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The new era of positive psychology

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    When I was president of the American Psychological Association,
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    they tried to media-train me,
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    and an encounter I had with CNN
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    summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today,
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    which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic.
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    The editor of Discover told us 10 of them,
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    I'm going to give you the eleventh.
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    So they came to me -- CNN -- and they said, "Professor Seligman,
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    would you tell us about the state of psychology today?
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    We'd like to interview you about that." And I said, "Great."
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    And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite."
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    So I said, "Well, how many words do I get?"
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    And she said, "Well, one."
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    (Laughter)
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    And cameras rolled, and she said, "Professor Seligman,
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    what is the state of psychology today?"
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    "Good."
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    (Laughter)
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    "Cut. Cut. That won't do.
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    We'd really better give you a longer sound bite."
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    "Well, how many words do I get this time?" "I think, well, you get two.
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    Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"
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    "Not good."
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    (Laughter)
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    "Look, Doctor Seligman,
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    we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium.
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    We'd better give you a real sound bite.
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    This time you can have three words.
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    Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"
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    "Not good enough." And that's what I'm going to be talking about.
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    I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good
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    and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough.
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    And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology,
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    about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar.
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    So, why was psychology good?
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    Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model.
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    Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane
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    and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did,
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    they'd move away from me.
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    And because, quite rightly, they were saying
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    psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony.
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    And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.
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    And what was good about psychology,
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    about the 30 billion dollar investment NIMH made,
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    about working in the disease model,
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    about what you mean by psychology,
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    is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable --
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    it was entirely smoke and mirrors.
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    And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable,
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    two of them actually curable.
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    And the other thing that happened is that a science developed,
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    a science of mental illness.
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    That we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts -- like depression, alcoholism --
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    and measure them with rigor.
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    That we could create a classification of the mental illnesses.
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    That we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses.
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    We could look across time at the same people --
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    people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia --
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    and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are,
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    and we could isolate third variables
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    by doing experiments on the mental illnesses.
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    And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years,
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    to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments.
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    And then we were able to test them rigorously,
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    in random assignment, placebo controlled designs,
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    throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did.
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    And the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry, over the last 60 years,
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    can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable.
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    And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it.
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    But what was not good, the consequences of that were three things.
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    The first was moral,
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    that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers,
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    that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you.
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    And we forgot that people made choices and decisions.
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    We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost.
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    The second cost was that we forgot about you people.
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    We forgot about improving normal lives.
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    We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier,
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    more fulfilled, more productive. And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word.
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    No one works on that.
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    And the third problem about the disease model is,
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    in our rush to do something about people in trouble,
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    in our rush to do something about repairing damage,
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    it never occurred to us to develop interventions
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    to make people happier, positive interventions.
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    So that was not good.
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    And so, that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert,
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    Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call positive psychology,
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    which has three aims.
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    The first is that psychology should be just as concerned
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    with human strength as it is with weakness.
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    It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.
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    It should be interested in the best things in life.
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    And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling,
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    and with genius, with nurturing high talent.
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    So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future,
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    we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology,
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    a science of what makes life worth living.
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    It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness.
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    And any of you, for free, can go to that website
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    and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness.
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    You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning,
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    for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people?
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    We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities:
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    a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio,
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    how they're defined, how to diagnose them,
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    what builds them and what gets in their way.
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    We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states,
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    the relationship between left hemispheric activity
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    and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness.
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    I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people,
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    and I've asked the question,
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    how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you?
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    And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people.
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    And how do they differ from the rest of us?
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    And it turns out there's one way.
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    They're not more religious, they're not in better shape,
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    they don't have more money, they're not better looking,
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    they don't have more good events and fewer bad events.
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    The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social.
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    They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning.
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    (Laughter)
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    They don't spend time alone.
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    Each of them is in a romantic relationship
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    and each has a rich repertoire of friends.
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    But watch out here. This is merely correlational data, not causal,
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    and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about:
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    happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer.
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    And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment.
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    We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries,
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    from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.
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    About 120 interventions have been proposed
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    that allegedly make people happy.
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    And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them,
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    and we actually carry out random assignment
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    efficacy and effectiveness studies.
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    That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier?
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    In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results.
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    But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have,
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    in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill,
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    and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable,
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    is can psychology actually make people happier?
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    And to ask that question -- happy is not a word I use very much --
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    we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy.
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    And I believe there are three different --
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    and I call them different because different interventions build them,
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    it's possible to have one rather than the other --
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    three different happy lives.
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    The first happy life is the pleasant life.
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    This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can,
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    and the skills to amplify it.
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    The second is a life of engagement --
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    a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure, time stops for you.
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    That's what Aristotle was talking about.
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    And third, the meaningful life.
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    So I want to say a little bit about each of those lives
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    and what we know about them.
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    The first life is the pleasant life and it's simply, as best we can find it,
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    it's having as many of the pleasures as you can,
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    as much positive emotion as you can,
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    and learning the skills -- savoring, mindfulness -- that amplify them,
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    that stretch them over time and space.
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    But the pleasant life has three drawbacks,
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    and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology and why it doesn't end here.
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    The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life,
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    your experience of positive emotion, is heritable,
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    about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable.
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    So the different tricks that Matthieu [Ricard] and I and others know
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    about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life
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    are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it.
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    Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed.
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    It's all like French vanilla ice cream, the first taste is a 100 percent;
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    by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone.
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    And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable.
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    And this leads to the second life.
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    And I have to tell you about my friend, Len,
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    to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion,
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    more than building pleasure.
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    In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30,
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    Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work.
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    By the time he was 20, he was an options trader.
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    By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire
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    and the head of an options trading company.
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    Second, in play -- he's a national champion bridge player.
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    But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure.
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    And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish.
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    (Laughter)
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    Len is an introvert.
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    American women said to Len, when he dated them,
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    "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost."
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    And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst,
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    who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma
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    that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him.
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    But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma.
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    It turned out that -- Len grew up in Long Island
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    and he played football and watched football, and played bridge --
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    Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities.
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    The question is, is Len unhappy? And I want to say not.
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    Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent
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    of the human race in positive affectivity,
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    I think Len is one of the happiest people I know.
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    He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness
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    and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow.
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    When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning,
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    time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell.
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    When the first card is played,
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    until 10 days later, the tournament is over, time stops for Len.
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    And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about,
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    about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way.
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    Pleasure has raw feels: you know it's happening. It's thought and feeling.
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    But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow, you can't feel anything.
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    You're one with the music. Time stops.
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    You have intense concentration.
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    And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life.
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    And we think there's a recipe for it,
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    and it's knowing what your highest strengths are.
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    And again, there's a valid test
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    of what your five highest strengths are.
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    And then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can.
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    Re-crafting your work, your love,
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    your play, your friendship, your parenting.
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    Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's.
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    Hated the job.
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    She's working her way through college.
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    Her highest strength was social intelligence,
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    so she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her
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    the social highlight of every customer's day.
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    Now obviously she failed.
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    But what she did was to take her highest strengths,
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    and re-craft work to use them as much as possible.
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    What you get out of that is not smiley-ness.
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    You don't look like Debbie Reynolds.
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    You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption.
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    So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion.
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    The second path is eudaimonian flow.
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    And the third path is meaning.
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    This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally.
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    And meaning, in this view, consists of -- very parallel to eudaimonia --
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    it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them
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    to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are.
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    I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives, the pleasant life,
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    the good life, the meaningful life, people are now hard at work on the question,
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    are there things that lastingly change those lives?
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    And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it.
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    It's being done in a rigorous manner.
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    It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works.
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    So we do random assignment, placebo controlled,
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    long-term studies of different interventions.
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    And just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect,
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    when we teach people about the pleasant life,
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    how to have more pleasure in your life,
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    one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills,
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    and you're assigned to design a beautiful day.
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    Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day,
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    and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures.
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    And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced.
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    Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would.
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    Close your eyes.
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    I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important
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    that changed your life in a good direction,
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    and who you never properly thanked.
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    The person has to be alive. OK.
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    Now, OK, you can open your eyes.
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    I hope all of you have such a person.
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    Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit,
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    is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person,
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    call them on the phone in Phoenix,
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    ask if you can visit, don't tell them why, show up at their door,
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    you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens.
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    And what happens is when we test people one week later, a month later,
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    three months later, they're both happier and less depressed.
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    Another example is a strength date, in which we get couples
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    to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test,
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    and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths,
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    and we find this is a strengthener of relationships.
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    And fun versus philanthropy.
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    But it's so heartening to be in a group like this,
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    in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy.
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    Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this,
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    so we actually have people do something altruistic
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    and do something fun, and to contrast it.
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    And what you find is when you do something fun,
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    it has a square wave walk set.
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    When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts.
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    So those are examples of positive interventions.
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    So, the next to last thing I want to say is
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    we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have.
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    And this is really what you're about. And that's our target variable.
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    And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives,
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    how much life satisfaction do you get?
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    So we ask -- and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people --
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    to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure,
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    the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life,
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    the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you,
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    and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction?
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    And our results surprised us, but they were backward of what we thought.
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    It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction.
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    The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.
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    The pursuit of engagement is also very strong.
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    Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement
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    and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry.
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    Which is to say, the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three.
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    Conversely, if you have none of the three,
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    the empty life, the sum is less than the parts.
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    And what we're asking now is
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    does the very same relationship, physical health, morbidity,
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    how long you live and productivity, follow the same relationship?
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    That is, in a corporation,
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    is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning?
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    Is health a function of positive engagement,
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    of pleasure, and of meaning in life?
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    And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes.
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    So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard,
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    and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this.
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    I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much,
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    which was one of the remarkable things.
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    But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel
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    to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way.
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    We all know that technology, entertainment and design
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    have been and can be used for destructive purposes.
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    We also know that technology, entertainment and design
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    can be used to relieve misery.
  • 21:01 - 21:05
    And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery
  • 21:05 - 21:08
    and building happiness is extremely important.
  • 21:08 - 21:11
    I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago,
  • 21:11 - 21:17
    that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed,
  • 21:17 - 21:23
    not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy.
  • 21:23 - 21:28
    And I never found that. I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero.
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    But they were empty.
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    And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life,
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    the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning,
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    are different from the skills of relieving misery.
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    And so, the parallel thing holds
  • 21:45 - 21:49
    with technology, entertainment and design, I believe.
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    That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world
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    to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion,
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    and that's typically how they've been used.
  • 22:04 - 22:07
    But once you fractionate happiness the way I do --
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    not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough --
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    there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life.
  • 22:13 - 22:15
    As Laura Lee told us,
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    design, and, I believe, entertainment and technology,
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    can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well.
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    So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism,
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    in addition to the space elevator,
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    is that I think with technology, entertainment and design,
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    we can actually increase the amount of tonnage
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    of human happiness on the planet.
  • 22:42 - 22:48
    And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life,
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    the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough.
  • 22:52 - 22:58
    If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion,
  • 22:58 - 23:02
    meaning, eudaimonia, it will be good enough.
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    And if design can increase positive emotion,
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    eudaimonia, and flow and meaning,
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    what we're all doing together will become good enough. Thank you.
  • 23:16 - 23:24
    (Applause)
Title:
The new era of positive psychology
Speaker:
Martin Seligman
Description:

Martin Seligman talks about psychology -- as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become?

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
23:24

English subtitles

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