TED英语演讲：你该如何面对艰难选择

关于直面困难的英语演讲稿Facing difficulties is a part of life, and it is how we deal with them that truly defines us. In today's speech, I would like to talk about the importance of facing difficulties and how it can help us grow and succeed.First and foremost, it is essential to acknowledge that difficulties are inevitable. No matter who we are or where we come from, we will all face challenges at some point in our lives. Whether it's a personal struggle, a professional setback, or a global crisis, difficulties are a part of the human experience. Instead of avoiding or denying them, we should confront them head-on.When we face difficulties, we are forced to step out of our comfort zones and confront our fears. This process can be uncomfortable and even painful, but it is necessary for personal growth. By facing our difficulties, we develop resilience, determination, and problem-solving skills. We learn to adapt, to persevere, and to find creative solutions to our problems. In the end, we emerge stronger, wiser, and more capable than before.Moreover, facing difficulties can also lead to unexpected opportunities and growth. When we are confronted with challenges, we are forced to think outside the box and explore new possibilities. We may discover hidden talents, passions, and strengths that we never knew we had. Difficulties can push us to reevaluate our priorities, set new goals, and pursue new paths. In this way, difficulties can be the catalyst for personal and professional development.It is also important to remember that difficulties are not meant to break us, but to build us. They are not signs of failure, but opportunities for growth. Instead of viewing them as obstacles, we should see them as stepping stones to success. By embracing difficulties and learning from them, we can become more resilient, more compassionate, and more empathetic individuals.In conclusion, facing difficulties is an essential part of life, and it is how we respond to them that truly matters. By confronting our difficulties head-on, we can develop resilience, discover new opportunities, and grow as individuals. Difficulties are not meant to defeat us, but to challenge us to become the best versions of ourselves. So let us embrace our difficulties, learn from them, and use them as stepping stones to success. Thank you.。

TED英语演讲：生命无限，勇往直前艾咪.普蒂19岁时，双脚膝盖以下遭截肢，但现在，她已成为滑雪专家。

在这则充满力量的演说中，她分享了如何从人生的阻碍中获得灵感和鼓舞。

那些局限和障碍只会造成两种结局：要么让我们停滞不前,要么逼我们迸发出巨大的创造力。

下面是小编为大家收集关于TED 英语演讲：生命无限，勇往直前，欢迎借鉴参考。

| 中英文 |If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever. Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.如果你的人生是一本书你是书的作者你会怎么写你的故事? 这个问题永远改变了我的一生生长在拉斯维加斯的炎热沙漠我一直向往自由我做着白日梦梦想周游世界住在能看见雪的地方编我想讲述的所有故事At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. That is, until my life took a detour. I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less thana two percent chance of living. It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection. Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in myleft ear and both of my legs below the knee.19岁那年在我从高中毕业后我搬到了能见到雪的地方我成为一名按摩师这份工作只需要双手以及身边的按摩桌而且我可以去任何地方有生以来头一次我感到自由独立对生活充满把握直到人生出现了一个转折一天我下班比往常早以为自己得了流感 24小时不到我就进了医院生命垂危只有2%的存活几率之后的几天我陷入昏迷医生诊断我得了细菌性脑膜炎疫苗可预防性血液感染在为期两个半月的治疗中我切除了脾和肾左耳失聪膝盖以下截肢When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced back together like a patchwork doll. I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time. The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that.当父母把我推出医院时我感到自己被重新拼凑起来像一个拼布娃娃我以为最惨的事已完结直到我第一次见到自己的新腿小腿是笨重的金属块脚踝用管子和螺丝固定外加黄色的橡胶脚突起的橡胶线从脚趾延伸到脚踝为了使它们看起来像血管我不知道我想要的结果是什么但绝不会是这个With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped on these chunky legs and I stood up. They were so painful and so confining that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted? And how was I going to snowboard again?妈妈站在我旁边两个人泪水肆意我绑上这两条粗短腿然后站起来它们让我感到十分痛苦，并且充满限制我脑子里只有一个想法：用这些破玩意我怎么能周游世界? 我如何才能过我一直想要的异彩纷呈的生活?That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken.我如何才能再玩单板滑雪? 那天，我回到家，爬上床这是我接下来几个月的生活状态: 我躺在床上, 淡出生活逃离现实我的腿放在床边.我在生理上和心理上完全崩溃了But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore.I could be as tall as I wanted! (Laughter) (Applause) Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. (Laughter) And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold. (Laughter) And best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales rack. (Laughter) And I did! So there were benefits here.但是我知道为了向前走我必须放开过去的艾米学着接受新的艾米那时我突然想到我再也不只有5.5英尺高了我可以想多高有多高 (笑声)(掌声) 或者想多矮有多矮这得看我和谁约会 (笑声) 如果我再玩单板滑雪脚再也不会冷 (笑声) 我觉得最棒的是我可以调整脚的大小来适合货架上任何尺码的鞋子 (笑声) 我真那么干了! 所以这还是有些好处的It was this moment that I asked myself that life-defining question: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go? And I began to daydream. I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again. And I didn't just see myself carving down a mountain of powder, I could actually feel it. I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment. And that is when a new chapter in my lifebegan.那一刻我问了自己一个决定人生走向的问题如果人生是一本书而我是作者我会怎么写这个故事? 我开始做白日梦想小时候那样做梦我想象自己优雅地前行在路途中帮助别人再次玩单板滑雪我并不是仅仅看到自己从山上滑下来我可以真切感受到那个场景我可以感受到风扑面而来感受到心脏的韵律如同那一刻正在真实发生.那就是我开启人生新篇章的时刻Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn't go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn't bend and at one point I traumatized all the skiers on the chair lift when I fell and my legs, still attached to my snowboard — (Laughter) — went flying down the mountain, and I was on top of the mountain still. I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again. And this is when I learned that our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: one, stop us in our tracks or two, force us to get creative.4个月之后，我重拾单板滑雪虽然事情并不像我期待的那样我的膝盖和脚踝无法弯曲在某一点上我吓坏了升降椅上所有的滑雪者(笑声)就是当我摔倒时,我的腿还连着滑板(笑声) 它们一起飞落到山脚而我依然在山顶(笑声)我被惊到了同其他人一样我惊呆了而且很失落但是我知道如果我找到了两条合适的腿我完全可以成功这时我明白了艰难险阻只能做两件事:一是将我们困在原来的轨道二是迫使我们充满创造力I did a year of research, still couldn't figure out what kind of legs to use, couldn't find any resources that could help me. So I decided to make a pair myself. My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in. As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink ducttape. And yes, I can change my toenail polish. It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive —a new kidney from my dad —that allowed me to follow my dreams again. I started snowboarding, then I went back to work, then I went back to school.我研究了一年仍然不知道用什么样的腿也找不到任何有用的资源于是我决定自己做一副假腿我和制作者把各种部件拼在一起做了两条可以玩滑板的腿你可以看到生锈的螺栓、橡胶、木头和荧光粉胶带没错我可以换指甲颜色这双假腿以及我21岁生日收到的最好礼物————我爸爸的一个肾让我再次追逐梦想.我开始玩单板滑雪我重新工作并回到学校Then in 20xx I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth and young adults with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports. From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school.20xx年我创办了一个非盈利组织用来救助身体残疾的年轻人使他们能再次参加体育运动从那时起我有机会前往南非给千百儿童带来鞋子这样他们就可以去上学And just this past February, I won two back-to-back World Cup gold medals — (Applause) — which made me the highest ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world.在刚刚过去的二月我相继取得两块世界金牌 (掌声) ——这使我成为世界上最高级别的残疾人女子单板滑雪运动员.Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no. Because my legs haven't disabled me, if anything they've enabled me. They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as toolsfor breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything.20xx年前当我失去腿时我不知道该期盼什么但是如果你现在问我是否愿意换个人生我会回答不因为我的双腿并没有阻碍我如果说它们给我带来了什么那就是它们让我依靠想象力让我相信一切皆有可能这就是为什么我相信想象可以成为工具用来冲破障碍因为在脑子里我们可以做任何事可以成为任何人It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits. And although today is about innovation without borders, I have to say that in my life, innovation has only been possible because of my borders. I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins.相信梦想直面恐惧能够让我们的生活超出局限虽然今天在讲无边界创新但我不得不说在我的生命里是我自身的种种局限让不可能变成可能我知道这些局限才是现实结束想象产生故事开始的地方So the thought that I would like to challenge you with today is that maybe instead of looking at our challenges and our limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go. It's not about breaking down borders. It's about pushing off of them and seeing what amazing places they might bring us. Thank you.所以今天我想让你们挑战的是与其把挑战、局限看做不利或者坏事我们可以把它们看做恩惠可以点亮想象的神奇礼物能帮助我们走得更远远到我们从未想过这不是要打破局限而是把局限推得更广然后看看它们能把我们带到怎样美好的地方谢谢 (掌声)。

TED最励志演讲：如何战胜绝望，走出困境？【尼克·胡哲】演说者：Nick Vujicic演说题目：如何战胜绝望，走出困境！在我们的人生中，常常需要面对各种困境，感到绝望。

此刻，我们总是祈祷奇迹会出现，但往往难拟踪迹。

本期TED演讲者：Nick Vujicic，出生时就没有四肢，陷入无限的绝望中，支撑他挺过绝境的究竟是什么呢？Remark：TED音频下载，网易云音乐搜索主播电台：TED英语演说如何战胜绝望！来自TED英语演说00:0014:53kaka福利：回复关键字'TED演讲资料下载'，即可免费下载。

100+精选TED演讲资料（包含TED视频、音频、中英文演讲稿）持续更新，百度网盘免费下载！中英对照演讲稿Guys, my name is Nick Vujicic, I was born in Australia in 1982, moved from Australia to California in the year 2006. And my life story，I’m just thankful that people have seen my life on some sort of level.大家好，我是尼克·胡哲，1982年出生在澳洲，2006年从澳洲搬到加州。

关于我的故事，我很感激。

就某个程度来说，大家都看到了我的人生。

Whether it’s just YouTube videos or seeing pictures of a limbless guy smile. You know, people always ask me you know, what happened to you and how did you overcome what you’ve been through? 不管是只在YouTube上看影片，或是看到一张没有四肢的人，微笑的照片。

TED：如何做出艰难的选择？最近几天，在线下和线下收到好几个关于选择的咨询，都是读者面临人生中的一些大事，不知道如何判断。

我不打算去代替别人选择人生，但一直在头疼如何回应，刚好遇到一个TED视频，解决了我的问题，也跟大家安利一下，希望也在你面临艰难选择时做出更好的判断关于选择方式还有推荐另一篇文章：如何在生活与工作中做出更好的选择?正文科学的思考可以解决世间一切重要之事。

所以越艰难的选择，我们变得越理性，枚举各种利弊条件，写了一页又一页。

但这时让我们抓狂的事情发生了：我们还是做不了决定！这是因为我们的无知吗？演讲者Ruth Chang亲身经历告诉你，一切不是我们想象得那么简单。

所以，艰难选择之所以艰难，并不是因为我们考虑的不周全，我们的无知，而是因为他们之间本来就没有最好的选择。

因为价值的世界不同于科学的世界。

科学的世界可以被量化，但前一种世界不可以被量化。

“越难的选择，越大程度取决于自己”。

所以，这是不是就验证了，我说的那句：你当时所做的选择，都是你当时认为的最好的选择呢？最后献上哲学家朱莉安的一句话：只有尊重你放弃的选项，才能让你选择的选项变得更有价值。

做出选择时，就是找出说服自己的理由，想想自己想成为怎样的人，比较外界的因素，确实更为有效。

有很多时候，选择之所以艰难，就是因为我们没有想清楚自己到底想要的是什么，从自身找原因去做出选择更有效。

换句说，做选择时是进行价值观的衡量，应该完全遵从自己的想法，选择自己愿意选择的选项。

艰难选择带给我们的是机遇——一个看清自身和遵从内心的方向前进的机遇。

这几天刚好在看几本哲学书籍，然后反复看了几遍视频之后，刚好理解了演讲者Ruth Chang的观点：当你面临人生重大选择的时候，应该选择你的世界观，而不是利益。

扩展阅读：20岁光阴不再来不要吞吃命运的饼干献给女生的毕业演讲：永远不要因为“你是个女人”而放弃什么是你这辈子最重要的东西，你将如何评价你的人生100天行动读者反馈@君月瑶汇报一下2.25以来成绩:一.扇贝打卡已坚持525天二.每天早晚刷牙时做20个深蹲，睡前做45个卷腹三.25天中有14天坚持了郑多燕小红帽和哑铃操二选一，剩余11天坚持了跳绳走路等运动。

The Secret to Overcoming Failure接受挑战，直面困难，把失败当做成功的垫脚石！What is your biggest failure? Have you been able to move past it? Does it still impact daily life? Last year, I failed to accomplish a very important personal goal, something that brought me to my knees. Today, I’m going to share that story with you, and also the lessons that I’ve discovered about how to overcome it.你最大的失败是什么？你是否已经走出了它的阴影？它还会影响日常生活吗？去年，我没能完成一个非常重要的个人目标，这件事几乎把我击垮了。

今天，我将与大家分享这个故事，以及我是如何克服失败的。

Let’s start by doing a little visualization. So please get comfortable in your seat. Perhaps take a long, deep breath. And I’d like you to think about the greatest success that you’ve ever experienced. Now, take a little trip back in time. Can you remember when you set the goal? Can you remember all the planning that you did that helped you achieve that success? OK, now, clear your minds. One more visualization. This time, I want you to think about that big failure. Again, go back in time. Can you remember when you set that goal? Can you remember all the planning that you did that didn’t come to fruition? Perhaps you can remember the exact moment when you knew that you were going to fail. And maybe just the thought of that failure is bringing back lots of feelings of shame. If you’re anything like me, it was much easier to think about the failure and the planning that didn’t come to fruition than the success.让我们先来做一个小小想象。

I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you miss them. I want to start with what I call the "official dogma." The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. 175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 different extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system -- speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier. And in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six and a half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store.You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. In other domains -- the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone. You didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one -- the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and creme brulee torch. And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is "No." It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, The same explosion of choice is true. Health care -- it is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits, and these risks. B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do? And you say, "Doc, what should I do?" And the doc says, A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do? And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you do?" And the doc says, "But I'm not you." And the result is -- we call it "patient autonomy," which makes it sound like a good thing. But what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody whoknows something -- namely the doctor -- to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions -- namely the patient.There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask prescriptions to be changed. Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We don't inherit an identity, we get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after.Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, "Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?" All of these are consuming questions. And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer. Work -- we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet -- except the Randolph Hotel.(Laughter)There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi works. I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" And even if the answer to the question is "no," it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been. So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this. And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? And the answer is yes.(Laughter)We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it producesparalysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer 50 funds -- 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money to put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this.(Laughter)You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or even the wrong salad dressing. So that's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and, you know, what salad dressing is? It's easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.Second, what economists call opportunity costs. Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject, that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers, I apologize.(Laughter)But here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons. V ery expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? "Well, damn it," this guy is thinking, "It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. I could be parking right in front of my building." And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when whatwe choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here's another example. Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things. And those other things may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive.Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. And there was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, and they were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. So I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones, and I said, "You know, I want a pair of jeans, here's my size." And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid washed? Do you want them distressed? You want boot cut, you want tapered, blah blah blah ..." On and on he went. My jaw dropped, and after I recovered, I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind."(Laughter)He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store -- truth be told -- with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try and explain this to myself. The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low expectations. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this.(Laughter)The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is low expectations.(Laughter)(Applause)I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally, one consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear. The world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why, who's responsible? It is equally clear that the answer to the question is you. You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them, they blame themselves.Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high. And then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you. This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare.Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done -- as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this. What enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult to install child seats don't help. It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off.If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a Pareto-improving move. Income redistribution will make everyone better off -- not just poor people -- because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? You know nothing is possible in this fishbowl." Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- and that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited -- perhaps evenfor the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much.(Applause)。

ted演讲面对巨大的压力该如何应对？（下）我不得不说，我觉得这是个巨大的错误。

单个的人，就像一艘战舰一样，功能齐全，是神的完完全全的化身，人的脆弱的心灵要承载太多的东西，创意的未知的永恒的谜题，就像让一个人吞下太阳一样，它歪曲了人性，使得人们背负着巨大的期望，我觉得这才是过去500年来困扰艺术家们的真正问题。

如果是这样的话，而且我相信事实就是这样，我们能否做些改变呢？回到古代，也许可以帮助我们更好的理解人类和创意之谜之间的关系，也许没有什么用。

我们不可能在18分钟的演讲里就把过去500年来的理性人文主义的影响清除干净。

而且也许在座的某些人也对有精灵帮助我们完成伟大工作的说法持有合理的科学怀疑，所以，我并不试图说服大家。

但问题是，为什么，为什么我们不可以试图这样想想看呢？因为对于解释创意过程的中出现的完全疯狂的随意性，再也没有更好的解释了。

这个过程每个人都曾经历过，也体会过其中无法言说的非理智性，事实上，有时感觉是完全超自然的。

灵感来找你而不是来自于你本身或许更有帮助最近我遇到了著名的诗人Ruth Stone，感触尤深。

她今年90岁了，一直在坚持创作。

她告诉我，她小时候生活在弗吉尼亚州农村，有时在田间工作，她能感到诗歌正从地平线远方袭来，就像巨大的空气流，她能感到正向她脚下袭来，因为脚感受到了震动，那时，她脑子里只充斥着一件事，就是拼命的冲，她冲进屋里，就像被诗歌追赶着一样，她得找到一张纸和一支笔，要足够快，这样当诗歌从她身边席卷而过的时候，她能抓住它写到纸上。

有时她跑的不够快，她跑呀跑呀，在没到屋里之前，诗歌就从脚下溜走了，她错过了它，她望着它从地平线消失，说“它去找另一个诗人了”。

也有的时候，她说，她差点就错过它了，她跑到屋里，在她找纸的时候，诗歌从她身旁经过了，当时她一只手拿着一支笔，她会伸出另一只手，抓住诗歌，抓住它的尾巴把它拽回来，然后就跃然纸上了，但是这时候，诗歌是倒叙的，她先写的结尾，后写的开头。

TED英语演讲稿：如何让选择更容易简介：面对商场里五花八门的商品，你的选择恐惧症又犯了吗? 美国哥伦比亚大学商学教授sheena iyengar研究如何让你在做选择时更容易。

为了让你的选择省时省力，商家又会有哪些诀窍呢?do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? do you know how many choices you make in typical week? i recently did a survey with over 2,000 americans, and the average number of choices that the typical american reports making is about 70 in a typical day. there was also recently a study done with ceos in which they followed ceos around for a whole week. and these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these ceos engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. and they found that the average ceo engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. 50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. think about your own choices. do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? how well do you think you're doing at managing those choices?today i want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. i want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. now as i talk about this problem, i'm going to have some questions for you and i'm going to want to know your answers. so when i ask you a question, since i'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. (laughter) otherwise, when i ask you a question, and if your answer is yes,i'd like you to clap your hands. so for my first question for you today: are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? (applause) thank you.so when i was a graduate student at stanford university, i used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. it was a store called draeger's. now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. they had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water -- and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. i used to love going to this store, but on one occasion i asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? here's their olive oil aisle. they had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees.so i one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and i asked the manager, "is this model of offering people all this choice really working?" and he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. we decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. here's their jam aisle. they had 348 different kinds of jam. we set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. we there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: first, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? more people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. the next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. now we see the opposite effect. of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. of thepeople who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24.now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us -- at least it's good for our waistlines -- but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. we choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. so now for the topic of today: financial savings. now i'm going to describe to you a study i did with gur huberman, emir kamenica, wei jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million americans from about 650 plans all in the u.s. and what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401(k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. and what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. so in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. and what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate.so if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s -- still not as high as we want it to be. in those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. so for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. the more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their moneyin pure money market accounts. now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being.well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. they're more likely to delay choosing -- procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. they're more likely to make worse choices -- worse financial choices, medical choices. they're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. the main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. so what i want to propose to you today are four simple techniques -- techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues -- that you can easily apply in your businesses.the first: cut. you've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. people are always upset when i say, "cut." they're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. but in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. when proctor & gamble went from 26 different kinds of head & shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. when the golden cat corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent -- a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. you know,the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. the typical walmart today offers you 100,000 products. but the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products -- one kind of canned tomato sauce.now in the financial savings world, i think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that david laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at harvard. every single harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. for those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. you know, often, people say, "i don't know how to cut. they're all important choices." and the first thing i do is i ask the employees, "tell me how these choices are different from one another. and if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers."now before we started our session this afternoon, i had a chat with gary. and gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. here's a description of the road. and i'd like you to read it. and now i'll give you a few seconds to read it and then i want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take gary up on his offer. (light clapping) okay. anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. is that all? all right, let me show you some more about this. (laughter) you guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. (honk) now who's ready to go on this trip. (applause) (laughter) i think i might have actually heard more hands.all right. now in fact, you had objectively more informationthe first time around than the second time around, but i would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. because the pictures made it feel more real to you. which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. that in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an atm card or a credit card as opposed to cash? because it doesn't feel like real money. and it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more.so a study that i did with shlomo benartzi and alessandro previtero, we did a study with people at ing -- employees that are all working at ing -- and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401(k) plan. and during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. the one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. by doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent.the third technique: categorization. we can handle more categories than we can handle choices. so for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. it turns out that in wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazineaisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. but you know what? if i show you 600 magazines and i divide them up into 10 categories, versus i show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that i have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if i gave you the 400 than if i gave you the 600. because the categories tell me how to tell them apart.here are two different jewelry displays. one is called "jazz" and the other one is called "swing." if you think the display on the left is swing and the display on the right is jazz, clap your hands. (light clapping) okay, there's some. if you think the one on the left is jazz and the one on the right is swing, clap your hands. okay, a bit more. now it turns out you're right. the one on the left is jazz and the one on the right is swing, but you know what? this is a highly useless categorization scheme. (laughter) the categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. and you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. who are they actually supposed to be informing?my fourth technique: condition for complexity. it turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. we have to gradually increase the complexity. i'm going to show you one example of what i'm talking about. let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. here's a german car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. you've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. car colors, exterior car colors -- i've got 56 choices. engines, gearshift -- four choices. so now what i'mgoing to do is i'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. so half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. the other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice.what am i going to look at? how engaged you are. if you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means i'm losing you. what you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. we're losing them. they go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. it's the same information. it's the same number of choices. the only thing that i have done is i have varied the order in which that information is presented. if i start you off easy, i learn how to choose. even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. it also gets me excited about this big product that i'm putting together, so i'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged.so let me recap. i have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload -- cut -- get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize -- make it real; categorize -- we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. all of these techniques that i'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices -- better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. because i believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. and the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing.thank you very much. (applause)。

如何走出低谷So, we all have bad seasons in life. And I had one in 2013. My marriage had just ended, and I was humiliated by that failed commitment. My kids had left home for college or were leaving. I grew up mostly in the conservative movement, but conservatism had changed, so I lost a lot of those friends, too.人生总会经历枯季。

我的枯季在2013年。

我的婚姻破裂了，我失败的婚姻让我感到羞辱。

我的孩子们离开家去上大学了。

我在保守派运动中成长，但如今，保守主义变了，因此我失去了不少老朋友。

And so what I did is, I lived alone in an apartment, and I just worked. If you opened the kitchen drawers where there should have been utensils, there were Post-it notes. If you opened the other drawers where there should have been plates, I had envelopes. I had work friends, weekday friends, but I didn't have weekend friends. And so my weekends were these long, howling silences. And I was lonely.我能做的仅是独居于公寓中，埋头工作。

TED英语演讲稿：勇敢面对挑战，不断学习Ladies and gentlemen,It is a great honor to be speaking at TED today. I want to talk about something that is dear to my heart: the importance of facing challenges head-on and continually learning and growing throughout our lives.Life is full of challenges. Whether it's in our personal lives or our professional lives, we constantly face obstacles that can threaten to derail us. However, it's important to remember that these challenges are not there to defeat us, but to help us grow and improve.When we face challenges, we have a choice. We can either give up and accept defeat, or we can choose to be courageous and keep pushing forward. It's not always easy to choose the latter option, but it is always worth it in the end.One of the keys to facing challenges is to be open to learning. We cannot expect to know everything, and we should never stop learning or growing. It's important to be humble and recognize that there is always something we can improveupon. By continuously learning and growing, we set ourselves up for success in the long run.In our personal lives, this may mean trying new things or putting ourselves in unfamiliar situations. It may meanfacing our fears and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones. When we do this, we not only become more resilient, but we also open ourselves up to new experiences and opportunities.In our professional lives, it's important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in our fields. We should be continuously seeking out opportunities for professional development and growth. By doing so, we not only enhance our own abilities and value as employees, but we also contribute to the success of our organizations.The world is constantly changing, and it's up to us to keep up. This means being adaptable and willing to learn new skills and approaches. It also means being open to feedback and criticism, and using those opportunities to improve and grow.In conclusion, we must be brave and face challenges head-on, never giving up or accepting defeat. We must remain open to learning and growing throughout our lives, continuously seeking out new opportunities for personal and professional development.We all have the capacity to be resilient and courageous in the face of adversity. It's up to us to embrace that capacity, and to use it to achieve our goals and live our best lives. Thank you.。