Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book

of mine that I hop e will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make som e connections myself, in case you miss them. I want to start with what I call th e "official dogma." The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all wester n industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interes ted in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itsel f good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. And because if people h ave freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maxim ize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize fre edom is to maximize choice. The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom th ey have, the more welfare they have. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my s upermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. 175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 different extr a-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then y ou go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system -- speakers, C D player, tape player, tuner, amplifier. And in this one single consumer electro nics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six and a half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. In other domains -- the world of com munications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your p hone. You didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety o f phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one -- the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and creme brulee torch. And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store ye t, you can rest assured that one day soon you will. And what this does is it lea ds people to walk into their stores asking this question. And do you know what t he answer to this question now is? The answer is "No." It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much. So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, The same explosion of choice is true. Health care -- it is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to d o. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits, and these risks. B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do? And you say, "Doc, what should I do?" A nd the doc says, A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and ri sks. What do you want to do? And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you d o?" And the doc says, "But I'm not you." And the result is -- we call it "patien t autonomy," which makes it sound like a good thing. But what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something -- namely the doctor -- to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions -namely the patient. There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, whic

h, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to ca ll our doctors the next morning and ask prescriptions to be changed. Something a s dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is m eant to indicate. We don't inherit an identity, we get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day when y ou wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be . With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumpt ion that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and t hen you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. It's because th ey are preoccupied, asking themselves, "Should I get married or not? Should I ge t married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?" All of these are consuming questions. And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not gett ing a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should. These are important ques tions to answer. Work -- we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the tech nology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the p lanet -- except the Randolph Hotel. (Laughter) There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi works. I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is t hat we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we shou ld or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we' re watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, "Shoul d I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" And even if the answer to the question is "no," it's certainly goi ng to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would 've been. So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things an d lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything w as a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this. And the que stion is, is this good news, or bad news? And the answer is yes. (Laughter) We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it . All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effec t, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I' ll give you one very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investme nts in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million emplo yees and about 2,000 different workplaces. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percen t. You offer 50 funds -- 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to de cide which fund to choose that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. And then t omorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow n ever comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to hav e to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money to put a

way, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up signifi cant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match thei r contribution. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this. (Laughter) You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You d on't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or even the wrong salad dressing. So th at's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the par alysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and, you know, what salad dressing is? It's easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice th at would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induce s you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisf action you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disa ppointing about the option that you chose. Second, what economists call opportunity costs. Dan Gilbert made a big point thi s morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject, t hat make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an e xample. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers, I apologize. (Laughter) But here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hampto ns. Very expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? "Well, damn it," this guy is thinking, "It' s August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. I could be parking ri ght in front of my building." And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. Oppor tunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even w hen what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opp ortunity costs. Here's another example. Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing thi ngs slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, y ou're choosing not to do other things. And those other things may have lots of a ttractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. And there was a time when jeans came in one fl avor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, and they were incredibly unco mfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they s tarted to feel OK. So I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearin g these old ones, and I said, "You know, I want a pair of jeans, here's my size. " And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You wan t button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid washed? Do you want the m distressed? You want boot cut, you want tapered, blah blah blah ..." On and on he went. My jaw dropped, and after I recovered, I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind." (Laughter)

He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store -- truth be told -- with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do bette r. But I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try and explain this to myself . The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expec tations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low expecta tions. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I ex pected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Addin g options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. Nobody in the world o f marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this. (Laughter) The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that whe n everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, in dustrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be plea santly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through t he roof. The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is low expectations. (Laughter) (Applause) I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am mar ried to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally, one conseq uence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy i s that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear. The world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, a nd you ask why, who's responsible? It is equally clear that the answer to the qu estion is you. You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jea ns on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions , and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them, they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high. And then when they have t o explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. And so t he net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. S o let me remind you. This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice i s better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better t han some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm prett y confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our w elfare. Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done -- as a policy matter, the thing to t hink about is this. What enables all of this choice in industrial societies is m aterial affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard abou

t several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Th eir problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrat ing and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how thes e expensive and difficult to install child seats don't help. It's a waste of mon ey. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's no t simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse o ff. If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we ma ke were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only woul d those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is wh at economists call a Pareto-improving move. Income redistribution will make ever yone better off -- not just poor people -- because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? You know nothing is p ossible in this fishbowl." Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- and that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certai nly too limited -- perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Carl Honore praises slowness What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book a bout slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days, you know, zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size ch unks. Because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. So ... so I did a spot on CNN the othe r day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. And I think that -- that's not really surprising though, is it? Because that's kind of the world that we -- we live in now, a world stuck in fast-forward. A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more an d more into less and less time. Every moment of the day feels like a race agains t the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is -- is in my bio the re, I'll just toss it out again -- "These days even instant gratification takes too long." And if you think about how we to try to make things better, what do w e do? No, we speed them up, don't we? So we used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of cour se, we used to date and now we speed date. And even things that are by their ver y nature slow -- we try and speed them up too. So -- So I was in New York recent ly, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new co urse, a new evening course. And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. So this

-- the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, sa lute the sun, but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. I mean, these a re sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at. But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living doe s to us. We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notic e the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives. On our health, our diet, our w ork, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it take s a -- a wake-up call, doesn't it, to -- to alert us to the fact that we're hurr ying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the f ast life, instead of the good life. And I think for many people, that wake-up ca ll takes the form of an illness. You know, a burn-out, or eventually the body sa ys, "I can't take it anymore," and throws in the towel. Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranqu ility, to be with the other person, to listen to them. And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slo w down -- you know, I'd be speed reading "The Cat In The Hat." I'd be -- you kno w, I'd be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page and of c ourse, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. And what sho uld have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of th e day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of glad iatorial battle of wills; a clash between his speed and my -- or, my speed and h is slowness. And this went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a ne wspaper article with time-saving tips for fast people. And one of them made refe rence to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." And I -- I win ce saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah -- what a great idea! This is exactly w hat I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." But thankfully, a light bul b went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different, and I took a st ep back, and I thought, "Whoa -- you know, has it really come to this? Am I real ly in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day?" And I -- I put away the newspaper -- and I was getting on a pla ne -- and I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time -- whic h is I did nothing. I just thought, and I thought long and hard. And by the tim e I got off that plane, I'd decided I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else. And I -And I had two questions in my head. The first was, how did we get so fast? And t he second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Now, if you thin k about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. Y ou think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But I think if you cut through those forces you get to what might be the deeper dri ver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It' s a finite resource, it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. T ime is money, as Benjamin Franklin said. And I think what that -- that does to u s psychologically is it -- it creates an equation. Time is scarce, so what do w e do? Well -- well, we speed up, don't we? We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line . A finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheles s. And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mind set? And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a -- a global backlash against this culture that t ells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best.

Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, y ou're roadkill, the opposite turns out to be true. That by slowing down at the r ight moments, people find that they do everything better. They eat better, they make love better, they exercise better, they work better, they live better. And in this kind of cauldron of moments, and places, and acts of deceleration, lie w hat a lot of people now refer to as the International Slow Movement. Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quic k overview of what -- what's going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement. Started in Italy, b ut has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. An d it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more p leasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement, a nd the renaissance farmers' markets, is another -- are other illustrations of th e fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultiva ting their food on an industrial timetable. They want to get back to slower rhyt hms. And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Citie s movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and b eyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape , so that people are encouraged to -- to slow down and smell the roses and conne ct with one another. So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space. And in some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, beca use I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. It's saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kin d of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. And millions of them around the world are turning to to complementary and alternative forms of medic ine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of hea ling. Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstrea m approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. And blue-chip medical colleges ev erywhere are -- are starting to study these things to find out how they work, an d what we might learn from them. Sex. There's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? I was coming to -- we ll -- no pun intended there. I was making my way, let's say, slowly to Oxford, a nd I went through a news agent, and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it s aid on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." So, you k now, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, you know, I like a quickie as m uch as the next person, but I think that there's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex -- from slowing down in the bedroom. You know, you tap into that -- th ose deeper, sort of, you know, psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with the buildup. You can get more bang for your buck, let's say. I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn't they, whe n they sang the praises of a lover with a slow hand. Now, we all laughed at Stin g a few years ago when he went Tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and no w you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. A nd of course, in Italy where -- I mean, Italians always seem to know where to fi nd their pleasure -- they've launched an official Slow Sex movement. The workplace -- right across much of the world -- North America being a notable exception -- working hours have been coming down. And Europe is an example of t hat, and people finding that their quality of life improves as they're working

less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. Now, clearly there are p roblems with the 35-hour work week in France -- too much, too soon, too rigid. B ut other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it' s possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. And Norway, Sw eden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American wee p with envy. And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro-c ompany level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug -- to take a lunch bre ak, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys -- you at the back -- mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and to -- for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mo de of thought. It's not just, though, these days, adults who overwork, though, is it? It's chi ldren, too. I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid-'80s, and I look at kids n ow, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tut oring, more extracurriculars, than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actu ally from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throt tle treadmill. But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, a nd you're finding that, you know, towns in the United States are now banding tog ether and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month, so that peo ple can, you know, decompress and have some family time, and slow down. Homework is another thing. There are homework bans springing up all over the dev eloped world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more. So there was a case up in Scotland r ecently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for e veryone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said , "What are you -- you know, our kids will fall" -- the headmaster said, "No, no , your children need to slow down at the end of the day." And just this last mon th, the exam results came in, and in math, science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. And I think what's very revealing is that the elite universit ies, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks, they have CVs jammed with extracurricu lars, to the point that would make your eyes water. But they lack spark, they la ck the ability to think creatively and think outside -- they don't know how to dream. And so what these Ivy League schools, and Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. And in Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter t o undergraduates -- freshmen -- telling them that they'll get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes. If they do less, but give ti me to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them. And even if they sometimes do nothing at all. And that letter is called -- very revealing , I think -- "Slow Down!" -- with an exclamation mark on the end. So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same. That less is ver y often more, that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticke t while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true, but that's not all of it. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. And if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. And i f any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you'll have a pretty good i dea of how fast I was going. (Laughter)

But why is it so hard to slow down? I think there are various reasons. One is t hat -- that speed is fun -- you know, speed is sexy. It's all that adrenaline ru sh. It's hard to give it up. I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension -that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper quest ions. We fill our head with distraction, with busy-ness, so that we don't have t o ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? Another reason -- although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason -- why we find it hard to slow down, is the cultural t aboo that we've erected against slowing down. Slow is a dirty word in our cultur e. It's a byword for lazy, slacker, for being somebody who gives up. You know, " he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being -- with being stupid. I guess what the Slow Movement -- the purpose of the Slow Movement, or its main goal, really, is to tackle that taboo, and to say that -- that yes, sometimes sl ow is not the -- the answer, that there is such a thing as "bad slow." You know. that -- I got stuck on the M25, which is a ring road around London, recently, a nd spent three and a half hours there. And I can tell you, that's really bad slo w. But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea of the Slow Movement, is th at there is such a thing as "good slow," too. And good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV switched off. Or -- taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best de cision at work. Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life. Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that' s happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. And I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brig ade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world -- yo u know, sort of, business press, but also, you know, big companies and leadershi p organizations. Because people at the top of the chain, people like you, I thin k, are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system, there's to o much busy-ness, and it's time to find, or get back to, that lost art of shifti ng gears. Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it's not just in the devel oped world that this idea's been taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status -- China, Bra zil, Thailand, Poland, and so on -- these countries are -- have embraced the ide a of the Slow Movement, many people in them, and there's a debate going on in th eir media, on the streets. Because I think they're looking at the West, and they 're saying, "Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sur e about that." So all of that said, is it, I guess, is it possible? That's really the main ques tion before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I -- I'm happy to be abl e to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as Exh ibit A, a kind of reformed-and-rehabilitated speed-aholic. I still love speed. Y ou know, I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busy-ness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. I p lay squash and ice hockey, two very fast sports, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise. (Laughter) And what that means is that I don't -- I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. I no longer hear time's wing ed chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. I can actually hear it now, because I see my time is ticking off. And the upshot of all of tha t is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive, than I eve r have. I feel like I'm -- I'm living my life rather than actually just racing t hrough it. And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is tha

t I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger. And for me, the -- I guess, the litmus test for whether this would work, and wha t it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's sort of where the -- the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. I -- you know, at the end of the day, I go into my son's room. I don't wear a watch. I switch o ff my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just sl ow down to his pace and -- and we read. And because children have their own temp o and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. They need you to move at their rhythm. I find that 1 0 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, "You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me." And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a k ind of -- a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so sl ow and I had to get through it quickly. It's become my reward at the end of the day, something I really -- I really cherish. And I have a kind of Hollywood endi ng to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this. A few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, a nd my son came down the stairs and he'd -- he'd made a card for me. And he was c arrying it. He'd gone and stapled two cards, very like these, together, and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. And he said to me, or he handed this to me, and -- and I read it, and it said, "To Daddy, love Benjam in." And I thought, "Aah, that's really sweet, you know, is that a good luck on the book tour card?" And he said, "No, no, no, Daddy -- this is a card for being the best story reader in the world." And I thought, "Yeah, you know, this slowi ng down thing ... " Thank you very much

Neil Pasricha: The 3 A's of awesome So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada. My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. My dad left a small village outside of Am ritsar, India. And they got here in the late 1960s. They settled in a shady subu rb about an hour east of Toronto. And they settled into a new life. They saw the ir first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids. My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods. We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn't take for granted when they grew up -- things li ke power always on in our houses, things like schools across the street and hosp itals down the road and popsicles in the backyard. We grew up, and we grew older . I went to high school. I graduated. I moved out of the house, I got a job, I f ound a girl, I settled down -- and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Ca t Stevens' song. (Laughter) But life was pretty good. Life was pretty good. 2006 was a great year. Under cle ar blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded b y 150 family and friends. 2007 was a great year. I graduated from school, and I

went on a road trip with two of my closest friends. Here's a picture of me and m y friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blo cked them with our giant heads. (Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but i t was breathtaking, believe me. (Laughter) 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me. First of all, the news was so heavy. It's still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flip open a newspaper, when you turne d on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars going on around the world, eart hquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, a nd then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs , or our retirements, or our livelihoods. 2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason too. I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. My marriage wasn't going well, and we just were growing further and further apa rt. One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation. And she said, "I don't love you an ymore." And it was one of the most painful things I'd ever heard and certainly t he most heartbreaking thing I'd ever heard, until only a month later, when I hea rd something even more heartbreaking. My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental il lness for some time. And for those of you whose lives have been touched by menta l illness, you know how challenging it can be. I spoke to him on the phone at 10 :30 pm on a Sunday night. We talked about the TV show we watched that evening. A nd Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared. Very sadly, he took his own life. And it was a really heavy time. And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really d ifficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. So I came home from work one night, and I logg ed onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.c om. I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures tha t we all love, but we just don't talk about enough -- things like waiters and wa itresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just o ut of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery st ore and you get to be first in line -- even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there. (Laughter) And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day. And so my blog was just one of those 50,000. And nobody read it except for my mom. Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad. (Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits. And then I started getting exc ited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and the n millions. It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then I got a ph one call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, "You've just won the best blog in the world award." I was like, that sounds totally fake. (Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to? (Laught er) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet b etween Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart. And I went onstage t o accept a Webby award for Best Blog. And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 liter ary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book. Flash-for ward to the next year and "The Book of Awesome" has now been number one on the b

est-seller list for 20 straight weeks. (Applause) But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today. I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you the three A's of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought. So let's talk about those thr ee A's. Over the last few years, I haven't had that much time to really think. B ut lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself ? And I've summarized those things, for me personally, as three A's. They are at titude, awareness and authenticity. I'd love to just talk about each one briefly . So attitude: Look, we're all going to get lumps, and we're all going to get bump s. None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that 's that it ain't gonna go according to plan. We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances a t weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too. It's sad, and it's not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend co uld cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog co uld get hit by a car on the street. It's not a happy thought, but your kids coul d get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes. Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean. And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart. And when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges and soaks in, I just really hope yo u feel like you've always got two choices. One, you can swirl and twirl and gloo m and doom forever, or two, you can grieve and then face the future with newly s ober eyes. Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choo sing, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to m ove forward and move on and take baby steps into the future. The second A is awareness. I love hanging out with three year-olds. I love the w ay that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. I love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk. I love the w ay that they'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes an d a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the pe anuts and the smell of the hotdogs. I love the way that they'll spend hours pick ing dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Than ksgiving dinner. I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. Having a sense of awareness is just about embracin g your inner three year-old. Because you all used to be three years old. That th ree year-old boy is still part of you. That three year-old girl is still part of you. They're in there. And being aware is just about remembering that you saw e verything you've seen for the first time once too. So there was a time when it w as your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from wo rk. There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt t he bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jac ket pocket and said, "Found money." The last A is authenticity. And for this one, I want to tell you a quick story. Let's go all the way back to 1932 when, on a peanut farm in Georgia, a little ba by boy named Roosevelt Grier was born. Roosevelt Grier, or Rosey Grier as people used to call him, grew up and grew into a 300 lb. six-foot five linebacker in t he NFL. He's number 76 in the picture. Here he is pictured with the "fearsome fo ursome." These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against. They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field. But Rosey Grier also had another passion. In his deeply authentic self, he also loved needlepoin

t. He loved knitting. He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took a way his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks. That's what he said. I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining club s. And he even put out a book called "Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men." (Laugh ter) (Applause) It's a great cover. If you notice, he's actually needlepointing his own face. (Laughter) And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authenti c person. And that's what authenticity is all about. It's just about being you a nd being cool with that. And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. You meet people that you like talking to. You go places you've dreamt about. And you end you end up following your heart and f eeling very fulfilled. So those are the three A's. For the closing thought, I want to take you all the way back to my parents comin g to Canada. I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when y ou're in your mid-20s. I don't know, because I never did it. But I would imagine that it would take a great attitude. I would imagine that you'd have to be pret ty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you're sta rting to see in your new world. And I think you'd have to be really authentic, y ou'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you're bein g exposed to. I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't g et many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitt ing in the front row. So I wanted to ask them to, if they don't mind, stand up. And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys. (Applause) When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada. And it's a great story, because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport, and he was welcomed by a non-profit group, which I'm sur e someone in this room runs. (Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welc oming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada. And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread. There was bread , there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little whit e onions. There was rolled up turkey cold-cuts, rolled up ham cold-cuts, rolled up roast beef cold-cuts and little cubes of cheese. There was tuna salad sandwic hes and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches. There was lasagna, the re was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pie s, lots and lots of pies. And when my dad tells the story, he says, "The crazies t thing was, I'd never seen any of that before, except bread." (Laughter) I didn 't know what was meat, what was vegetarian; I was eating olives with pie." (Laug hter) "I just couldn't believe how many things you can get here." (Laughter) When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping. And he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables. H e would say, "Look, can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico? They've got an apple here from South Africa. Can you believe they've got a date from Mor occo?" He's like, "Do you know where Morocco even is?" And I'd say, "I'm five. I don't even know where I am. Is this A&P?" And he'd say, "I don't know where Mor occo is either, but let's find out." And so we'd buy the date, and we'd go home. And we'd actually take an atlas off the shelf, and we'd flip through it until w e found this mysterious country. And when we did, my dad would say, "Can you bel

ieve someone climbed a tree over there, picked this thing off it, put it in a tr uck, drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed all the way across the At lantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a ti ny grocery store just outside our house, so they could sell it to us for 25 cent s?" And I'd say, "I don't believe that." And he's like, "I don't believe it eith er. Things are amazing. There's just so many things to be happy about." When I stop to think about it, he's absolutely right; there are so many things t o be happy about. We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the en tire universe, that we've ever seen, capable of experiencing so many of these th ings. I mean, we're the only ones with architecture and agriculture. We're the o nly ones with jewelry and democracy. We've got airplanes, highway lanes, interio r design and horoscope signs. We've got fashion magazines, house party scenes. Y ou can watch a horror movie with monsters. You can go to a concert and hear guit ars jamming. We've got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and roller coaster rides. You can sleep in clean sheets. You can go to the movies and get g ood seats. You can smell bakery air, walk around with rain hair, pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap. We got all that, but we only got 100 years to enjoy it. And that's the sad part. The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgati ng you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every te acher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politicia n in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your fami ly, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred y ears. Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjo y all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet. And that moment is right now, and those moments are counting down, and those moments are always, always, always fleeting. You will never be as young as you are right now. And that's why I believe that i f you live your life with a great attitude, choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow, living with a sense of awareness of the world a round you, embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that mak e life so sweet and being authentic to yourself, being you and being cool with t hat, letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisf y you, then I think you'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying, and I thi nk you live a life that is truly awesome. Thank you.