Listen to TED and write your thoughts (4)

Listening to TED on the last day of February happens to be the fourth 12 days. It is very meaningful to end February in this way. This cycle of TED is introduced as follows. Friends can choose the TED they want to listen to based on the content.

Topic 1: Reading changes destiny

Reading changes destiny, this is a sentence that people often hear, and it has also become one of the important reasons that motivate people to read. How does the speaker understand this sentence?

Born in the Arab world, a place where women have a low status, girls have to overcome many difficulties to receive education. After overcoming various difficulties, the speaker became a photographer. She wanted to use photos to record the women who had been transformed through education.

At first many women were reluctant, but after the speaker repeatedly explained the impact of this project on other women, some agreed to be filmed. Through this project, the speaker saw how education can make women more independent, more in control of their own lives, and more able to gain a kind of freedom.

Reading changes your destiny. Today, when this sentence is questioned, I think reading may not necessarily bring you financial rewards, but it can make you more independent in mind and richer in heart.

Topic 2: How to make friends with stress

Many people think that making friends with stress is impossible. For many people, stress is something that needs to be avoided, because in our minds stress can cause harm to people's bodies and minds. Why does the speaker think stress is a friend?

The speaker initially believed that stress was harmful. Later, the speaker learned about a study that showed that people who are highly stressed but do not regard stress as their enemy are healthier.

The speaker began to change her views on stress. She began to change her understanding. She believed that the accelerated heartbeat and sweating caused by stress are the body's active preparation for challenges. In addition, stress can induce labor. It encourages people to seek support and build strong relationships, all of which are good for good health.

Correct understanding is important. Treat stress as a friend rather than an object to suppress, and you'll be healthier.

Topic 3: The road to pursuing self-worth

The speaker got straight to the point and introduced his point of view: people do not pay for your true value, but for what they think you are worth, and you Can control their perceptions. This point of view is very clear, which immediately aroused my interest to continue reading.

We need to communicate our value to others. Whether looking for a job or communicating with customers, we need to clearly express what value I can create for the company and customers. The speaker believed that in order to get a salary that matches your own value, you must be able to define your own value and be able to communicate your own value.

Research shows that women receive lower wages than men at work, and women need to learn more than men how to obtain a salary that matches their value.

The speaker believes you can do this by thinking about the following questions:

1. What do my customers need and how do I meet their needs?

2. What special qualities do I have that allow me to better serve my customers?

3. What can I do that others can’t do?

4. What value can I create for my customers?

Many people underestimate their own value because of self-doubt. The speaker helps a woman express herself more confidently and focus her expression on the value she can create for customers. She is no longer afraid of difficulties. Engage in customer meetings.

This speech does reflect the fact that your value comes from other people's perceptions, and you can control other people's perceptions.

In addition, in how to convey your own value, it is also important to focus on the value you can create for others. This allows you to objectively express your value without giving others a sense of bragging. feeling, you will also be better able to gain others' recognition of your value.

Topic 4: Living toward death

Death is something that everyone must experience. When it comes to it, it feels like a very heavy topic. Knowing more about death can help people live better.

The speaker has experienced death once, and he naturally has a deeper experience of death than the average person. Through his own experience, he discovered that medical institutions were originally designed to treat diseases rather than caring for people themselves. He began to think about how we should return to caring about people.

The death process itself requires a lot of pain. First of all, we should reduce unnecessary pain. For example: loss and regret can cause people pain. Loss may be inevitable, but regret is avoidable. We should not leave any regrets in our lives. This requires us to clearly know what is important to ourselves.

Live in the moment. Life lies in the present. As long as you live in the present, you will carefully appreciate the connection established with the outside world through your own senses. At this time, you will feel that you are truly alive.

Make life more colorful. Human needs can be divided into physical and spiritual needs. From both aspects, we can enrich our lives.

The speaker talked about how to design medical care from the perspective of death so that people who are about to die can die with dignity.

From this speech, we can learn how to live. If you don’t know death, how can you know life? Only by understanding death can we live better.

Topic 5: The last pure land in the world

Bhutan, a country with a population of only 700,000 and a gross national product of US$2 billion, is able to achieve negative carbon emissions. How is it done?

First of all, this country has made basic education and medical care free of charge, which has greatly reduced the burden on a family, and the behavior that damages the natural environment due to the pressure on education and medical care has also been reduced accordingly.

In addition, the government has also done the following: providing free clean electricity to the people; government departments strive to achieve paperless offices; and the government encourages the use of clean transportation. These measures reduce carbon emissions.

In addition, the Constitution of Bhutan stipulates that the national green coverage rate shall not be less than 60%, but in fact it has a forest coverage rate of 72%.

Nowadays, environmental issues have attracted the attention of all countries. If people still doubted global warming in the past, now people have agreed that the world is warming and have seen the harm it brings.

The problem of global warming requires all countries to unite to solve it. Unlike other problems, such as local wars, it is not regional in nature. No country is immune to the effects of global warming. As the speaker said, although Bhutan has made great efforts to reduce carbon emissions, it also has to bear the burden of natural disasters such as floods and mudslides caused by climate warming.

Although Bhutan is a small country and its GDP is not high, these have not become excuses for not taking on environmental protection. This is very worthy of recognition. Our country is also paying more and more attention to environmental protection. The weather conditions in Beijing this past winter were very good. This shows me that as long as we treat environmental governance as an important issue to solve, we will definitely find a solution.

Topic 6: The Myth of Personality - Who Are You?

Knowing yourself is not an easy task. Although you get along with yourself day and night, few people truly understand you. What does this speech say about “who are you?”

The speaker is a personality psychologist. He will classify people according to five dimensions:

1. Open and closed types

2. Conscious and unenthusiastic types

3. Extroversion and introversion

4. The pleaser and the naysayer

5. The neurotic and emotionally stable type

The one we are most familiar with here is the extrovert. and introverts. Extroverts often need stimulation from both inside and outside. They like to drink coffee and go to lively places. Introverts like to stay in quiet places and can't fall asleep at night if they drink coffee in the afternoon. This isn’t to say that introverts don’t enjoy social interaction, it’s just that they realize they perform better when there’s less stimulation.

On the one hand, the speaker categorizes people, but on the other hand, he believes that everyone is unique and cannot be simply categorized. Everyone values ​​different things, and it’s these differences that make you unique.

"Who are you?" This is a philosophical question. Although this question is not easy to answer, it is worthy of our serious consideration. A lot of distress is caused by a lack of understanding of oneself. For example, choosing a job and person that are not suitable for you. If you know more about yourself, it will be easier to make the right choice.

Topic 7: Fearless, endless learning

The speaker was a very confident boy since he was a child. He thought he was the Hulk until he was seven years old when he attended a summer camp and was killed by a His partner was dragged into the water, and although he was eventually rescued by a teacher, his fear of water still lingered in his heart. How did he overcome his fear?

A friend who drank six cups of coffee a day told the speaker that he would not drink coffee for a year as long as the speaker could swim one kilometer in open water. The speaker accepted the challenge. He tried a variety of methods: training with triathletes; using kickboards; taking lessons from a champion swimmer. But none of this works. Until one day he heard a friend's suggestion: try Terry Laughlin's "full body immersion" swimming method.

This method introduced the speaker to a new swimming method, through which he learned to swim and successfully swam one kilometer. It made him realize that the best results can be hampered by misconceptions and untested assumptions.

The speaker discovered from language learning: materials are more important than methods. The speaker was afraid of foreign language learning for a while. A study experience in Japan changed his view on language. Studying in Japan made him realize that he had to learn Japanese well. He looked at various books and CDs, but nothing helped until he found the list of 1,945 commonly used kanji prescribed by Japan's Ministry of Education in 1981.

He focused on studying this material. After six months, he could read newspapers and his Japanese level was improved from Level 1 to Level 4. And using this method, I learned twelve languages. He realized: being effective is more important than being efficient. Doing the right thing is more important than being efficient. The latter only focuses on doing well, but does not pay attention to whether what is done is correct.

He even concluded that as long as the following six sentences are translated by native speakers into past, present and future tense, you can understand the grammatical structure of this language (the order rules of sentence components in a sentence).

1. The apple is red.

2. It is John's apple.

3. I give John the apple.

4. We want to give him the apple.

5. He give it to John.

6. She gives it to him.

In addition, the speaker I was afraid of ballroom dancing before. At a dance class in Argentina, he originally just wanted to watch it, but was later encouraged to sign up for a month of lessons. To motivate himself to learn, he uses Parkinson's law (the complexity of a task is related to the time you give it). He signed himself up for a competition and it was only four months away.

During this time, he first hired a female coach to teach him the steps of his female partner. The abilities and characteristics of different competition champions were then studied and these individuals were interviewed. He noticed that in addition to the explicit things mentioned by these people (what they recommended to practice), there were also some implicit things (the most explicit things they did not say but could be discovered through observation).

He summarized these implicit things and found that these champions have three things in common:

1. long steps

2. different types of pivots

3. Variation in tempo

He broke down the dance process through video. Through these internal and external exercises, he created a dance in five months and two weeks. A world record.

If you just listen to his achievements, you will feel that he is a very powerful person. If you listen to him talk about the learning process, you will feel that everything is natural. Once you master the correct learning methods, coupled with continuous practice and persistence, success is inevitable.

Topic 8: The Gospel of Doubt

December 31, 1999, was predicted to be the end of the world, and God would come to the world for the second time. On this day, the speaker and others were in a church, waiting for God to come and rescue them. However, when the twelve o'clock clock passed, people found that what they expected did not happen.

The 12-year-old speaker, like everyone else, felt cheated like never before. When the speaker returned home with mixed emotions and saw people in different places blessing the millennium, he suddenly realized that the time was different in different places. Could it be that the Lord came to earth again and again? This makes the speaker feel even more ridiculous.

This incident makes the speaker realize that doubt is possible. The answer is wrong and maybe the question itself is wrong. From then on, under the mountain of certainty, springs of doubt began to flow out. The speaker begins to continually look for something to believe in.

At first he thought that a good education could save him. At the age of 18, he left the slums and went to Cambridge to study, which made him think that he could leave all the misfortunes behind him. However, when he found himself with a gun to his head by a thief Pinned to the ground with his arms behind him, he found that even the best education could not save him.

When he became an intern at Lehman Brothers in 2008, he thought he was far away from poverty. However, as he watched the financial building collapse, he realized that even the best job could not save him.

He entered Washington as a young reporter. He heard the voice that "America will change." However, Congress later shut down and the country fell into cracks. He realized that nascent politics could not save him.

Although the "god of success, the god of money, the god of power" he believed in all died after midnight just like what happened when he was 12 years old, the speaker did not give up looking for new gods. He figured he could either keep searching or die.

He found Harvard Business School. During an 8,000-mile road trip in 2013, the speaker met and worked with different people, and was inspired by the experience to start a non-profit organization. This organization has become an influential organization due to the author's efforts, people's pursuit of meaning and countless entrepreneurs.

The researchers credit themselves with convincing people that we can cure society's problems. But along the way, the speaker gets another boon. At a Harvard Business School alumni meeting a year ago, several hundred people donated $500 billion. Two days later, the speaker was in an urban farm and listened to the story of a man named Tony. Some children would attend one of his programs just to eat one meal a day. It was a project that Tony carried out using his pension money, and he was not paid a salary for this project. Although the project was successful, he lacked resources and needed help.

The contrast between these two makes the speaker realize that he is not the savior and that he needs to consider those who want to be self-reliant. He closed his organization and shared his organizational model for free with those who thought they had the ability to do it well.

This frees the speaker from the messianic pressure to realize that time is limited, that the gap is too great, and that miracles are not going to happen. He needs to use all his strength.

This speech is very deep and not easy to understand, especially the latter part. I think it’s great that he shares good models for free. Chinese charities can do this. I think this can not only reduce the pressure on individual people, but also give dignity to those being rescued.

Topic 9: Use our last warmth to give back to the earth

Death is unavoidable for anyone. What should be done with the body after death? We know that different places have different customs, including burial in the ground, tree burial, water burial, cremation, etc. Different customs also reflect different understandings of death. For example, Egypt mummies corpses because they believe that the soul will not disappear after death. Even if the person dies in the world, as long as the body is well preserved, it can still be resurrected in the underworld.

How will the speaker answer the question of how to deal with the remains?

The speaker was born in a medical family, so she is not afraid to talk about death at the dinner table, but she did not choose medicine. She chose to study design at the School of Architecture. But while she was studying, she became interested in how to deal with her own remains.

She learned that traditional processing wastes a lot of resources and that there are no longer enough cemeteries in the United States. Cremation is favored because it is simple, cheap and more environmentally friendly. But if you think about it carefully, we use fire to turn corpses into ashes. This process will produce carbon dioxide and cause damage to nature.

The speaker thought: Why do we choose such a way to harm the earth when we finally leave?

A phone call from a friend inspired her. She thought: "Since animals can be composted after death, why can't people?" By cooperating with experts in many fields and doing some experiments, she described this scene for us: In a funeral room, we held a funeral ceremony , and then transport the body of the deceased to the main equipment. The body is covered with sawdust. After several weeks of microbial decomposition, the body is turned into fertilizer. We can use the fertilizer to plant a tree, and we can later pay homage to the deceased under the tree.

This is a really good idea. People come from nature, and eventually people return to nature. At the same time, the living remember the dead through trees. This reminds me of a sentence I once read: A seed becomes a tree, does the seed die? It doesn't, it just transforms a form of existence. If the body is handled in this way, even if the loved one leaves us, when we see the tree, we will feel that he is still with us.

Topic 10: Prison or college for your children

This is a speech that reflects the current situation of American justice. I had heard reports before about conflicts between black American youths and the police. I did not expect that these reports would reflect serious problems in the American judicial system. Being aware of the subtleties may be telling us not to ignore the visible signs. This may be just the tip of the iceberg, and there are huge problems hidden underneath.

The speaker studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and there was another group of people in an African-American community with a long history near the university. They lived a different life trajectory: they faced probation officers. Instead of being a teacher; going to court instead of taking classes; going to a correctional facility instead of traveling; in your 20s, instead of getting an academic degree, you got a criminal record.

Over the past four decades, the U.S. prison sentence rate has increased by 700%. There are 716 people in prison for every 100,000 people. The speaker taught a class to a high school sophomore girl in college and met her 15-year-old brother who had just returned from a juvenile detention center. From then on, she devoted her time to studying the current judicial situation in the United States.

After her sophomore year, she moved into the African-American community and spent six years trying to understand what local young people faced as they grew up. In the first week she saw a lot of police games being played among the kids. In the time that followed, she saw how the police searched people, entered houses, beat people, led them for questioning, and chased them down the street.

What impressed her deeply was how an 18-year-old boy went to prison step by step because of a school fight. In one incident, his 11-year-old brother was also sentenced to three years of discipline. If he had gone to the speaker's high school, his incident would have been considered a school fight, which would have been resolved within the school and would not have been elevated to a crime.

I have heard about the polarization of American society before, but I have not understood it in detail. After watching this movie, I learned more about it. It can be seen that people living in different classes in this society face different justice.

The speaker said something quite shocking, to the effect that: We require those who live in communities where violence occurs every day, have the least family resources, attend the worst schools, and face the worst Children in a tough labor market cannot make any mistakes on their way to growth.

A country will have various problems, and it is unrealistic to solve them all at once. However, the order of problem solving needs to be thought about. In my opinion, issues related to the next generation must always be placed first. priority location.

Question 11: The dream we never dared to dream

What dream do we never dare to dream? Let's listen to what the speaker has to say.

At the age of 8, the speaker saw a photo of Armstrong landing on the moon. Before and after that, the speaker never saw anything like it again.

At the age of eighteen, when the speaker realizes that he is gay, he feels a sense of strangeness from this country. After people fought hard despite the dangers, gay marriage was finally recognized by Congress. At eighteen, he couldn't believe he could start a gay family.

This is a big step forward, but at the same time, the speaker saw huge gaps in many areas: marriage, the gay community, the AIDS community. If we don't eliminate the abyss between people, what will we gain by putting a man on the moon?

Radicalism and overwork prevent people from maintaining inner peace and living in the present moment. The development of communication technology has not brought about the growth of listening ability. Convenient access to information does not lead to increased happiness. What we need is to create a society where we can be honest with each other and care about others.

We can boldly dream about the rapid development of science and technology, but we dare not dream about the development of human nature. The speaker believes that we should be curious about human nature, learn to get along with others, and dare to create a world where we no longer ask others what they do, but what their dreams are.

Listening to speeches recently, I saw that the misunderstanding between people in the United States has reached a very serious level. Some people have also realized this problem. In our country, I do not have such a strong feeling I feel that traditional Chinese culture pays more attention to human nature, and people pay attention to the feelings of others. This is different from the Western emphasis on individualism. This allows me to see the advantages of Chinese culture. Recently I started studying "The Book of Changes" and I feel that these ancient wisdoms can still shine in the new era.

Question 12: "Boxer" in the workplace

After seeing this question, you may be wondering what is a "boxer" in the workplace? Let's see how the speaker explains it.

The speaker first created a situation: facing a graduate from a 985 university with excellent grades and a perfect resume, and a graduate from an ordinary university with a lot of job-hopping experience and some strange work experiences. , such as singing in bars and working in restaurants. If both people were qualified for the job, who would you choose?

The former are called "silver spoons" by the speaker. They have an absolute advantage and are destined to succeed. The latter, known as "boxers," had to overcome tremendous odds to reach the success of the former, and their experiences sound like patchwork quilts.

The latter’s inconsistent work experience may suggest a lack of concentration and an inability to focus. However, it may also imply that they are constantly struggling with setbacks. So we should give these people an interview.

Compared with the latter, the former also made efforts and sacrifices on the way to academic success. However, the success of their studies may also cause them to be unable to face difficulties at work. Moreover, they have different opinions on the content of the work they do, and some work content is not worth doing in their eyes.

The speakers themselves come from a family whose father suffered from "paranoid" schizophrenia, and their life is a combination of "madhouse, awakening, and beautiful mind." The fourth eldest child in the family, he lives in a family without his own house, car, or washing machine. But this didn't stop her. She was very motivated to understand business success and the "boxer" relationship.

She met successful business people and read a lot of profiles of leaders with great power. She discovered some characteristics. Many of these people experienced huge setbacks in their early years: poverty, abandonment, and the early death of their parents. wait.

Research also shows that people will grow after experiencing trauma. In one study, 1/3 of children who experienced trauma ended up living healthy, successful lives. This was the case with Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. He was adopted, didn't graduate from college, spent a year in India, and was dyslexic, but that didn't stop him from succeeding.

When "boxers" face setbacks in life, they believe that their destiny is in their own hands. If the results are not good, they will think about what I can do to bring about good results, and they will not give up on themselves. When they overcome various difficulties they encounter, the difficulties they encounter in the future will no longer be difficult for them. Just like a person has been able to solve a problem that seemed extremely difficult at the time. If he challenges himself and succeeds, he will be more likely to accept problems that are higher than his ability in the future.

In addition, it is also essential to get help from others on the road to growth. They can dig out your good sides and provide advice and help for your success.

I have heard what the speaker said before. The "silver spoon" the speaker refers to is the person our education is committed to cultivating, but we also know that not everyone can become such a person. In order to cultivate such a person, some families will clear the way for their children. All obstacles are actually unnecessary. Obstacles are good for a child's growth and can cultivate his perseverance. There are also some people who deliberately set up obstacles. I think this should be carefully considered. If you set up appropriate obstacles, it will cultivate his perseverance. If not, it may destroy his confidence in overcoming difficulties and make him always be able to face difficulties in the future. There will be a feeling of powerlessness. When you don't know what to do, it's best to do nothing.