Transcription
Translator: Kinan Al Zouabi
Proofreader: Hani Eldalees
When I was seven years old and my sister was five, we were playing on a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time – I mean, I am two years older than her now – but at that time, it meant that she had to do anything I wanted. I wanted us to play war. And so we were on our bunk bed. On one side of the bed, I placed all my soldiers and weapons from the G.I. Joe team. On the opposite side were all my sister's dwarf horses, ready for an unequal battle.
There are different accounts of what happened that evening, but since my sister is not with us here today, let me tell you the correct version. (Laughter) The truth is that my sister was sitting on the side of the bed, somehow unstable, without any intervention or push from her older brother. Amy disappeared from the top of the bunk bed and landed hard on the floor. I nervously approached the edge of the bed to see what had happened to my sister, and I saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees, all four limbs on the ground.
I was nervous and scared because my parents had instructed me to make sure that my sister and I played as safely and calmly as possible, considering that I had unintentionally broken Amy's hand just a week before. (Laughter) (End of laughter) After heroically pushing her away from the path of an imaginary sniper shot, (Laughter) no one thanked me for this heroism, and so I tried my best – she couldn't even see it – I tried very hard to be kind and polite in my actions. And when I saw my sister's face, a face sobbing from pain, suffering, and surprise, threatening to explode and wake my parents from their long winter naps.
And so I did what I had to do. My seven-year-old brain was thinking to find a way to avoid this tragedy. If you have children, you have seen this thousands of times. I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed on the ground? Humans cannot land like that on all fours. Amy, I think that means you are a mythical unicorn." (Laughter) This was a trick, because there was nothing she wanted more than not to be Amy, the five-year-old, hurting little sister, but to be Amy, the mythical unicorn. Of course, this option had always been available to her brain. And you could see my poor, manipulated sister facing the conflict, as her little brain tried to dedicate resources and analyze: Is she feeling the pain, suffering, and surprise that happened to her now, or is she contemplating her new acquired identity as a mythical creature? This option won. So instead of crying and canceling our game, instead of waking our parents, of course with negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face, and she began to climb back up onto the bed with all the blessings of a little mythical unicorn... (Laughter) ...and with a broken foot.
What we experienced in this story at such a young age, five and seven, we had no idea then that it would be the vanguard of a scientific revolution two decades later that would change the way we look at the human mind. We had moved beyond what is called positive psychology, which is why I am here today and why I wake up every morning. When I started talking about this scientific research outside the academic arena, in companies and schools, the first thing they say I should avoid is starting with a graph. The first thing I would do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I wake up energized every morning, and this graph means nothing; it is fake data. What we found is – (Laughter) if I get this data from your study, I will be happy and grateful because there is something common here, and this means I can publish it; that is all that really matters. There is a strange red dot above the curve; there is an eccentric person in the room – I know who it is, I saw them a moment ago – there is no problem. There is no problem, as most of you know, I can simply erase this dot. I can erase this dot because it is clearly a calculation error. We know it is a calculation error that messes with my data. (Laughter) So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business administration, and psychology is how to exclude outliers correctly, statistically. How do we exclude the outliers to get the right curve? And this is great if I am trying to figure out how many Advil a normal person can take – two. But if you are interested in your potential, or your happiness, or your productivity, or your energy, or your creativity, we are creating a doctrine. The doctrine of the arithmetic mean in science. If I ask a question like, "What is the reading speed of a child in class?" scientists change the question to, "What is the reading speed of an average child in class?" And here we have limited the class to the average or the arithmetic mean. If you are below average, then the psychological counselor gets agitated, because this means you are depressed, or you have a psychological disorder, or both. As we hope. We hope you suffer from both because our job requires that if you come to a psychotherapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave with ten problems, so you always come back to us. We will go back to your childhood if necessary, and ultimately our goal is for you to become normal. But normal simply means average. Positive psychology, however, says that if we study what is simply normal, we will simply remain normal. So instead of deleting these outliers, what I do is come to a group of people like you and say, "Why? Why are some of you above the curve in scientific, mathematical, musical, creative, energy levels, ability to face challenges, sense of humor?" Whatever your ability, instead of deleting you, I want to study you. And perhaps then I can get information not only to raise people to the average but to raise the entire average upwards in our companies, schools, and around the world. The reason this graph is important to me is that, on the news, most of the information is not positive. In fact, it is negative. Most of it talks about crime, corruption, epidemics, and natural disasters, and very quickly my brain starts to believe that this is the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. This forms "medical school syndrome." During the first year of medical training, when you read through the list of all diseases and symptoms, you suddenly realize that you have all of them. (Laughter) I have a brother-in-law named Bobo, who is a long and different story. Bobo, Amy the mythical creature's husband, called me. Bobo called me from Yale Medical School and said, "Shawn, I have leprosy." (Laughter) And it is a very rare disease, even at Yale, I had no idea how to advise poor Bobo because he had barely made it through a full week of menopause. (Laughter) We have found that it is not necessarily reality that shapes us, but the window through which our brain sees the world that shapes reality. And if we can change this window, not only will our happiness change, but we can change every academic or professional outcome at the same time. I applied to Harvard as a risk. I did not expect to be accepted, and my family did not have the money for university. When I received a military scholarship two weeks later, I said goodbye to my parents. Something that was impossible became a reality. I assumed that everyone there would see their coming here as a privilege too, and would be excited to be here. Even in a class full of people smarter than you, I thought you would be happy just to be in that class. But what I found was, although some people live the experience, when I graduated four years later and spent the next eight years living in dormitories with students – Harvard asked me to do that, I am not that kind of person – (Laughter) I was working to advise students through the difficult four years. And during my research and teaching, I found that no matter how happy these students were with their original success upon arriving at this college, after two weeks their brains start to focus not on the privilege of being here, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on competition, assignments, noise, stress, and complaining. The first thing I did when I got there was walk into the dining hall for the first year, which my friends from Waco, Texas, where I grew up, see. I know some of you may have heard of it. When they visit me and look around, they say, "This dining hall looks like it's from Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movie." It is, because this is Hogwarts, and that is Harvard. And when they see that, they say to me, "Why are you wasting your time studying happiness at Harvard? What could make a Harvard student unhappy?" This question contains the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what the question assumes is that our happiness levels are predicted by the external world, whereas in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90% of your long-term happiness is not predicted by the external world, but by the way your brain processes this world. And if we change that, if we change the recipe for happiness and success, then we can change the path, we can change reality. We found that only 25% of work success can be predicted by intelligence level, and 75% of work success is predicted by your level of optimism, social support, and your ability to see work pressure as a challenge rather than a threat. I spoke to a college in New England, probably the most prestigious college, and they said, "We already know that, so every year, instead of just teaching students, we have Health Week. And we are very excited. Monday night, our world-renowned specialist will speak about youth depression. Tuesday night is the night of violence and bullying in school. Wednesday night is the night of food problems. Thursday night, illicit drug use, and Friday night, we are trying to choose between unsafe sex and happiness." (Laughter) I said, "That's Friday night for most people." (Laughter) (Applause) I am glad you liked it, but they never liked it. Silence on the phone. Through the silence, I said, "I am happy to speak at your college, but this is not Health Week; this is Sickness Week. You have covered all the negative things that can happen, and you haven't talked about the positives." The absence of disease is not health. This is how we achieve health: we must reverse the equation for happiness and success. In the last three years, I have traveled to 45 countries, working with companies and schools in the midst of an economic downturn. I found that most companies and schools follow a recipe for success, which is: if I work harder, I will be more successful. And if I become more successful, I will be happier. And this reflects most of our approaches to education and management; it is the way we motivate our actions. And the problem is that it is not scientifically correct; it is actually reversed, for two reasons. Every time your brain achieves success, you change your goal and change the form of success. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades. You got into a good college, now you have to try for a better college. You got a good job, now you have to get a better job. If you reach the sales level you want, we will raise that level. If happiness is on the other side of success, your brain will never reach it. We have pushed happiness to the intellectual horizon; this is what we have done as a society. And this is because of our belief that we have to be successful, then we will be happy. But our minds work in the opposite way. If you can raise someone's positivity in the present, their brain will experience what we call the happiness advantage, which means that a positive brain works much better than a negative, neutral, or stressed brain. Your intelligence increases, your creativity increases, and your energy increases. In fact, we found that every work outcome improves. Your positive brain is 31% more productive than your negative, neutral, or stressed brain. You are 37% better in sales. Doctors are 19% faster and more accurate in giving the correct diagnosis when they are positive rather than negative, neutral, or stressed. This means that we can reverse the equation. If we can find a way to make us happy in the present, then our brains will work successfully; we will be able to work harder, faster, and smarter. We need the ability to reverse the equation so that we can see the true potential of our brains. Because dopamine, which runs in our bodies when we are positive, has two functions. It not only makes us happier, but it also activates all the learning centers in our brains, allowing you to engage with the world in a different way. We found that there are ways you can train your brain to become more positive. For no more than two minutes, for 21 consecutive days, we can rearrange your brain to be able to work in a more optimistic and successful way. We have done these things in our scientific research now in every company I have worked with. I have made them write down three new things they are grateful for for 21 consecutive days, three new things each day. In the end, their brains start to build a pattern of scanning the world around them not to look for negativity, but for positivity first. Looking for a positive experience you had in the last 24 hours and allowing your brain to relive it. The exercise teaches your brain that your actions affect your life. We found that meditation allows your brain to overcome the hyperactivity we were measuring by trying to do multiple tasks at the same time and allows our brains to focus on one task. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We have people who, when they open their mailbox, write a positive message to praise or thank someone in their social network who supports them. By doing these activities and training your brain as you train your body, we found that we can reverse the equation of happiness and success, and by doing so, we not only create waves of positivity but create a real revolution. Thank you very much. (Applause)