On Spaghetti Sauce and Happiness
April 10, 2008 6:15 pm Happiness, Life choices, Making choicesI recently stumbled upon a goldmine called TED.
No, not a new love interest.
TED started in 1984 and stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design as a conference to bring ideas from these three worlds together. Their site makes talks and performances on some of the world’s best thinkers, writers and notables available to the public for free.
I will proudly feature some of the talks here that will give you insight, food for thought and guidelines for enjoying a happier and more meaningful life.
When planning the 2004 Conference, Chris Anderson, TED Curator, said
A few years age I stumbled upon a question I found both shocking and exhilarating: Suppose our natural instincts about what we needed to make us happy were dead wrong?
That was what the latest scientific research on happiness seemed to suggest: that most of the things we spent our time striving for made almost zero difference to how happy we were. In other words, our minds were apparently engineered for self-deception.
If true, this appeared to destroy a key assumption underlying our economic and political systems — that “rational” consumers know how to act in their own best interests. Worse, t meant we could be doomed to spend our lives on a “happiness treadmill”; forever pursuing, never arriving.
The Conference then was planned around exploring the pursuit of happiness. Over the next few weeks I will feature some of those talks here. Enjoy the first talk featuring Dr. Malcolm Gladwell.
| Dr. Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the best seller Blink, was invited to talk about his new book.Instead, he talked about spaghetti sauce and its connection to happiness.
Gladwell is best known for making connections between the most unlikely pairings such as when he used the principles of epidemiology to explain the drop in crime in New York in his book The Tipping Point. Watch his entertaining talk. |
