Translator: Jago Di Piro Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
"No latitude, your attitude must be one of gratitude."
Dr. Seuss' Guide to Contentment.
Well, like millions of others, I am a big fan of Dr. Seuss.
And we all have our favorite books:
"Green Eggs and Ham," "The Cat in the Hat,"
"Oh, the Places You'll Go!"
But I'm going to be talking about one of his lesser known books today.
A book entitled:
"Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?"
It's a story about a young lad who meets a guru in the desert,
who extols lessons on gratitude and contentment
whilst sitting atop a prickly cactus.
It provides wisdom
about how not to feel sorry for oneself,
how to look on the bright side of things, even in the midst of crumminess,
and how to be content.
And that's where I want to start today.
I want to start with this idea of contentment,
but I wanted to do it in kind of a fun, creative way.
And I was unable to resist the temptation
to provide for you a Seussian introduction.
So I wrote an original poem in the style of Seuss.
So without any further ado, here is:
"Enough! Enough! Enough! Enough! Enough ..."
We use it when we're gruff,
"Enough!"
We use it to rebuff,
"That's enough out of you."
We use it when we're in a huff,
"Enough!"
Or when we're acting tough,
"You had enough?"
But there is another nuance, another meaning of "enough" to discover -
a positive, pleasant variant to uncover.
"Enough" can describe when we're gratified,
happy, peaceful, content and satisfied.
We humans are interesting creatures,
and we have a handful of less than stellar features.
One of these blemishes we cannot ignore
is our infinite, insatiable desire for more.
Our pursuit of more often leads to lament, thus it's critical to learn to be content.
Who should we study?
Aristotle? Socrates? Zeus?
Too lofty, no pictures, I prefer Dr. Seuss.
Perhaps it takes someone truly plucky to point out
that we're really quite lucky.
I bet he would say in some zany way
to avoid resentment and attain contentment:
"No latitude, your attitude must be one of gratitude."
My attempt at a Seussian introduction.
(Applause) (Cheering)
Now surprisingly, Dr. Seuss was a bit of a recluse.
He had a couple of annoyances
when interacting with his fellow Homo sapiens.
One of the questions he got asked all the time is,
"Where do you get your ideas from?"
And finally, he came up with a response,
and he delivered it with deadpan sincerity.
He said, "I get my ideas from a small Swiss hamlet called Uber Gletch,
where I go each summer to get my cuckoo clock fixed."
It also annoyed him when journalists would call his books whimsical.
He said, "Whimsical means that the books mean nothing.
If you look it up in the dictionary, it means capricious, without reason."
Okay, so strictly speaking Dr. Seuss' books are not whimsical,
but he had an ingenious ability to be silly and profound at the same time.
"Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?" is no exception to that.
And I would be remiss if I talked about the book,
but I didn't provide just a few samples from its pages.
The book begins:
"When I was quite young and quite small for my size,
I met an old man in the Desert of Drize.
He sat in a terribly prickly place.
But he sang with a sunny, sweet smile on his face.
He said, 'When you feel bad, when you feel sour and blue,
when you start to get mad ... just do as I do!
Just tell yourself, Duckie, you're really quite lucky!
Some people are much more ... oh, ever so much more ...
so muchly much-much more unlucky than you!'"
And he goes on to give various hilarious examples.
There's Ali Sard, who mows "his uncle's back yard
and it's quick-growing grass and it grows as he mows.
The faster he mows, the faster it grows."
And there's Mr. Potter, "T-crosser, I-dotter.
He crosses t's and dots i's in an I-and-T factory out in Van Nuys."
(Laughter)
But in this last example,
Dr. Seuss proves to be a virtuoso in an absolutely brilliant passage
as the old man explains to the young lad
that he's fortunate that he's not a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher ...
watcher.
Hold on, this is going to go fast:
"Out west, near Hawtch-Hawtch, there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher.
His job is to watch.
Is to keep both his eyes on that lazy town bee.
For a bee that is watched will work harder, you see.
Well, he watched and he watched, but in spite of that watch,
the bee didn't work any harder.
Not mawtch.
So then somebody said,
'Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can.
He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher.
The thing we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!'
Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher.
But he didn't watch well,
so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher.
Today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch
are watching on watch watcher watchering watch,
watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee.
You're not a Hawtch-Watcher. You're lucky, you see!"
(Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering)
So, isn't that fun?
So what is Dr. Seuss' profound message in the midst of all of this silliness?
Well, just as the old man describes
those less fortunate than he and the narrator,
we too fall victim to a never-ending game of comparisons
that take our focus off of what we have, instead we bemoan what we have not.
Contentment doesn't get its due in our country.
We are living better than 99.9999% of people in the history of mankind.
And yet we seem to be grumbling about the fact
that we're fueled by this discontent,
envy and fear of insecurity,
and that we don't have enough stuff.
There is a great economist, Tim Jackson, who spoke at TEDGlobal 2010.
He uttered this great statement, he said:
"We spend money we don't have on things we don't need
to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about."
(Laughter)
Doesn't that sound like the antithesis of contentment?
Absolutely!
J. R. R. Tolkien said it like this, he said:
"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold,
it would be a merrier world."
I just like that sentiment.
And often it is just the little things in life,
it's the simple things that bring us pleasure,
and we could be grateful for those things.
And gratitude and contentment have a lot in common,
and they go hand in hand.
And those with a gift of the gratitude attitude
have a unique ability to see the bright side of things,
even in the midst of the most dire of circumstances.
I grew up in a small town in Iowa.
My graduating class was 32,
and that included two foreign exchange students,
so you get an idea of how small it is.
But Parkersburg, Iowa, gained some national recognition
for a couple reasons.
First of all, we produced four players from our high school
that went on to play in the NFL.
Now, this next slide has five pictures on it.
I want to see if you can tell
which one didn't make it to the big leagues.
Yes, that would probably ... You got it? You figured it out?
I know you were wondering.
(Laughter)
But secondly, we made national headlines more tragically
when an EF5 tornado came through and decimated a third of the town,
and there was a handful of casualties that went with it.
It was a Sunday of Memorial Day weekend,
and my parents had just gotten back from a vacation,
90 minutes before the tornado hit.
And when they heard the tornado siren going off,
they did what all good Midwesterners do,
they went outside, right?
(Laughter)
So they went outside,
and they saw a neighbor up the street in a dead sprint into their house.
And they looked up to the sky and they saw why.
The tornado was half a mile wide at that point.
And there was no question that it was going to hit,
so they dashed into the house, went down the basement,
bathtub, blankets, and began praying.
And the tornado hit the house and then kept going.
And when they went upstairs to open the basement door,
they looked up and they saw sky.
That's the house I grew up in on the left there.
But literally, before the dust had a chance to settle,
my parents were already counting their blessings.
First and foremost, they were alive, they were uninjured,
they had a place to stay that night.
My dad's keys, wallet, glasses and phone
that he had put on the kitchen counter and forgotten about,
miraculously hadn't moved an inch
in the middle of 250 mph wind speeds.
Now, their bedroom furniture, that was in a different county.
I don't know ... (Laughter)
But they were thankful, very thankful for those things.
They had great insurance; they were able to find a temporary place to stay.
My dad had a portable office,
because his business was destroyed as well.
And the list went on and on.
Not just my parents but everybody in town.
It was fortunate that the tornado hit on a Sunday
because otherwise the kids would have been in school,
and at the time when it hit,
they would have been in the designated tornado shelter within the school.
And as you can see here, the high school was badly damaged,
and the place that they would have been was completely destroyed.
And there could have been more casualties and injuries.
The town rallied around the football team.
They said, "We're still going to play our first game 3 months later,
at the end of August."
And with the help of many people in the communities around them,
counties, even states, many, many people, they were able to pull that off.
And 15 months later, they built a brand new high school.
And disaster experts were wondering,
"How in the world did this small town recover so quickly?"
But if you ask the people of the community,
they would say they made a conscious effort
to concentrate on the good things, on the positive things,
and then they got busy rebuilding their homes and rebuilding their lives.
There's tangible benefits,
there's some tangible health benefits as well
to expressing gratitude.
People who express gratitude get better sleep,
they have lower blood pressure, they have stronger immune systems,
they're more likely to experience positive emotions,
such as hope and optimism and happiness.
They're giving, they're compassionate,
they're less likely to be lonely and isolated.
And gratitude promotes forgiveness and resiliency.
The American Psychological Association
published a study showing evidence that expressing gratitude
resulted in greater mental and ultimately physical health in patients
with asymptomatic heart failure.
In a very literal sense, a grateful heart is a healthy heart.
So you're sitting here going, "Okay, that's nice Neil,
but I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, I'm a bit of a pessimist.
(Laughter)
I can't be accused of spreading any joy around.
(Laughter)
How do I grow my gratitude?"
Well, I'm so glad you asked. That's very nice of you.
(Laughter)
It's actually very easy, and like most things in life,
it just takes a little practice and discipline until it becomes a habit.
But it's something that you can begin today.
So one of the first things you do
is simply list three things you're grateful for,
three positive things in your life.
If you want to expand on that, you can go and write a gratitude journal.
You can write letters of gratitude
for those in your circle that you are thankful for.
And then there's this mental exercise which is kind of cool.
It's called the mental subtraction of positive events or positive things.
We learn to appreciate what we have
by imagining our life without those things.
I think the 1980s hair band Cinderella had a hit song:
(Laughter)
"You don't know what you've got till it's gone."
I appreciate some of you recognizing that. (Laughter)
That would be along the same vein there.
And it applies to relationships as well.
When you think about those people that are important to you,
if you imagine your life without them, would you miss them?
Absolutely.
So make sure you take some time to let them know that.
A couple of years ago, I was having dinner with one of my mentors,
and I hadn't seen him for 20 years,
and I was trying to explain to him how much I appreciated him,
but he is a master of deflection.
He was swatting away compliments.
So I had to get a little aggressive with him.
"Enough!" I gruffly rebuffed, in a huff, acting a little tough.
(Laughter)
"Enough," I said,
"Gary, you need to listen to me and I need to be heard.
You had a significant impact on who I am today,
and some of the lessons you taught me at a formative time in my career,
I haven't forgotten to this day.
So for that, I want to thank you."
And as I wrap things up, I want to revisit this idea of contentment and gratitude.
And while they have a lot in common,
there's one subtle but important difference between the two.
An author and blogger Natasha Crain put it quite eloquently.
She said this:
"While gratitude is a measure
of our perspective of the things we already have,
contentment is a measure of perspective
of the things we don't have."
And I want to end with a beautiful example of this sentiment
in a letter written to Dr. Seuss by a girl who found strength in his book,
"Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?"
Each year the letters about literature writing contests
ask grade school, middle school and high school students
to pick out a favorite piece of literature,
connect with it, reflect on it, and report on it,
and the result is a letter written to the author,
describing his or her impact on that student's life.
In 2012, 11th grader Victoria Gray from Germantown, Tennessee,
submitted a piece to that contest.
She won third prize and received 25 dollars.
In her letter, she brings us back to her sixth grade graduation,
and the fact that she couldn't engage in any of the joy in celebration.
The announcement that her parents were getting a divorce
was both shocking and not shocking at the same time.
It was a culmination of a crescendo of arguments
that had been going on for months,
and it left Victoria feeling very self-conscious, unsure of herself
and totally overwhelmed with her new reality.
And I'll let Victoria's words to Dr. Seuss pick it up
as she comes back from the ceremony still wiping tears from her eyes,
and she sees her mom sitting in her bedroom.
"I walked into my room
and I immediately noticed the yellow book sitting in my mother's lap.
The cover read,
"Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?"
In an attempt to raise my spirits,
my mother began singing the words to the song
the old man in the Desert of Drize sang to Duckie.
And as she went through some of those first pages,
I was convinced you knew me,
and knew everything about my family situation.
And as the old man described the various characters and situations,
I too began making comparisons.
I immediately thought of the family whose home had burnt down
just around the corner from my house.
And I suddenly felt guilty for confusing my challenges with that calamity.
Your book helped remind me
that even though my family was in a difficult spot,
we still were blessed with life and with each other.
And before my mom had finished the last sentence,
I realized that growing up in a single-parent household
did not mean that my life was over.
The next few years were spent adjusting to an absent parent.
But even when I couldn't help but crying,
the optimism of your book reminded me
that my dad was just a phone call or a visit away.
And when I wanted to throw a pity party,
Duckie and the old man would show up to crash it,
even before it had a chance to begin.
Years later, my mom began packing up some of her old things
and putting them away in boxes to be sold,
but I refused to part with your book.
It was a gift that has continued to give,
and for that, the only appropriate response is thank you."
Victoria expressed gratitude to one who taught the importance of gratitude.
Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?
Have you told yourself how lucky you are?
Did you need reminding today of how lucky you are?
"So Duckie! Don't grumble! Don't stew! Some critters are much more,
oh, ever so much more,
so muchly much-much more unlucky than you!"
Thank you for your attention and not being rude.
For that, you have my undying gratitude.
(Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering)