Transcriber: Erin BQ Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Hi everyone.
A number of years ago,
I had the awesome privilege
of interviewing the great Sir Richard Dearlove,
who you all know of him
through a fictional character in Bond movies,
known as M,
but in the real world, he's actually called C.
You see, I was a counterintelligence agent for the United States Army,
and he -
he was the chief, the C, of MI6, the famed British spy agency.
And one of the things I wanted to know from him was rather simple.
What makes a successful counterintelligence agent?
Did it include the shoot-'em-up, take-'em-down ways of Bond?
Now, let's get to his answer to my question
by having you all finish the following phrase:
I just want you to yell out the last word.
Are you ready?
You ready?
All right.
Survival of the ...
(Audience) fittest.
Fittest - that word, that idea,
what it means to most people is being the strongest, most powerful,
most intimidating and even ruthless.
But can you imagine if when I said, "Survival of the ... "
you all finished that phrase with "the kindest."
What sort of world would we be living in?
Now, I'm told that I'm naive to think like this,
and some have even said, "Hey, hey, we didn't design evolution.
We just follow what Darwin found in his research."
Well, you should probably know
that Charles Darwin did not come up with the phrase "survival of the fittest."
He hypothesized something like that.
But what's hypothesis?
It's a guess.
A gentleman named Herbert Spencer, a philosopher, coined the phrase.
And Darwin, he actually argued against the simplicity of the phrase
in a book called "The Descent of Man."
And he made his argument in chapters 2, 4 and 5
by making an argument like this:
He said that the species
that will move up the evolutionary ladder most efficiently and effectively
is the species that will have the highest number of its members
as sympathetic to one another.
And scholars have researched what Charles Darwin meant by sympathetic,
and he meant three different things:
altruism, generosity and compassion.
So for Darwin, after much of his research,
success in evolution
is about how sympathetic and compassionate you can be,
not how ruthless and intimidating you are.
Now, let's get back to how the chief of MI6 answered my question
about being the most successful counterintelligence agent.
He said that the successful agents were the most compassionate agents
because they get the information we needed -
they get the information we need in order to stop something from happening.
He said the reason they get that
is because they actually connect with the people they question,
thereby learning their truths.
Why?
Because compassion is powerful enough
to bridge the gap between us and those we fear
so that we acquire the information we need to understand a problem,
so that we can fully address possible threats.
The challenge I have for all of you today though,
is to reconsider, reexamine
and even redefine a word that we've misused,
misunderstood.
It's time we changed the way we think about compassion.
I define compassion as a 360-degree holistic understanding
of a problem with suffering of another,
with a commitment
to take action to address the problem and alleviate the suffering.
Now, we've confused and conflated compassion with empathy,
and they are different.
Where [empathy] is feeling the same emotion as someone else
with no demand for action,
compassion is feeling warmth and care for another that includes action.
And empathy?
Empathy has at least two problems that compassion overcomes
because of the difference.
The first,
empathy is an experience far easier and more natural to feel
for people who seem to be like you rather than people who are different.
It actually creates an us-versus-them type of thinking.
Paul Bloom and others
have actually found that empathy has led to tribalism, conflict and wars.
Empathy also contributes to something scholars call an affinity bias.
That's a fancy way of saying
you favor people who seem to be just like you,
and that contributes and often leads to racism.
Compassion though, casts a broad net of warmth and care to all people.
There is no us-versus-them component to compassion.
None.
It's simply "us."
The second problem is that empathy leads to burnout,
and compassion does not.
The neuroscience work of Dr. Tania Singer's lab
for human cognitive and brain sciences at the Max Planck Institute in Germany
have found that when we think empathetically,
we use the neural networks and circuits of pain.
So when someone's depressed, you get depressed;
when someone's sad, you get sad.
In contrast,
compassion uses the neural networks of love.
And when we're in love - I mean real love -
it strengthens you.
It makes you feel like you're on top of the world.
Why?
Because when we think compassionately,
we activate a peptide hormone called oxytocin,
not oxycontin.
(Laughter)
And scholars have researched this,
Paul Zak and Shawn Achor,
and they've explored what happens to us inside our brain
when oxytocin is flowing.
We release two neurotransmitters:
dopamine, which gives us a feeling of reward,
and serotonin, which gives us a feeling of calm.
And combined together, they give us happiness and hope,
and those are the places
where resilience resides and success is built.
Now, to visualize the difference between empathy and compassion,
think of when someone falls into a hole.
The empathetic response is to jump in the hole with them;
the compassionate response
is to hand them down a ladder or a rope and help them up.
All right.
We get the difference between empathy and compassion.
Now we need to understand
where compassion fits into our language.
Because right now, compassion is simply considered a noun.
Did you know
that compassion was originally considered both a noun and a verb?
And that's not unusual.
We use words like house as both.
For example,
you live in a house, which is a shelter,
and you can try to house someone, which is to give shelter.
And this is important
because compassion is more than something you're in,
it's something you do.
So I'm not asking for anything new when it comes to making compassion a verb.
You know what is new?
Our modern notion of seeing it exclusively as a noun.
And we have evidence from the 14th to the 19th century
of people using compassion as a verb.
From Shakespeare in "Titus Andronicus" to John Quincy Adams,
people used the word "compassionating,"
and one of my heroes, Abraham Lincoln,
spoke of the importance of compassionating by a person and in a society.
As a result of Victorian age debates
over the definition and meaning of compassion about 150 years ago,
we in Western society simply now see compassion
as a sentiment or feeling that has no real-world effects.
And some Victorians considered compassion a weakness,
and we have followed that flawed logic ever since.
If we make compassion a verb again,
I sincerely believe,
and I would argue,
that we would get to doing more
about the problem and issues we face as individuals and as a society.
We could create centers or community hubs of civic engagement
where compassion is at the core of problem solving.
We actually did that in my small community with the help of the Dalai Lama.
We created the center for compassion, creativity and innovation.
And if we create more of those centers around the world,
we'll have and find more constructive approaches
to problems like racism and political polarization.
Pew researchers asked Democrats and Republicans to rank your core value -
quote, unquote "your core value." -
The number one core value for Democrats and Republicans was,
you guessed it,
compassion.
So why don't we feel that way in the everyday world?
I argue it's because people continually use compassion exclusively as a noun,
and then they totally neglect the verb.
Imagine a world
where our political leaders didn't go on TV or in the newspapers
and say, "I feel your pain,"
and instead, went out and demonstrated compassion as a verb.
You know what they would do?
They would actually do something about our pain.
(Applause)
All right.
Political arena - I'm going to leave that alone.
(Laughter)
Let's talk a little economics.
Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, does not believe compassion is a weakness.
In a recent commencement address
as well as newspaper articles and interviews,
he actually talks about the role of compassion in success.
And he said this:
quote, "Managing compassionately,
it's not just a better way to build a team;
it's a better way to build a company," unquote.
By the way, he's not alone in thinking like this.
There are researchers from various fields and disciplines that support his idea.
For example,
a team of researchers from UPenn and George Mason University found this:
quote, "A clear positive correlation between compassionate behavior
work satisfaction and a company's success," unquote.
Where there are high levels of workplace compassion,
employee retention is three time higher.
There's 1.7 times higher job satisfaction by employees,
and 1.4 more employees engage in work.
All right.
We're going to talk a little education now.
And I'm actually afraid of this next slide.
I'm not kidding. You'll see why.
You know what? Let's just get to it.
(Laughter)
As a kid from New York City,
I was basically a C student at a Catholic school,
where the nuns would take a wooden ruler to your knuckles
if you got anything wrong,
and for some reason, I had a problem with latitude and longitude,
and I got pummeled for my fifty-fifty guesses.
I was scared to go to school.
And then my family moved to a suburb in Connecticut,
where I walked into a classroom surrounded by maps and globes.
I thought I'd exchanged one hell for another.
(Laughter)
But I'll never forget my teacher,
Mrs. Virginia Peck,
and the compassion she showed
for my misunderstanding about latitude and longitude.
She could tell right away that I was guessing.
And she came over,
got down on one knee,
and asked me how I saw the lines.
And I said, "I see them up and down and going across,"
and she said, "Good,"
and I almost started crying because that's my problem.
And then she taught me a lesson
that I've used ever since for learning anything.
She did this:
She goes, "OK, your 'o' in 'down' is the 'o' in 'longitude.'
Your 'a' in 'across' is the 'a' in 'latitude.'"
You see, she helped me to resolve my problem
by first learning how I perceived the problem,
and then took that understanding to help me succeed,
succeed so much that now, if you go to my house -
I'm not kidding here -
I have maps and globes in almost every room.
(Laughter)
And I became a straight-A student, where I graduated near the top of my class
and did so well in school I did not have to pay a dime for my PhD.
(Applause)
Mrs. Peck. That's Mrs. Peck.
You see,
one teacher's compassion unlocked one student's potential.
And Mrs. Peck's type of classroom
versus the nun's torture-chamber type of classroom
has science to back it up, guys.
There've been several studies on a gene called DRD4.
It's a dopamine processing gene.
And what they've shown
is that all types of students outperform other students -
all types of students in compassionate classrooms
outperform students in learning environments
based on intimidation and threats and punishment.
So the compassionate classrooms, all types of students
outperform students in those classrooms based on punishment and intimidation.
Overall, compassion has several secrets
that need to be declassified, revealed, or uncloistered
for any of you nuns out there.
(Laughter)
The first is that compassion leads to success
in everything from evolution to espionage to economics to epidemiology.
The second is that compassion
is different and more beneficial than empathy to society.
And third, compassion is both a noun and a verb.
And sure, compassion creates bonds, not the 007 type but the double-down type,
between people that make this world a better place.
We need to pay closer attention
to the words and ideas of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin,
for you see,
I'm a "Dead Poets Society" type of guy.
I believe in the words of Robin Williams's character,
John Keating,
who was based on a real teacher here in Nashville in the 1960s -
at the Montgomery Bell Academy,
by the way.
And I'll never forget that one line that still resonates with me,
when he said,
"No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world."
If we make "compassion -ate" a word again,
we'll not only change this world into something better than it is,
but we would literally make a world of hope.
I hope that you compassionate in everything that you do,
for the more you compassionate, the higher you'll elevate.
Thank you.
(Applause)