Personal Renewal英语演讲经典值得收藏.docx

1、Personal Renewal英语演讲经典值得收藏“Personal Renewal”delivered byJOHN W. GARDNERBackgroundJohn W. Gardner was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, an activist and author, and recipient of the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom. This speech was delivered to McKinsey

2、& Company on November 10, 1990.Speech TranscriptIm going to talk about “Self-Renewal.” One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of the organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount of self-renewal. But to help you think about o

3、thers is not my primary mission this morning. I want to help you think about yourselves.I take that mission very seriously, and Ive written out what I have to say because I want every sentence to hit its target. I know a good deal about the kind of work you do and know how demanding it is. But Im no

4、t going to talk about the special problems of your kind of career; Im going to talk about some basic problems of the life cycle that will surely hit you if youre not ready for them.I once wrote a book called “Self-Renewal” that deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations and individ

5、uals. I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves, and the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives. Its the latter question that I shall deal with at this time. I know that you as an individual are not goin

6、g to seed. But the person seated on your right may be in fairly serious danger.Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I dont want to give the wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I re

7、ad. But this article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. “The barnacle” the author explained “is confronted with an existential decision about where its going to live. Once it decides. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.” End of quote. For a good many of us, it com

8、es to that.Weve all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps some

9、thing inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. Youve known such people feeling secretly defeated, ma

10、ybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.Im not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We cant all get to the top, and that isnt t

11、he point of life anyway. Im talking about people who no matter how busy they seem to be have stopped learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions. I dont deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women f

12、unctioning far below the level of their potential.We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day “How

13、 can I be so bored when Im so busy?” And I said “Let me count the ways.” Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if thats true I know some very busy middle level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.We cant write off the danger of

14、complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well people even younger than yourselves are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a cert

15、ain point in their lives.” I could without any trouble name a half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I wont do it because I still have to deal with them periodically.Ive watched a lot of mid-ca

16、reer people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. Ive concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. Youre young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies arent what they used to be, then youll begin to wonder what it