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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cblGXehwoUM
thank you very much we must be moving from the front stage villain to the backstage hero I'm coming here I am a former politician now a banker talking about happiness I mean how credible is not it's really wonderful to be here %HESITATION today and in my twelve minutes I will give you an introduction I'm a conclusion and then this twelve minutes I will have given the
recipe for what happened is all about you see by way of introduction the interesting thing is stopped happiness is something that we all seek I actually think it's the meaning of life Aristotle talked about it John Locke talked about it the US constitution talked about it life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but it's also extremely individual thing and if I ask you what makes you
happy it's probably something completely different from what makes me happy for me when I hear the words twelve minutes I think of a coup protest and that makes me happy for some of you you might've Alex you're not that's not fun that's not happiness I think that in order for an individual to be happy you need to have an ingredients with three things and body mind
and empathy number one band his body and here I think there's three things that you need to do in order to feel good about yourself number one is you need to sleep enough how many of you slept eight hours last night I'm ten percent you know my percentages next fairly close are it's important to rest you cannot work on four hours for five hours or six
hours sleep you need the recovery time number two I would argue you need to eat well and the older you get the better you need to eat it's different when you're young you can work on crisps you can work on energy drinks another thinks but I see grow older it's a little bit like a hangover you know it's not what it used to be right a
bottle of wine was quite easy when you're young nowadays you know it takes two days to recover the bottom line is that you know you are what you eat food can be really tasty and good it doesn't have to be on healthy if you want to be happy in your body I think you need to I eat well and number three is exercise and here I'm
not saying that you need to be another case like myself put on lycra sweated out scream and shout and enjoy crew protests exit signs can be just walking to work walking up stairs going cycling going swimming doing aerobics it soon but whatever you get kicks out of but my argument is that one hour of exercise gives you two more hours of energy for each and every
day so in terms of your body it does not matter what you look like what matters is what it feels like and I would argue the body feels pretty damn good when you've slept well when you've eaten well and you've gotten a little bit of exercise point number one point number two is mind and here we don't think about it very often but if you are
like me I think we should be on high alert I have noticed not as time goes on and as the instruments at our disposal go alone I get more and more short term in my thinking I'm in my attention span I surf the net I'm on social media I check my email I click around where ever I go and what I'm leaving out is deep breathing
and I actually believe that when you want to feel the mind when you want to train the mind when you want to feel the so you need to read and you need to be pre it I will give you are a challenge once we approach the conclusion but in order for you to train the mind you need to do three things all the time number one
is to read and I don't consider opening my Twitter feed every morning and reading the latest a tweet from Donald Trump being an intellectual you know a rega it's not kind of put you probably in a bad mood but that's how things go but you need to deep create what else do you need to do I think you need to listen to people I think you
need to write and I think you need to observe those are all things that train the mind and if you want to take it one step further and thus I grew older I do have a dream of training my mind I want to do two things one is to learn how to pray play an instrument because I'm really about I think I've tried to start playing
the guitar three times once with my son I'm just a miserable failure but I think it's great intellectual stimulus and the second thing I wanted to learn a new language I don't do grammar a toll I just do language by feel but I I I wish I could pick up another one so in order for you to train your mind I would argue you have to
be curious you have to be open to new impulses you have to let all of your prejudices go it is part of human nature to have a prejudice you get a picture of a human being through the public eye or what they look like or what they have said but until you have met Dutch human being you don't know what that human being is life can
you cannot then you should not make a value judgment so be curious and find all of your life fight cynicism but it's the worst mental disease that you can have the minute that you think that you know better than someone else I think you're done for so read right listen observe and learn something new with an open mind point number three is empathy I think asks
we the homo sapiens develop we are going to according to many not least Ferrari in bos Hamasaki been sent home a day does we're gonna involve we're not gonna be regular human beings anymore there is going to be a time when we become cyborgs or when we become some kind of hybrids and some would argue that with our smart phones we kind of already are we
get impulses and reactions which our brains weren't used to doing before and we are going to get to a stage where by robots digitalization artificial intelligence internet of things will do things for us but we as human beings had to do previously and then there's one thing I would argue that we're left with and that is empathy and empathy is about how we as human beings
treat each other and for me the key as I say this as someone who has felt quite often as an incomplete hospital incomplete father or incomplete prime minister or incomplete friends I said with sincerity you have to work at this you have to be present with other human beings you have to be present in any court every conversation that you have no my son is here
today our first time his listening to me speak for twelve minutes and he doesn't see his haven't fallen asleep yet which I which I think is great but that's where it all starts from it starts basically from your kin from your family then it moves on to your friends and then it moves on to the relationships that you have at work and I know that we
are getting a sense that there's more violence there's more viciousness and there's more meanness in this world I don't buy that argument we just see it more at face value because of social media media or other things I actually think that the world is becoming a better place believe it or not we have much less violence than ever before and I say this carefully not least
in the light of what we have seen in Barcelona yesterday or what we saw in the United States %HESITATION earlier this this week we have less decease and we have less famine so what's left this human relations and empathy and here is where I come to my conclusion after %HESITATION body mind and empathy is to give you three pieces of advice on how to conduct this
happiness package the first one is very theoretical at something I call eight plus eight plus eight are I believe that happiness is something that takes place right now it's not something that happened it's not something that you have in the future it's something that you need to live with all the time and what I've tried doing my life is to live a life of aids plus
eight plus a I've miserably failed but it's a good day what does that mean it means eight hours of sleep a night it means eight hours of hard work a day and it means eight hours of your own time for whatever you spend that time with I don't believe in these people say that they can do twenty hour workdays and be effective that's I'm allowed to
say bull shit yeah Ted exit route you hear me I think it it doesn't go like not you can be effective for approximately maximum of eight hours someone got it right when they said that aids plus a plus a my point number two and it's it's a challenge I I just wrote my blue weeks column known it then it's out of September and then this stems
from from my thinking or reading and please join me in this challenge it's a one plus one plus one day what I was trying to say without having noticed that I fast around too much a social media and elsewhere and do not read enough I have made a rule which starts in the first of September this year and ends on the first of September next year
but every day I will do three things one hour of reading a book now you read about four hundred words a minute %HESITATION with that pace you can go up two hundred two hundred books depends a little bit on the links okay number two I will exercise one hour day while I do that anyway so it's kind of easy no problem it doesn't have to be
the crew protest and number three I will spend only one hour a social media the day and that will be my one plus one plus one rule and every month I will post my a a record on Facebook to see if I'm able to do it is now my wife said that's easy for you because you're moving to Luxembourg in the family is staying here well
yeah it's true but I will try one plus one plus one I want to join me and the final thing I want to say as nothing has gone blank %HESITATION one final thing I want to say hi it is about empathy it it's it's full words thought that I tell my children every night when we go to bed and it's something that my parents told me
as well %HESITATION and and I I just want you to remember those four works because I I I think they sort of former package in which happiness can can exist because happiness is a process and the four words are dream and dream big always believe believe in those streams some believe that you can actually do it so dream believe work hard I know it's two words
but still and finally fourth succeed so dream believe work hard and succeed if you can keep that package I would argue that you can develop a state of happiness I mean if you keep the package shelf taking care of your body taking care of your mind and taking care of the people around you I think that's what happiness is all about thank you very much
