TED演讲1000个快乐的理由.docx

1、TED演讲1000个快乐的理由TED演讲:1000个快乐的理由 So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada. My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar, India. And they got here in the late 1960s. They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Tor

2、onto, and they settled into a new life. They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids. My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods. We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things

3、that my parents couldnt take for granted when they grew up - things like power always on in our houses, things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard. We grew up, and we grew older. I went to high school. I graduated. I moved out of the house, I got

4、a job, I found a girl, I settled down - and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens song - (Laughter) but life was pretty good. Life was pretty good. 2006 was a great year. Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded by 150 family and friend

5、s. 2007 was a great year. I graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends. Heres a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked

6、 them with our giant heads. (Laughter) So you cant actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe me. (Laughter) 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me. First of all, the news was so heavy. Its still heavy now, and it was heavy before

7、 that, but when you flipped open a newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs

8、, or our retirements, or our livelihoods. 2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason, too. I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. My marriage wasnt going well, and we just were growing further and further apart. One day my wife came home from work and summoned the cou

9、rage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation. And she said, I dont love you anymore, and it was one of the most painful things Id ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing Id ever heard, until only a month later, when I heard something even more heartbreaking. My frie

10、nd Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time. And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be. I spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday night. We talked about the TV show we watched

11、that evening. And Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared. Very sadly, he took his own life. And it was a really heavy time. And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focu

12、s on the positive somehow. So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called . I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just dont talk about enough - things like waiters and waitresses w

13、ho bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line - even if you were last at the oth

14、er line, swoop right in there. (Laughter) And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000. And nobody read it except for my mom. Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 p

15、ercent when she forwarded it to my dad. (Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions. It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then I got a

16、phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, Youve just won the Best Blog In the World award. I was like, that sounds totally fake. (Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to? (Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up wal

17、king a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart. And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog. And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk ab

18、out putting this into a book. Flash-forward to the next year and The Book of Awesome has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks. (Applause) But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today. I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you

19、 the three As of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought. So lets talk about those three As. Over the last few years, I havent had that much time to really think. But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: What is it over the last few years that helpe

20、d me grow my website, but also grow myself? And Ive summarized those things, for me personally, as three As. They are Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. Id love to just talk about each one briefly. So Attitude: Look, were all going to get lumps, and were all going to get bumps. None of us can pre

21、dict the future, but we do know one thing about it and thats that it aint gonna go according to plan. We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those hi

22、gh highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too. Its sad, and its not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend could cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog could get hit by a car on the street. Its not a happy thought, but

23、your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes. Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean. And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well, too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart, and when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges

24、and soaks in, I just really hope you feel like youve always got two choices. One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever, or two, you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes. Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choosing, no matter how diffic

25、ult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future. The second A is Awareness. I love hanging out with three year-olds. I love the way that they see the world, because theyre seeing the world for the first time. I love the way that they

26、can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk. I love the way that theyll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs. I love the way that theyll spend hours picking dand

27、elions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner. I love the way that they see the world, because theyre seeing the world for the first time. Having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old. Because you all used to be three years o

28、ld. That three-year-old boy is still part of you. That three-year-old girl is still part of you. Theyre in there. And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything youve seen for the first time once, too. So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green

29、lights on the way home from work. There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, Found money. The last A is Authenticity. And for this one, I want to tell you a quick sto

30、ry. Lets go all the way back to 1932 when, on a peanut farm in Georgia, a little baby boy named Roosevelt Grier was born. Roosevelt Grier, or Rosey Grier, as people used to call him, grew up and grew into a 300-pound, six-foot-five linebacker in the NFL. Hes number 76 in the picture. Here he is pict

31、ured with the fearsome foursome. These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against. They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field. But Rosey Grier also had another passion. In his dee

32、ply authentic self, he also loved needlepoint. (Laughter) He loved knitting. He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks. Thats what he said. I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining clubs. And he even put out a book called Rosey Griers Needlepoint for Men. (Laughter) (Applause) Its a great cover. If you notice, hes actually needlepointing his own face. (Laughter) And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authentic person, and thats wh