第1篇 大学生英语演讲稿快乐
i am young , i am happy !
attention,please!
ladies and gentlemen, good evening!
at the beginning of my speech , i want to say because we all are young , so we gather together here happily for one goal tonight ! don’t you think so ?
to our great honor , the development of our motherland is much faster than any one of other developing countries in the world ! china is great ! living in such a country with long history , varieties of cultures and steable finance , we all are lucky . everyone one of us are pround of her ! it is so exciting that we all are her children . so at the time of our mother’s birthday , we should speak louldly “happy birthday to our beloved motherland !”
now , the 16th asian games is to be held in guang zhou . we all are preparing for the great event ! we all are excited for her ! we all take pride in her ! those all due to our special role in the society . we are youth and we full of strength and spirit . what's the most important point is that we are very active . so in this distinguished gathering , we have more oppportunities to show off our personalities and enthusiasms .
undoubtedly , i believe everyone of us youth have done well for the coming of the 16th asian games’ approaching !
that’s all ! thank you !
大学生英语演讲稿快乐
第2篇 ted英语演讲稿：改善工作的快乐之道
when i was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. i was two years older than my sister at the time -- i mean, i'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that i wanted to do, and i wanted to play war. so we were up on top of our bunk beds. and on one side of the bunk bed, i had put out all of my g.i. joe soldiers and weaponry. and on the other side were all my sister's my little ponies ready for a cavalry charge.
there are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story -- (laughter) -- which is my sister's a little bit on the clumsy side. somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, suddenly amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. now i nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
i was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and i played as safely and as quietly as possible. and seeing as how i had accidentally broken amy's arm just one week before ... (laughter) ... heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (laughter) for which i have yet to be thanked, i was trying as hard as i could -- she didn't even see it coming -- i was trying as hard as i could to be on my best behavior.
and i saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. so i did the only thing my little frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. and if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times before. i said, "amy, amy, wait. don't cry. don't cry. did you see how you landed? no human lands on all fours like that. amy, i think this means you're a unicorn."
(laughter)
now that was cheating, because there was nothing in the world my sister would want more than not to be amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but amy the special unicorn. of course, this was an option that was open to her brain at no point in the past. and you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. and the latter won out. instead of crying, instead of ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences that would have ensued for me, instead a smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn ... (laughter) ... with one broken leg.
what we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. what we had stumbled across is something called positive psychology, which is the reason that i'm here today and the reason that i wake up every morning.
when i first started talking about this research outside of academia, out with companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is to start your talk with a graph. the very first thing i want to do is start my talk with a graph. this graph looks boring, but this graph is the reason i get excited and wake up every morning. and this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. what we found is --
(laughter)
if i got this data back studying you here in the room, i would be thrilled, because there's very clearly a trend that's going on there, and that means that i can get published, which is all that really matters. the fact that there's one weird red dot that's up above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- i know who you are, i saw you earlier -- that's no problem. that's no problem, as most of you know, because i can just delete that dot. i can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. and we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.
so one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statistics and business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. how do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? which is fantastic if i'm trying to find out how many advil the average person should be taking -- two. but if i'm interested in potential, if i'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, what we're doing is we're creating the cult of the average with science.
if i asked a question like, "how fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" scientists change the answer to "how fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" and then we tailor the class right towards the average. now if you fall below the average on this curve, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're either depressed or you have a disorder, or hopefully both. we're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have 10, so you keep coming back over and over again. we'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually what we want to do is make you normal again. but normal is merely average.
and what i posit and what positive psychology posits is that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what i intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? why is it that some of you are so high above the curve in terms of your intellectual ability, athletic ability, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, your resiliency in the face of challenge, your sense of humor? whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what i want to do is study you. because maybe we can glean information -- not just how to move people up to the average, but how we can move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.
the reason this graph is important to me is, when i turn on the news, it seems like the majority of the information is not positive, in fact it's negative. most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. and very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. what that's doing is creating something called the medical school syndrome -- which, if you know people who've been to medical school, during the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that could happen, suddenly you realize you have all of them.
i have a brother in-law named bobo -- which is a whole other story. bobo married amy the unicorn. bobo called me on the phone from yale medical school, and bobo said, "shawn, i have leprosy." (laughter) which, even at yale, is extraordinarily rare. but i had no idea how to console poor bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.
(laughter)
see what we're finding is it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. and if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.
when i applied to harvard, i applied on a dare. i didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. when i got a military scholarship two weeks later, they allowed me to go. suddenly, something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. when i went there, i assumed everyone else would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. even if you're in a classroom full of people smarter than you, you'd be happy just to be in that classroom, which is what i felt. but what i found there is, while some people experience that, when i graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- harvard asked me to; i wasn't that guy. (laughter) i was an officer of harvard to counsel students through the difficult four years. and what i found in my research and my teaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or their physics. their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles, the stresses, the complaints.
when i first went in there, i walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from waco, texas, which is where i grew up -- i know some of you have heard of it. when they'd come to visit me, they'd look around, they'd say, "this freshman dining hall looks like something out of hogwart's from the movie "harry potter," which it does. this is hogwart's from the movie "harry potter" and that's harvard. and when they see this, they say, "shawn, why do you waste your time studying happiness at harvard? seriously, what does a harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?"
embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if i know everything about your external world, i can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. and if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way that we can then affect reality. what we found is that only 25 percent of job successes are predicted by i.q. 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
i talked to a boarding school up in new england, probably the most prestigious boarding school, and they said, "we already know that. so every year, instead of just teaching our students, we also have a wellness week. and we're so excited. monday night we have the world's leading expert coming in to speak about adolescent depression. tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. wednesday night is eating disorders. thursday night is elicit drug use. and friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness." (laughter) i said, "that's most people's friday nights." (laughter) (applause) which i'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. silence on the phone. and into the silence, i said, "i'd be happy to speak at your school, but just so you know, that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. what you've done is you've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive."
the absence of disease is not health. here's how we get to health: we need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. in the last three years, i've traveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. and what i found is that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: if i work harder, i'll be more successful. and if i'm more successful, then i'll be happier. that undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.
and the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. first, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. you got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change your sales target. and if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. what we've done is we've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. and that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
but the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. if you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. in fact, what we've found is that every single business outcome improves. your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. you're 37 percent better at sales. doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. which means we can reverse the formula. if we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.
what we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.
we've found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. in just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. we've done these things in research now in every single company that i've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. and at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.
journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. we find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural adhd that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. and finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. we get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social support network.
and by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.
thank you very much.
(applause)
第3篇 ted英语演讲稿：我们为什么快乐？
when you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. but evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. and yet in two million years the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. what is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?
well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. and one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe." and particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex." now what does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?
well, it turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it is an experience simulator. flight pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. this is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. it's a marvelous adaptation. it's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall.
now -- (laughter) -- all of you have done this. i mean, you know, ben and jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "yuck." it's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it.
let's see how your experience simulators are working. let's just run a quick diagnostic before i proceed with the rest of the talk. here's two different futures that i invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. one of them is winning the lottery. this is about 314 million dollars. and the other is becoming paraplegic. so, just give it a moment of thought. you probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. and this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? but these aren't the data. i made these up!
these are the data. you failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.
now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. the research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. for the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.
from field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. in fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.
why? because happiness can be synthesized. sir thomas brown wrote in 1642, "i am the happiest man alive. i have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. i am more invulnerable than achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." what kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?
well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." a system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. like sir thomas, you have this machine. unlike sir thomas, you seem not to know it. (laughter)
we synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, i suspect. though i'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence.
as a challenge to myself, since i say this once in a while in lectures, i took a copy of the new york times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. and here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "i am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way." "i don't have one minute's regret. it was a glorious experience." "i believe it turned out for the best."
who are these characters who are so damn happy? well, the first one is jim wright. some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the house of representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young republican named newt gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. he lost everything. the most powerful democrat in the country, he lost everything. he lost his money; he lost his power. what does he have to say all these years later about it? "i am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." what other way would there be to be better off? vegetably? minerally? animally? he's pretty much covered them there.
moreese bickham is somebody you've never heard of. moreese bickham uttered these words upon being released. he was 78 years old. he spent 37 years in a louisiana state penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. he was ultimately exonerated, at the age of 78, through dna evidence. and what did he have to say about his experience? "i don't have one minute's regret. it was a glorious experience." glorious! this guy is not saying, "well, you know, there were some nice guys. they had a gym." it's "glorious," a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.
harry s. langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named mcdonalds. and he thought, "that's a really neat idea!" so he went to find them. they said, "we can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." harry went back to new york, asked his brother who's an investment banker to loan him the 3,000 dollars, and his brother's immortal words were, "you idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." he wouldn't lend him the money, and of course six months later ray croc had exactly the same idea. it turns out people do eat hamburgers, and ray croc, for a while, became the richest man in america.
and then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds -- some of you recognize this young photo of pete best, who was the original drummer for the beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up ringo on a tour. well, in 1994, when pete best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "i'm happier than i would have been with the beatles."
okay. there's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. here it is, finally to be revealed. first: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it. (laughter) second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can. (laughter) third: make somebody else really, really rich. (laughter) and finally: never ever join the beatles. (laughter)
ok. now i, like ze frank, can predict your next thought, which is, "yeah, right." because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "yeah right, you never really wanted the job." "oh yeah, right. you really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face."
we smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness." what are these terms? natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. and in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. why do we have that belief? well, it's very simple. what kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it?
with all apologies to my friend matthieu ricard, a shopping mall full of zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable because they don't want stuff enough. i want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. now, i'm a scientist, so i'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data.
let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. and this isn't mine. this is a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." it's very simple. you bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. in this case, because the experiment i'm going to tell you about uses them, these are monet prints. so, everybody can rank these monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. now we give you a choice: "we happen to have some extra prints in the closet. we're going to give you one as your prize to take home. we happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. this is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four.
sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days -- the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "tell us how much you like them now." what happens? watch as happiness is synthesized. this is the result that has been replicated over and over again. you're watching happiness be synthesized. would you like to see it again? happiness! "the one i got is really better than i thought! that other one i didn't get sucks!" (laughter) that's the synthesis of happiness.
now what's the right response to that? "yeah, right!" now, here's the experiment we did, and i would hope this is going to convince you that "yeah, right!" was not the right response.
we did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. these are hospitalized patients. most of them have korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis that -- they drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. ok? they remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are.
we took our monet prints to the hospital. and we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. we then gave them the choice between number three and number four. like everybody else, they said, "gee, thanks doc! that's great! i could use a new print. i'll take number three." we explained we would have number three mailed to them. we gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour. back into the room, we say, "hi, we're back." the patients, bless them, say, "ah, doc, i'm sorry, i've got a memory problem; that's why i'm here. if i've met you before, i don't remember." "really, jim, you don't remember? i was just here with the monet prints?" "sorry, doc, i just don't have a clue." "no problem, jim. all i want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least."
what do they do? well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. we ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. and what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. these are normal controls, where if i did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. but if i do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. they can't pick their print out of a lineup.
here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. right? this is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. normal controls show -- that was the magic i showed you; now i'm showing it to you in graphical form -- "the one i own is better than i thought. the one i didn't own, the one i left behind, is not as good as i thought." amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. think about this result.
these people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "yeah, right" is not the right response! what these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. they're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it.
now, when psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. and yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. and some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. it turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. but freedom to choose -- to change and make up your mind -- is the enemy of synthetic happiness. and i'm going to show you why.
dilbert already knows, of course. you're reading the cartoon as i'm talking. "dogbert's tech support. how may i abuse you?" "my printer prints a blank page after every document." "why would you complain about getting free paper?" "free? aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "egad, man! look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "ah! now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "what are you doing?" "i'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." indeed.
the psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. this is the difference between dating and marriage, right? i mean, you go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. you're married to a guy and he picks his nose? yeah, he has a heart of gold; don't touch the fruitcake. right? (laughter) you find a way to be happy with what's happened. now what i want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage.
here's an experiment we did at harvard. we created a photography course, a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. so we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have harvard memories of. they bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. and they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "which one would you like to give up?" they say, "i have to give one up?" "oh, yes. we need one as evidence of the class project. so you have to give me one. you have to make a choice. you get to keep one, and i get to keep one."
now, there are two conditions in this experiment. in one case, the students are told, "but you know, if you want to change your mind, i'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before i actually mail it to headquarters, i'll be glad to" -- (laughter) -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "i'll be glad to swap it out with you. in fact, i'll come to your dorm room and give -- just give me an email. better yet, i'll check with you. you ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." the other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "make your choice. and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to england. your picture will be winging its way over the atlantic. you will never see it again." now, half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. and look at what we find.
first of all, here's what students think is going to happen. they think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. it's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.
wrong-o. bad simulators. because here's what's really happening. both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! and people who are deliberating -- "should i return it? have i gotten the right one? maybe this isn't the good one? maybe i left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. they don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. why? because the reversible condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.
so here's the final piece of this experiment. we bring in a whole new group of naive harvard students and we say, "you know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. we could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. which course would you like to be in?" duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows.
the bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'tis nothing good or bad / but thinking makes it so." it's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. is there really nothing good or bad? is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to paris are just the same thing? that seems like a one-question iq test. they can't be exactly the same.
in more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, adam smith, and he said this. this is worth contemplating: "the great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another ... some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." in other words: yes, some things are better than others.
we should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. but when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. when our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. when our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. when our fears are bounded, we're prudent; we're cautious; we're thoughtful. when our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly.
the lesson i want to leave you with from these data is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.
thank you.
第4篇 我成长我快乐的英语演讲稿
i'm happy as i grow up
good morning,everyone!i’m zhang yuting from grade six.today,the topic of my speech is “i'm happy as i grow up”.
the happiness of growth is the purest kind of happiness, sometimes not even need any reason.it is a happiness in human life when continuous improvement, it is even the emotional outpouring from the heart. someone might ask: is it just happy to grow it is no trouble, and of course there is a growing worry, but "tired" and just "happiness" contrast, is not absolute; sometimes troubles may also be a pleasure.
through careful study, i know the happiness of mastering knowledge. i know that learning is equivalent to happiness. when you get good grades; when you get a praise from teacher or parents; when you are thinking very hard, and finally know the correct answer to a question ; when you know a lot of knowledge you almost didn’t know , do you feel a sense of happiness? right, this is the happiness of learning! we learn in growing life every day, since it can’t escape, then happy to face it! we need to have a class carefully and complete homework carefully , we need to review and preview consciously , you need some proper outdoor sports, to maintain a healthy body. as long as you do the above points, you will be surprised to discover that learning is so happy!
so, my classmates, we must cherish every minute of time from life, let us "happy to learn, happy to grow up "!
我成长 我快乐
尊敬的老师、亲爱的同学们：
早上好!我是来自六年级的张雨婷。今天我演讲的题目是“我成长，我快乐!”
成长的快乐，是最纯粹的一种快乐，有时侯甚至不需要什么理由。它是人的生命在不断完善时的一种欣喜，更是发自内心的情感流露。有人也许会问：成长难道就只有快乐没有烦恼吗?是的，成长中固然有烦恼，但“烦”只是和“乐”对比而言，并不是绝对的;有时候，烦恼可能也是一种快乐。
通过认真学习，我知道了掌握知识的快乐。我知道了学习就等于快乐 。当你在取得好成绩时；当你得到老师或家长的称赞时；当你在苦苦思索后，终于知道了一道题的正确答案时；当在你知道了许多你以前不知道的知识时，你是否感到了一种喜悦的感觉?对，这就是学习的快乐!在成长中，我们天天都在学习，既然逃避不了，那就开心的去面对吧!我们需要认真上课，需要仔细按时完成家庭作业，需要我们自觉地复习与预习，需要一些适当的户外运动，来保持健康的身体。只要你做到了以上的几点，你就会惊奇的发现原来学习也是这么的快乐!
所以，各位同学们，我们一定要珍惜生活中每分每秒的光阴，让我们一起“快乐学习，快乐成长!”
第5篇 寻找快乐英语演讲稿
seeking pleasure
not long ago, i read this story in a magazine: there was once a group of young people searching everywhere for pleasure but what they got was only annoyance , melancholy and torture.
so they turned to socrates for advice on where pleasure lay. but instead of giving any answers, socrates asked them to help with building a boat first. the group of guys had to set about the task, laying aside their own business of seeking pleasure. it took them a long time to cut down a tall tree, gouging out the center. through painstaking effort, they made a canoe out of the tree. they launched the canoe into a river, and then rowed together in it, singing with joy.
socrates asked: “my children, do you have pleasure now?” they answered in chorus: “we couldn’t be happier!” socrates added, “that’s it! whenever you are too busy pursuing something definite to notice anything bitter, pleasure will occur.”
from the story i got to know that pleasure always hides behind every tiny thing that you are engaged in, and that you may only get pleasure through hard work and creativity.
it also tells us that we might have no alternative but to experience some pain in our daily life and in the process of seeking pleasure, or sometimes tend to look for pleasure in material things, like a new car, clothes, etc, but true long term pleasure comes from within our soul and spirit. so why not turn suffering into praising life, and turn tears into the light in your heart, only in this way can we make it through and hold the magical spark to light the fire of life.
so my dear friends, just remember pleasure is a state of mind and a matter of choice, and i wish you all a life of pleasure.
寻找快乐
前几天，我在一份杂志上看到一则这样的故事：一群年轻人到处寻找快乐，却遇到许多烦恼，忧愁和痛苦。
他们向苏格拉底请教，快乐到底在哪里?苏格拉底没有立即给他们答案，而是让他们先帮助造一艘船。这帮年轻人暂时把寻找快乐的事儿放到一边，开始这项工作。他们花了很长时间锯倒了一棵又高又大的树，挖空树心，造出了一条独木船。独木船下水了，他们一边合力荡浆，一边齐声快乐的唱起歌来。
苏格拉底问：“孩子们，你们快乐吗?”他们齐声回答：“快乐极了!”苏格拉底道：“快乐就是这样，它往往在你为着一个明确的目的忙的无暇顾及其他的时候突然来访。”
从这个故事当中我知道了，快乐隐藏在你用心做的每一件小事当中，通过我们的努力和创造，才能得到快乐。
它还告诉我们，在生活中和追求快乐的过程中，可能无法避免会遇到一些痛苦，人们往往把快乐建立在对物质的追求上，像一辆新车，新衣服，等等。但真正意义上的快乐应该是从精神上得到的。为什么不把痛苦锤炼成对生命的赞扬，把眼泪作为心灵的灯盏呢?只有这样才会真正寻找到快乐，一展生命中灿烂的光泽!
朋友们，请记住：快乐是一种心态，也是一种选择，我祝愿大家一生快乐!
第6篇 《英语学习的痛苦或快乐》英文演讲稿
in the modern society study english is becoming more important and popular. but when i was young, i didn’t know of this and prefer to play outside rather than learn english. but my mother said :“english is the necessary tools to talk with foreigners, so you should study in an english class. believe yourself, you can certainly study english well!”finally i agreed my mom’s opinion and began to study ladder english when i was five.
at the beginning i was happy to study, because it was fun in the english class. we played games, and only studied five words, sentence a time. we also learned to sing a lot of english songs. in this studying environment, i was interested in english for the first time.
when i was in grade two, my mother thought that i should study english formally, so she let me study in the class of teacher ye of young palace of beijing. in her class i began to learn the new concept english and touched the grammar for the first time. teacher ye let us practice the oral english, listening and writing. although i should remember much more words than before and had to practice listening and writing every day, and must take the crowded bus to school for two hours every week, i was very happy because i could learn much knowledge that not taught in school.
with my mother and teacher’s encouragement and teaching, i studied very hard and won many prize in the competition. when i was in grade four, i passed pets 1 with the score of 88 of writing, and 5 of oral english, and i passed pets 2 in grade five. i was very happy and excited because i had the experience of talking with foreigners, and even used english to help some people when they met the communication problem. i was also very proud when the foreign
up till now, i have been studied english for about 6 years. i deeply realize the importance of learning english. i will continue to study in the future, and i really appreciate my mother and my english teacher，too. this year beijing will host the xx olympic games, i believe that master english well will certain help me to do some useful work for this olympics.
