The objective of 7th speech in the Competent Communicator manual is to Research Your Topic. You are asked to engage and enlighten the audience using anecdotes, facts, statistics and visual aids.
Related books:
Related TED talks:
- The price of happiness by a GQ reporter
- The habits of happiness by a biochemist turned Zen monk
- Why are we happy? by a Harvard psychologist
In today's world, happiness has become the ultimate prize. It has spawned a whole industry - if you search for the word "happiness" in Amazon, you can find over 12000 books alone. At the same time Depression has become an epidemic - do you know that there are more suicides than homicides in this country? By 2020, the World Health Organization predicts that depression will be the second largest cause of medical disabilities after heart disease. Many thus try to achieve bliss by medicating themselves - last year alone more than 120 million prescriptions of anti-depressants were made in U.S.
Some like the NPR correspondent Eric Weiner try to find happiness in places. Four years ago, he collected all the happiness data and set out to find the happiest places on Earth. Believe it or not, there exists a World Database of Happiness. It is maintained by Professor Ruut Veenhoven at the Erasmus university in Netherlands and it provides a ranking of the happiest countries on Earth. What do you think is the happiest country on Earth? It certainly has little to do with wealth - the happiest country in the world is Costa Rica. Now you might think - ahh Costa Rica with its beautiful beaches, sunshine and wonderful forests seems an obvious choice. Does happiness then have to do with geography? - No that is not true either because 4 of the top 10 happy countries are all in Scandinavia with its biting cold and desolateness. These are places where you can't see the sun for 6 months! After a year, Eric Weiner cuts short his quest when he realizes that happiness is a moving target.
Wise people have always known this. You do not achieve happiness by seeking it outside. Instead you have to search within. 400 years ago, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown said,
"I am the happiest man alive.
I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity,
and I am more invulnerable than Achilles;
Fortune hath not one place to hit me."
What remarkable machinery does he have that can give him this power? It turns out that this is something that we all possess - our brains. In the last 2 million years, our brains have tripled in size. Most of this was due to the development of the frontal lobe and in particular something called as the pre-frontal cortex. You see the cortex is our experience simulator. You don't have to experience each and every possibility to learn about something. You may have never seen a real lion in your entire life. But if I were to bring a real lion into this room, you all would know instinctively what to do. The funny thing about the brain is that it doesn't care where the experience comes from - it could be from real life or it could be a simulation. They are all the same to the brain. What does this mean? - really believing that you are happy is the same as being happy. Let me tell you - this is not new-age hocus pocus! In one experiment conducted at Harvard university, students were asked to rate 10 paintings from best to worst. After they were finished, they were given a choice to take either the 3rd or 4th best painting home. A month later, they were brought in again to repeat the experiment. Guess which painting they picked up as the best? - that's right, the ones they had at home! Now I see you rolling your eyes. Were they faking it? To test this, the experimenters placed the students under an MRI scanner. Under the scan, the brain was indeed registering pleasure when looking at the painting. The students had thus trained their minds to redefine happiness.
Happiness is thus all about training your mind. We spend 15 years of school learning skills. We apply all kinds of lotions to remain beautiful. Yet we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most - the way our mind functions. As long as we neglect the mind, happiness will remain a distant mirage.
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