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

17、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 all added up to; youll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Dont be too hard on your

18、self. Look ahead. Someone said that “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” And above all dont imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. At almost any age. You dont need to run down

19、 like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that that just isnt possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they dont really know that. Li

20、fe takes unexpected turns.I said in my book, “Self-Renewal,” that we build our own prisons and serve as our own jail-keepers. I no longer completely agree with that. I still think were our own jailkeepers, but Ive concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prison

21、s. They create roles for us and self images that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions, accumulated grievances and resentments that have long out

22、lived their cause. Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable. As Jim Whitaker, who climbed Mount Everest, said “You never conquer the mountain, You only conquer yourself.”The more I see of human lives, the more I

23、 believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30s, even our 40s, were doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say “Sorry about that.”Theres a myth that learning is for young people. But as the proverb says, “Its wha

24、t you learn after you know it all that counts.” The middle years are great, great learning years. Even the years past the middle years. I took on a new job after my 77th birthday and Im still learning.Learn all your life. Learn from your failures. Learn from your successes, When you hit a spell of t

25、rouble, ask “What is it trying to teach me?” The lessons arent always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isnt a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.We learn from our jobs, from our friends and families. We learn by acc

26、epting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we cant change, by taking risks.The things you learn in maturity arent simple things such as acquir

27、ing information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world lo

28、ves talent, but pays off on character.You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and the

29、n really quite relaxing.Those are things that are hard to learn early in life, As a rule you have to have picked up some mileage and some dents in your fenders before you understand. As Norman Douglas said “There are some things you cant learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.You come

30、to terms with yourself. You finally grasp what S. N. Behrman meant when he said “At the end of every road you meet yourself.” You may not get rid of all of your hang-ups, but you learn to control them to the point that you can function productively and not hurt others.You learn the arts of mutual de

31、pendence, meeting the needs of loved ones and letting yourself need them. You can even be unaffected a quality that often takes years to acquire. You can achieve the simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.You come to understand your impact on others. Its interesting that even in the first year o

32、f life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others. The hostile person keeps asking Why are people so hard to get along with?” In some measure we create our own environment. You may not yet grasp the power of that truth to change your life.Of course failures are a part of the story too. Everyone fails, Joe Louis said “Everyone has to figure to get beat some time.” The question isnt did you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ah