduated from Harvard at 19 with anhonors degree in mathematics. Two: I currently run a construction company inOrlando. Three: I starred on a television sitcom. Four: I lost my sight to arare genetic eye disease. Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Courtjustices. Which fact is not true? Actually, they're all true. Yeah. They're alltrue.
我想告诉你们五件关于我的事实。其中有一件不是真的。第一：我19岁的时候以数学荣誉学士学位毕业于哈佛大学。第二：我现在在奥兰多经营着一家建筑公司。第三：我主演过一部电视情景剧。第四：我因为患上一种罕有的遗传性眼疾而失去了视力。第五：我曾经给两位美国最高法院的法官当过法律助手。哪一个不是真的呢?事实上，它们都是真的。是的，它们都是真的。
At this point, most people really only careabout the television show.
这时候，大部分人其实都只关心那部电视剧。
I know this from experience. OK, so theshow was NBC's "Saved by the Bell: The New Class." And I playedWeasel Wyzell, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show, whichmade it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13-year-old boy.
这是经验告诉我的。好吧，那部电视剧是NBC的“SavedbytheBell:TheNewClass."而我饰演了WeaselWyzell，一个在剧中带点笨拙书呆子性格的角色，对于13岁的我来说，这是一个很重大的演出挑战。
Now, did you struggle with number four, myblindness? Why is that? We make assumptions about so-called disabilities. As ablind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions about my abilities everyday. My point today is not about my blindness, however. It's about my g blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. It taught me to spotthose backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. Going blind cast them intofocus.
现在，你是否纠结于第四个事实，我的失明?为什么会这样呢?我们对所谓的残疾做出一些假设。作为盲人，我每天都面对别人对我能力的错误假设。然而，我今天的重点不在于我的失明。而是在于我的视野。失明教会我用开阔的眼界去生活。它教会我去发现那些倒游的鱼，我们内心创造出来的鱼。失明使它们变成了焦点。
What does it feel like to see? It'simmediate and passive. You open your eyes and there's the world. Seeing isbelieving. Sight is truth. Right? Well, that's what I thought.
看得见是怎么样的一种感觉?是即时并且被动的。你睁开双眼，世界就在你眼前。看见什么相信什么。眼见为实。对吧?好吧，我当初是这么想的。
Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinasprogressively deteriorated. My sight became an increasingly bizarre carnivalfunhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. The salesperson I was relieved to spotin a store was really a mannequin. Reaching down to wash my hands, I suddenlysaw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its trueshape.
接着，从12岁到15岁，我的视网膜逐渐衰弱。我的视像变成了愈加奇异的嘉年华游乐场里的哈哈镜。我在商店里好不容易发现的销售员实际上是一个人体模型。俯下身去洗手，当我的手指感受到它的真实形状，我意识到我去触摸的是小便池，而不是洗手池。
A friend described the photograph in my hand, and only then I could seethe image depicted. Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. Itwas difficult and exhausting to see. I pieced together fragmented, transitoryimages, consciously analyzed the clues, searched for some logic in my crumblingkaleidoscope, until I saw nothing at all.
一位朋友向我描述我手中的照片，只有在那时候我才能明白图像描画了些什么。物体在我的现实中出现、变形和消失。看见成为了一件困难的使我筋疲力尽的事情。我把支离破碎的、片刻的图像拼接起来，凭感觉分析线索，在我破碎的万花筒中寻找符合逻辑的对应，直到我什么都看不见。
I learned that what we see is not universaltruth. It is not objective reality. What we see is a unique, personal, virtualreality that is masterfully constructed by our brain.
我认识到我们所看到的并不即是普遍真理。并不是客观现实。我们所看到的是独一无二的虚拟现实，它是由我们的大脑巧妙地构造出来的。
Let me explain with a bit of amateurneuroscience. Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent of your 's compared to approximately eight percent for touch and two to threepercent for hearing. Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as manyas two billion pieces of information. The rest of your body can send your brainonly an additional billion. So sight is one third of your brain by volume andcan claim about two thirds of your brain's processing resources. It's nosurprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistakeabout it: sight is an illusion.
请让我以外行的身份解释一遍神经系统学。你的视觉皮层占据了你脑部的大概30%。相比于触觉的8%以及听觉的2-3%。每一秒钟，你的双眼能够向你的视觉皮层传达多达二十亿的信息片段。其余的身体部分加起来也仅能够传达另外的十亿。所以视觉占据了你脑部容量的三分之一并且占用了你脑部中三分之二的信息处理资源。因此意想得到的是视觉幻象是多么的令人信服。但是别误会了：我们所看到的只是一种幻象。
Here's where it gets interesting. To createthe experience of sight, your brain references your conceptual understanding ofthe world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mentalattention. All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to yoursight. These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. So for example, what you see impacts how you feel, and the way you feel can literally change what you see.
这是事情变得有趣的地方。为了制造视觉经验，你的大脑参考了你对这个世界的概念性理解，其它知识、你的记忆、看法、情绪和心理关注。所有的这些东西和以及其它的都连结于你的大脑和视觉景象之间。这些连结是双向作用的，并且常常在潜意识中发生。举例子来说，你所看到的会影响到你的感觉，而你的感觉又能够直接改变你所看到的。
Numerous studies demonstrate this. If you are asked toestimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer willbe different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. A hill appearssteeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you'rewearing a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction.
许多的研究证明了这一点。如果你被要求去估计视频中人物的行走速度，举例来说，在被告知去想着猎豹或者乌龟的情况下，你的答案将会不一样。如果你刚刚运动完，你会感觉山变陡峭了，如果你背着一个很重的背包，眼前的目的地看起来距离更远。我们在这里遇到了一种基本的矛盾。
What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experienceit passively as a direct representation of the world around you. You createyour own reality, and you believe it. I believed mine until it broke apart. Thedeterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion.
你肉眼所看到的东西是你自己创造的一种复杂的心智建造，但是你被动地经历着它让它作为你周遭世界的一种直接呈现。你创造了属于你自己的现实并且深信着它。我深信于我的现实直到它瓦解了。我双眼的衰退粉碎了这种幻象。
You see, sight is just one way we shape ourreality. We create our own realities in many other ways. Let's take fear asjust one example. Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic offear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs,passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place ofthe ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. Psychologists have a greatterm for it: awfulizing.
你看，视觉只是我们认识世界的一种途径。我们可以通过许多其它的方式去创造属于我们自己的现实。让我们来举恐惧作为一个例子。你的恐惧扭曲了你的现实。在扭曲的恐惧逻辑影响下，任何事情都比未知要好。恐惧不惜一切代价填补空白，把你所惧怕的冒充成你所知道的，让最糟糕取代了不明确，使假设代替了原因。心理学家对此有一个很好的术语：往坏处想。
Right? Fear replaces the unknown with theawful. Now, fear is self-realizing. When you face the greatest need to lookoutside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside yourmind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for criticalthought with a flood of disruptive emotions. When you face a compellingopportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you topassively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves.
对吧?恐惧把未知的替换成了可怕的。现在，恐惧在自我实现着。当你非常迫切的需要去客观看待自己并进行批判性思考的时候，恐惧在你的内心深处打起了退堂鼓，收缩并扭曲你的观点，以洪水般涌现的破坏性情绪淹没你批判思考的能力。当你面对一个极具吸引力的机会去采取行动时，恐惧误导你去无所作为，诱使你被动地看着它的预言一个个实现成真。
When I was diagnosed with my blindingdisease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness was a death sentencefor my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness meant Iwould live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. I knew was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but itwas my reality, just like those backwards-swimming fish in little Dorothy'smind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. Iam certain of that.
当我被诊出患有致盲眼疾时，我料到失明将会毁了我的生活。失明对我的独立能力判了死刑。它是我一生成就的终点。失明意味着我将度过平凡的一生，渺小且凄惨，极有可能孤独终老。我就知道会这样。这是我因为恐惧带来的胡编乱造，但我相信了。它是一个谎言，但它曾是我的现实。就像小多萝西内心那些倒游的鱼一样。如若我不曾面对过我内心恐惧创造出来的现实，我会就那样活着。我很确定。
So how do you live your life eyes wideopen? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be practiced. I willsummarize very briefly.
所以你们如何去以开阔的眼界生活呢?这是一个需要学习的学科。它能被传授。它能被练习。我简单地总结一下。
Hold yourself accountable for every moment,every thought, every detail. See beyond your fears. Recognize your ess your internal strength. Silence your internal critic. Correct yourmisconceptions about luck and about success. Accept your strengths and yourweaknesses, and understand the difference. Open your hearts to your bountifulblessings.
让自己学会负责，对每一时刻，每个想法，每个细节。超越你内心的恐惧。识别出你所作的假设。展现你内在的能力。消除你内心的批判。修正你对于运气和成功的错误概念。接受自己的长处和短处，并清楚认识它们之间的区别。打开你的心扉去迎接对你满满的祝福。
Your fears, your critics, your heroes, yourvillains -- they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications,your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to seethrough them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. Withthat empowerment comes complete responsibility.
你的恐惧，你的批判，你的英雄，你的敌人——他们都是你的借口、合理化作用、捷径、辩护、屈服。它们是你错认为现实的小说。尝试选择看穿它们。尝试让它们远离自己。你是自我现实的创造者。伴随这种权利而来的是你需要负起全部的责任。
I chose to step out of fear's tunnel intoterrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life. Farfrom alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with ourtriplets, whom we call the Tripskys, and with the latest addition to thefamily, sweet baby Clementine.
我选择走出恐惧的隧道，步入了未知的领域。我选择在那里构建幸福的人生。远离孤单，我分享我的美好生活，与多萝西，我美丽的妻子，与我们的三胞胎，我们称之为“Tripskys”，还有新添的家庭成员，可爱的宝贝克莱蒙蒂。
What do you fear? What lies do you tellyourself? How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? Whatreality are you creating for yourself?
你在害怕什么?你在欺骗自己什么?你是如何修饰自己的真相，编写自己的小说?你在为自己创造着怎么样的现实?
In your career and personal life, in yourrelationships, and in your heart and soul, your backwards-swimming fish do yougreat harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealized potential,and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment andconnection. I urge you to search them out.
在你的职业生涯和个人生活中，在你的人际关系中，在你的内心和灵魂中，倒游的鱼给你带来巨大的伤害。它们使你为错失的机会以及尚未实现的潜能付出代价。它们在你寻求满足与联系时引起你的不安以及不信任。我呼吁大家把它们找出来。
Helen Keller said that the only thing worsethan being blind is having sight but no vision. For me, going blind was aprofound blessing, because blindness gave me vision. I hope you can see what Isee.
海伦·凯勒曾说过，唯一比失明更糟糕的是拥有视力，却没有远见。失明对我来说是一种深深的祝福，因为失明给予了我远见。我衷心希望你们也能看见我所看见的。
Thank you.(Applause)
谢谢。(掌声)
Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you leave thestage, just a question. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, of doers, ofinnovators. You are a CEO of a company down in Florida, and many are probablywondering, how is it to be a blind CEO? What kind of specific challenges do youhave, and how do you overcome them?
布鲁诺·朱萨尼：艾萨克，在你离开之前，我想问一个问题。在座的各位都是创业者、实干家、创新者。你是佛罗里达一家公司的执行总裁，很多人大概都会好奇，身为一名失明的执行总裁究竟是怎么样的呢?这使你面临哪些具体的挑战，而你又是怎么克服它们的呢?
Isaac Lidsky: Well, the biggest challengebecame a blessing. I don't get visual feedback from people.
艾萨克·利德斯基：好吧，最大的挑战成了一种祝福。我看不到别人的反应。
BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah. So,for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't see facial expressions orgestures. I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. I basically forcepeople to tell me what they think. And in this respect, it's become, like Isaid, a real blessing for me personally and for my company, because wecommunicate at a far deeper level, we avoid ambiguities, and most important, myteam knows that what they think truly matters.
布：有什么声音在哪里吗?艾：是的。比如说在我的领导团队的会议中，我无法看到别人的表情或者手势。我学会去征求更多的言语反馈。我基本都要求人们把他们的想法告诉我。正因如此，它成为了，如我所说，对我个人还有我公司的一种真正的祝福。因为我们获得了更深层次的沟通。我们避免了歧义，还有更重要的，我的团队清楚知道他们的想法是真的要紧的。
BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED. IL:Thank you, Bruno.
布：艾萨克，感谢你来到了TED。艾：谢谢你，布鲁诺。
我选择在网络声中被倒下就在网络声中爬起来，当你被骂得小有名气的时候我就暗自思量，反正也是挨骂，不如用最积极的方式迎接骂声。20__年3月3日，我在微博上面发出了一条名为"爱的骂骂"的微博，只要在我这条微博下面留言的，，不管是鼓励我的，骂我的，还是随便说说的，我都捐五毛，24个小时，有十万多条留言，捐款金额是50693.5元，作为北京一家残疾孤儿康复机构的手术费，在这里我要对每一位留言的人表示感谢。
在现实生活中顽强活着的残疾孤儿，其中有一个孩子在手术后的一年，终于有机会可以站起来了，当我看到她第一次站起，我很感动，也很骄傲，这个"黑姑娘"干了一件痛快的事。是的，我说出了金额，我知道一定会有人说，"捐那么少还好意思报数"我相信现在大部分人都不愿意公布捐款金额，因为捐款已经不再是一件随心的行为，而是成为大家根据金额的多少来衡量爱心的大小。
我相信在座的的各位，也一定有过朋友之间随份子，该给多少才合适的烦恼，我之所以说出来，不仅仅是因为，我觉得随心的行为需要躲闪，更因为"爱的骂骂"是每一个留言的镜子。当时骂过我的人，也许在两年后的今天听到我说这番话，会想起曾经不太善意的留言，却给了这些孩子们有机会获得新生，这同样值得高兴，其实我们每个人都有不同阶段的新生，不是吗?"爱的骂骂"发出那一刻，我如重生般释然了，虽然，我不像很多演员那样，拥有令人赞叹的表演才华，自己也觉得不是天生吃这碗饭的，但是既然选择了演员这份职业，我相信只要通过自己的努力和善待他人，就可以让自己的家人和自己过上幸福美满的生活，然而这一切，在20__年的夏天，被一句开创演艺界网络暴力先河的"滚出娱乐圈"所动摇，我是第一个被放在主语位置的人，袁姗姗，这个名字好像从此和"一无是处"划上了等号，那个时候不管说什么、做什么、演什么都不对。更有媒体总结了"袁姗姗不被观众所喜欢的五大理由"第一条理由是"没有理由"这是得有多深厚的感情基础，才能达到的境界。
20__年确实挺让人操心的，从春天到夏天，都没有平静过，一开始我也有些懊恼，不知道到底发生了什么，我既没有不劳而获，也没有做伤天害理的事，为什么让我"滚"?没多久，我想明白一个道理，谁都可以说我不好，但是自己必须接纳那个心安理得的自己，既然我的演艺生涯要从倒数开始，那我之后的每一点进步都是充满喜悦，从零分到六十分比从满分到六十分，哪个更让人开心呢?
也是从那个时候，我重拾扔下了多年的小提琴，还有健身，运动让我心情愉快，不工作的时候练琴和健身会让我的每一天都过得很充实，根本没有过多的时间停留在网上，更顾不上网友的围观。
我建议那些沉迷于网络的年轻人，每天可以挤出一点时间锻炼身体，当有朝一日被他人欺负的时候，至少可以像我一样，身轻如燕，自由翻滚，作为过去也许将来还会遭遇网络暴力的过来人，我不喜欢再有人因为网络暴力而受到伤害，请善用语言让人言可敬。
特别感谢在那段特殊时间陪伴，我的家人和朋友，感谢他们承受住了一个当时还没有来得及减肥，各方面份量都很重的我，经历了这些，并不是想说明自己有多强大，但确实因为这些切身经历让我有了足够的时间去思考，我曾经问过自己一个问题，如果我当时真的不堪重负放弃了演员这个职业，是否网络暴力就会消失，答案当然不会，既然还是要面对，就应该积极地面对.
前不久，我参与了一部公益电影的拍摄，电影传递了一个非常积极的理念：每个人都有自由选择的机会和权利，无论你生下来是幸福的还是不幸的，我非常赞同，所以我选择做一个积极快乐的自己，不再受控于网络暴力中，不再只能看到消极的一面，都说做公益是在帮助他人，在我身上成全了一个更加快乐的自己，电影的名字叫《有一天》我想在这里特别推荐一下，虽然我只参演了电影的一部分，但也给我带来很多启发和感动，这部电影关注了九类特殊儿童群体，我参与拍摄的故事和聋哑儿童有关，跟我一起搭档演出的也是一名聋哑儿童，拍摄之前，我还有些顾虑，我不知道该怎么去跟他交流，我担心因为自己不小心的举动伤害到他，但是见面之后，我才发现成年人的世界真的是，因为想太多而变得复杂，只要我们保持一颗平常的心，用平等的方式去交流，就不会存在特别的障碍，重要的是你怎么看，而不是他怎么想，拍摄的那几天，我平静而快乐，每当完成一个镜头，这个小少年都会跟我竖起大拇指示意，他这个小小的举动也提醒了我和我们，有人选择赞美，有人则不!
感谢"爱的骂骂"感谢《有一天》感谢喝倒彩时刻提醒我的人，感谢一直鼓励我的家人和朋友，我希望能有更多的人
可以像我一样，主动地从逆境中走出来，这个世界还有很多需要我们关心的事去做，需要我们关心的人去爱，保持自己的真实，倔强地活下去。
I choose in network sound by the fall on the climb up the network sound, when you get it a little famous I thought, it is better to meet with scolded, condemning the most positive way. In March 3, 20__, I issued a "love mama" micro-blog on micro-blog, as long as in my micro-blog comments below, and whether it is encouraging me, scold me, or casual, I donated 50 Fen, 24 hours, more than 100 thousand message, the donation amount is 50693.5 yuan, as a Beijing disabled orphans surgery rehabilitation institutions, here I want to every message thank you.
In real life, live strong disabled orphans, one child in a year after operation, finally have the opportunity to stand up, when I saw her for the first time to stand up, I was very moved, very proud of this "black girl" did a good thing. Yes, I say the amount I know some people will say, "donate so little Weasley off" I believe now that most people are not willing to publish the donation amount, because the donation is no longer a heart of behavior, but we become according to the amount to measure how much the size of love.
I believe all of you, there must have been friends with the elements, how much is appropriate trouble, I say, not just because I feel heart behavior need to dodge, but also because "love mama is a mirror of the message. When scolded me, maybe two years later to hear me say these words, will remember not too good message, gave the children a chance, this is happy, in fact, we each have a different stage of the new, not love mama? From that moment, I like reborn as relieved, though, I like a lot of actors that have admirable acting talent, feel not born to eat a bowl of rice, but since the choice of the actors of this occupation, I believe that through their own efforts and be kind to others, you can make your own family. And they live a happy life, but all of this, in the summer of 20__, was a pioneering shake showbiz network violence first get out of entertainment, I was the first one to be placed in the subject position of people, Yuan Shanshan, this name seems to be from "Nothing is right." sign, at that time no matter what to say, what to do, what's wrong. More media summed up the Yuan Shanshan is not the audience like the five reasons, the first reason is that there is no reason, this is a more profound emotional foundation, in order to achieve the realm.
20__ is really a worry, from spring to summer, are not calm, I also started a little vexed, don't know what happened, I have neither something for nothing, nor do wicked things, why let me roll? Not long, I want to understand a truth, who can say I'm not good, but he must accept that comfort myself, since my career is going to start from the bottom, every bit of progress that I later are full of joy, from zero to sixty from out to sixty points, which make people happy?
From that time, I regain dropped years of violin, and fitness, exercise makes me feel good, and practicing fitness will let me every day to the fullest when not working, there is not too much time on the Internet, no more friends in the crowd.
I suggest young people who are addicted to the Internet, every day can squeeze a little time to exercise, when some day in the future is bullied, at least you can like me, shenqingruyan, free rolling, as past, perhaps the future will encounter the network violence over, I don't love hurt because the network violence again, please use let the other person worthy of language.
Special thanks to the company at that period of time, my family and friends, thank them to withstand a time yet to lose weight, the weight is very heavy for me, these experiences, and not to show how powerful you are, but because these experiences let me have enough time to think and I asked you a question, if I was really overwhelmed abandoned actor in this occupation, whether the network violence will disappear, of course not, since still have to face, should actively face.
Not long ago, I participated in a charity film, the film has a very positive philosophy: everyone has the freedom to choose the right and opportunity, whether it is happy or not you born, I agree very much, so I choose to be a positive and happy self, no longer controlled by the network of violence, not only see the negative side, say to do charity is to help other people, in my body into a more happy, the name of the movie called "one day" here I would like to recommend a special, although I only made a part of the film, but also to I brought a lot of inspiration and moved, the film focused on nine classes of special groups of children, I participated in the filming of the story and deaf children, together with my partner before the show is also a deaf children, shooting, I still have some Worry, I do not know how to communicate with him, I am worried because you accidentally move to hurt him, but after the meeting, I found that the adult world is really too much, because I want to become more complex, as long as we keep a normal heart, with equal way to communicate, do not there are particular obstacles, it is important how you see, rather than what he thinks, that a few days of shooting, I am calm and happy, whenever a lens, the boy will tell me the thumbs up sign, he this small action also remind me and us, some people choose to have praise. People are not!
Thank you love mama for "one day" to remind me of the boos, thank you always encourage my family and friends, I hope to have more people
Can be like me, take the initiative to come out from the face of adversity, the world there are many things we need to do to do, we need to care about people to love, to maintain their true, stubborn to live.
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.
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.
