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TED演讲：从内而外改变自己的关键！
我们渴望改变，但却常常抓错了重点。
我们容易看到他人的言语和行为，金钱和人脉，抓住他人成功的有形标志，但却从本质上忽略了他们内在的无形的积累。
那么，如何从内而外发生改变呢？演讲者Robert Greene分享了他个人的转变之路，以及从中的感悟，希望对你有所启发！
演讲者：Robert Greene
国际畅销作家，著有《48条权力法则》、《诱惑的艺术》、《33条战争策略》等畅销书，他的书已被翻译成17种语言。曾在纽约担任过几家杂志的编辑和作家，在好莱坞作为一个故事开发者和作家
Over the years I have now personally consulted with over hundred different people. And in so many of the cases, they would — the following scenario would play itself out. They would come to me with a specific problem.
A boss from hell, a business relationship that had gone — turned ugly, a promotion that never came. I would slowly direct their attention away from the boss and the job, and instead get them to search inside themselves, and try to find the emotional root of their discontent.
Often as we talked it out, they would realize that at their core they felt deeply frustrated, their creativity was not being realized, their career had somehow taken a wrong turn. What they actually wanted was something larger, a real and substantial change in their careers and in their lives.
It would be at this point that I would tell them a story about myself, about my own peculiar path to change and transformation from a highly unsuccessful writer eking out an existence in a small one bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, to bestselling author seemingly overnight.
I have never publicly related this story before but for this very special occasion, my first TED talk, I thought I would share it with you, because it’s actually very relevant to this subject of change.
The story goes like this. I had known since [age] that I wanted to become a writer. I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to write. Perhaps it was novels or essays or plays. After University I drifted into journalism as a way to at least make a living while writing.
Then one day after several years of working as a writer and editor, I was having lunch with a man who had just edited an article I had written for a magazine. After downing his third martini, this editor, an older man, finally admitted to me why he had asked me to lunch.
“You should seriously consider a different career,” he told me. “You are NOT writer material. Your work is too undisciplined. Your style is too bizarre. Your ideas — they’re just not relatable to the average reader. Go to law school, Robert. Go to business school. Spare yourself the pain”.
At first these words were like a punch in the stomach. But in the months to come, I realized something about myself. I had entered a career that just didn’t really suit me mostly as a way to make a living. And my work reflected this in compatibility.
I had to get out of journalism. This realization initiated a period of wandering in my life. I traveled all across Europe. I worked every conceivable job.
I did construction work in Greece, taught English in Barcelona, worked as a hotel receptionist in Paris, a tour guide in Dublin, served as a trainee for an English company making television documentaries, living not far from here in Brixton.
During all of this time I wrote several novels that never made it past a hundred pages and dozens of essays that I would tear up and plays that never got produced.
I wandered back to Los Angeles, California where I was born and raised. I worked in a detective agency, among other odd jobs. I entered the film business working as an assistant to a director, as a researcher and story developer and screenwriter.
In these long years of wandering, I had totaled over 50 different jobs. By the year 1995, my parents — God bless them — were beginning to get seriously worried about me.
I was 36 years old and I seemed lost and unable to settle into anything. I too had moments of doubt but I did not feel lost. I was searching and exploring and I was hungry for experiences, and I was continuously writing.
That same year, while in Italy, for yet another job, I met a man there named Joost Elffers, a packager and producer of books. One day, while we were walking along the quays of Venice, Joost asked me if I had any ideas for a book.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an idea just gushed out of me. It was about power. I told Joost that I was constantly reading books in history and the stories that I read of Julius Caesar, [La Borges], Louis the Fourteenth, these were the exact same stories that I had personally witnessed with my own eyes in all of my different jobs, only less bloody.
People want power and they want to disguise this wanting of power. And so they play games. They covertly manipulate and intrigue all the while presenting a nice even saintly front. I would expose these games.
I gave him numerous examples of what I meant and he became increasingly excited. He said I should write a treatment, and if it was good enough he would pay me to live while I wrote half the book and up to sell it to a publisher.
Suddenly in writing what would become The 48 Laws of Power everything in my disjointed past seemed to click into place, like magic, like destiny. All of those various writing experiences, the journalism, the television, the theater, the film had given me the skills to tell stories and organize my thoughts.
All of that reading of history had given me a vast storehouse of ideas that I could draw upon and my work as a researcher had taught me how to find the perfect anecdote.
Even those — and those different seemingly random jobs had exposed me to every type of psychology and to the dark corners of the human psyche. Even the languages I learned while traveling it taught me patience and discipline.
All of these experiences added up to rich layers of knowledge and practice that had altered me from the inside out. In my own very weird and intuitive way, I had given myself the perfect education for the writing of The 48 Laws of Power. The book came out in 1998 and it was a success. The course of my life was forever altered.
Now the moral of the story, as I told the people who had come to me for advice and as I’m telling you now is the following. We humans tend to fixate on what we can see with our eyes. It is the most animal part of our nature.
When we look at the changes and transformations in other people’s lives, we see the good luck that someone had in meeting a person like Joost, with all of the right connections and the funding.
We see the book or the project that brings the money and the attention. In other words, we see the visible signs of opportunity and success in our own lives but we are grasping at an illusion.
What really allows for such dramatic changes are the things that occur on the inside of a person and are completely invisible. The slow accumulation of knowledge and skills, the incremental improvements in work habits and the ability to withstand criticism.
Any change in people’s fortune is merely the visible manifestation of all of that deep preparation over time.
By essentially ignoring this internal invisible aspect, we fail to change anything fundamental within ourselves. And so in a few years time we reach our limits.
Yet again we grow frustrated, we crave change, we grab at something quick and superficial and we remain prisoners forever of these recurring patterns in our lives.
The answer. The key to the ability to transform ourselves is actually insanely simple to reverse this perspective: Stop fixating on what other people are saying and doing on the money, the connections, the outward appearance of things.
Instead look inward, focus on the smaller internal changes that lay the groundwork for a much larger change in fortune. It is the difference between grasping at an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. And reality is what will liberate and transform you.
Here’s how this would work in your own life. Consider the fact that each and every one of you is fundamentally unique, one of a kind. your DNA, the particular configuration of your brain, your life experiences.
In early childhood this uniqueness manifested itself by the fact that you felt particularly drawn to certain subjects and activities. What I call in my book Mastery primal inclinations.
You cannot rationally explain why you felt so drawn to words or to music or to particular questions about the world around you, or to social dynamics.
As you get older, you often lose contact with these inclinations. You listen to parents who urge you to follow a particular career path. You listen to teachers and alcoholic magazine editors who tell you what you’re good and bad at.
You listen to friends who tell you what’s cool and not cool. At a certain point, you can almost become a stranger to yourself. And so you enter career paths that are not suited to you emotionally and intellectually.
Your life’s task, as I call it, is to return to those inclinations and to that uniqueness that marked each and every one of you at birth. At whatever age you find yourself, you must reflect back upon those earliest inclinations.
You must look at those subjects in the present that continue to spark that childlike intense curiosity in you. And you must look at those subjects and activities that you’ve been forced to do over the past few years that repel you, that have no emotional resonance.
Based on these reflections, you determine a direction you must take: writing or music or a particular branch of science, or a form of business or public service. You now have a loose overall framework within you which you can explore and to find those angles and positions that suit you best.
You listen closely to yourself to your internal radar. Some parts of that framework, for me journalism and Hollywood, do not feel right. And so you move on slowly narrowing your path all the while accumulating skills.
Most people want simple direct straight line paths to the perfect position and to success. But instead you must welcome wrong turns and mistakes. They make you aware of your flaws. They widen your experiences, they toughen you up.
If you come to this process at a later age, you must cultivate a new set of skills that suit this change in direction you’ll be taking and find a way to blend them with your previous skills. Nothing in this process is ever wasted. In any event the goal that you are after is learning and the acquisition of skills, not a fat paycheck.
Now look at what happens to you as you adopt this very different internally-driven mindset, because you are headed in a direction that resonates with you personally and emotionally.
The hours of practice and study do not seem so burdensome. You can withstand — you can sustain your attention and your interest for much longer periods of time.
What excites you is the learning process itself: overcoming obstacles, increasing your skill level. You are immersed in the present instead of constantly obsessing over the future.
And so you pay greater attention to the work itself, into the people around you, developing patience and social intelligence. Without forcing the issue, a point is reached in which you are thoroughly prepared from within. The slightest opportunity that comes your way you will now exploit.
In fact, you will draw opportunities to you, because people will sense how prepared you are, which is I believe what happened to me with Joost.
Now some of this might sound a bit mystical but the results of this process that I’m talking about have been corroborated by recent scientific research. Most notably the 1995 study by Anders Ericsson that yielded a very famous 10,000 hour rule.
In tracking people who are devoted years of their lives to learning chess or music, Ericsson discovered that somewhere near that magical mark of 10,000 hours of practice, the minds of these people suddenly became much more creative and fluid.
The structures of their brains had been altered by all of those hours of practice and at that 10,000 hour mark we could see a visible transformation in their performance and their creativity. That is the level you will reach naturally and organically if you follow this process far enough.
Finally what I’m proposing to you right now is in actually I think rather radical. Namely the way to transform yourself is through your work. Now I know this runs counter to our prevailing cultural prejudices. Work is too ugly, too boring, too banal.
Self transformation we think comes through a spiritual journey, therapy, a guru who tells us what to do, intense group experiences and social experiences and drugs.
But most of these are ways of running away from ourselves and relieving our chronic boredom. They are not connected to process and so any changes that occur don’t last.
Instead through our work we can actually connect to who we are instead of running away. And by entering that slow organic process, we can actually change ourselves from the inside out in a way that’s very real and very lasting.
This process involves a journey of self discovery that can be seen as quite spiritual if you like and in the end of this process we contribute something unique and meaningful to our culture through our work, which is hardly ugly, boring or banal.
Thank you very much.
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