Translator: Behdad Khazaeli Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
Thank you.
Did you see how slowly I just walked?
About 12 years ago, yeah, that would not have been possible.
You see, I am a recovering speedoholic.
I used to believe that faster was somehow better
and that more was somehow ... well, more.
Now, I like to walk my talk, quite literally,
and the TED shoes help.
My work is based on the notion that slow is actually faster
and fast is merely exhausting.
This notion was born in an ice-cream parlor,
just outside of Boston, Massachusetts.
I was there with my then three-year-old,
and she was overwhelmed by the array of 32 flavors.
She didn't know which one to choose,
and she took her time to do so.
Well, I found myself, as a speedaholic, checking my watch thing:
"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, we gotta go, we gotta go!"
Go where?
I had decided to jump off the treadmill of corporate America
to stay home and raise my children.
I had nowhere to go;
I was already there.
And yet, I was embedded in this idea
that somehow being fast and busy
and doing all of these things and moving the action forward,
even in an ice-cream parlor,
was somehow going to make me a more productive and better person.
Well, I grew ashamed of myself.
Here I was in an ice-cream parlor with my daughter
about to rob her
of the single most amazing experience a three-year-old can have:
selecting and savoring her very first ice-cream cone.
And so I decided to conduct an experiment.
For the rest of the afternoon, I was going to walk at the pace
of an ice cream-eating three-year-old.
You can imagine how slow that is -
slower than this one right here.
But the most amazing thing happened.
As I stepped out of the ice-cream parlor into the sunny day with my daughter,
I saw things I hadn't seen in years.
I saw the leaves on the trees.
I saw the flowers on the ground.
And I saw faces much like yours,
smiling at me.
And I asked myself, "Why are they smiling?"
Because I was smiling at them.
Do you know that anxiety disorder
is the single most commonly diagnosed mental illness in the United States today,
affecting 18% of the US adult population?
That's one in five people,
basically,
costing the healthcare system over 42 billion dollars annually.
In Germany, that number is 6%
of the adult population affected by the same anxiety disorder.
Now, I'm no medical doctor, but my guess is
that our raised anxiety today has a lot to do with our pace of life.
In the mid-'90s,
a man by the name of Robert Levine, from California State University,
decided to conduct a "pace of life" study.
He wanted to see which country was the fastest on the planet.
And so he and his team of graduate students
went out to about 30 different countries,
and they used three variables to measure their pace of life
in each of these countries.
They looked at how fast it took to purchase a postage stamp.
They looked at how fast an average pedestrian walked 60 feet,
without knowing they were being observed,
and how accurate the clocks were in public spaces.
Well, you can imagine, in the mid-'90s,
it was Switzerland that won!
Switzerland was considered the fastest place on the planet.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love Switzerland.
I'm sure many of you have been out there before too.
It's a very bucolic place.
It has a speed limit on the autobahn, much to my dismay.
But my guess is that it had more to do with the criteria
that if the postal system was efficient...
And well, the clocks goes without saying.
But let's fast forward to 2007
when a man by the name of Richard Wiseman, in the United Kingdom,
decided to reenact this study.
He decided to look only
at the literal pace at which people walked.
So he took the only variable of the pace of 60 feet.
He went out to 32 different metropolitan areas in the world,
and he discovered the most amazing thing.
In just under a decade and a half,
our pace of life, globally, had increased by 10%.
That means people are walking at least an average 10% faster
than they were in the mid-'90s.
And what he also found was that, in some places,
the pace of life had increased by 30% ...
in China.
Suddenly, our little Switzerland - [banned] Switzerland to be exact -
ended at the bottom of the pile.
It was suddenly the slowest place on the planet, according to the study.
Which one was the fastest?
Singapore.
Singapore was the fastest place on the planet.
People were walking 60 feet, roughly, in 10 seconds.
Now, Singapore happens to also be a hotbed of the IT industry.
It is a tech-driven society.
And in 2007, when the pace of life study was reenacted,
it happened to coincide with the birth year of the iPhone.
Now, I'm no technophobe.
I have my own iPhone.
I have a laptop, a PC ... Heck, I even have a fax machine.
My guess is that there is something seriously correlated between technology,
our pace of life,
and our heightened anxiety.
Now, my thinking is this: our iPhone is the new cigarette.
We take it out when nobody's looking, just to get a quick hit.
And I predict that, at some point, just like we have smoke-free zones,
we're going to have gadget-free zones too.
I've instigated that in my own family.
According to Cisco, a multinational company
that provides IT services to companies worldwide,
they did a survey that said that by the end of 2012,
there would be one mobile connected device
for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
And that by 2016, that number would skyrocket
to 1.4 mobile connected devices per capita worldwide.
And the world's population is growing.
This means we're going to have a lot of gadgets on this planet,
and we need to learn how to deal with them.
Now, the way in which we interact today is changing,
and there's nothing wrong with that.
But are we starting to replace our one-on-one time with screen time?
I was recently in France with two girlfriends,
and then one girlfriend started to freak out.
She goes, "Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!
(Gasps) Has anyone seen my iPhone?"
To which we both replied,
(Whispering) "It's in your hand."
It's like the sunglasses.
You go into a dark room, you're wearing sunglasses,
you put them on your forehead and forget about them
because you get used to the weight of them.
It was like that for her.
Her iPhone had been in her hand so often
that she had gotten used to it, and it had become a part of her anatomy.
(Laughter)
Now, if you really want to see someone freak out,
try to take a smartphone away from a teenager.
(Laughter)
The cute little three-year-old and the example of the ice cream parlor?
Yeah, she's now a smartphone-carrying 14-year-old.
And we had a conversation about her digital digestion
and all the things she does with her smartphone,
and we suggested lightly
that perhaps it would be good for her to just leave it at home for the mornings,
since she goes to school until 12:30.
She could leave it at home. And she begged, she pleaded.
You would have thought we were asking her to amputate her arm.
When she saw that her tactic of begging and pleading wouldn't work,
she got up, looked me square in the eye,
and she said, "Fine, then I'll just take away your iPhone, huh!"
(Gasps)
Inward turmoil, absolute disaster; I almost had a panic attack.
I remain composed on the outside, as an adult would.
However, I was shocked by my own reaction, inwardly.
And when she trotted off to school without her smartphone,
I decided it was time to conduct another experiment.
This time I turned off my smartphone.
I put it on the kitchen table, and I went straight for the woods.
I decided to go on a nature walk without my iPhone,
without saying, "Oh, I'm just listening to music!" -
but what I'm really doing is waiting for the next text message.
I think you all can relate to this.
The most amazing thing happened as I entered the woods,
I started to feel my anxiety level plummet.
My pulse normalized.
I saw the leaves on the trees and the flowers on the ground
and the forest animals smiling at me.
In other words, I was taking in what was actually happening around me
versus creating a virtual reality beyond it.
This got me to thinking about how we behave at the workplace.
Salary.com does an annual survey called the "Wasting Time at Work" survey.
And what happened to come about
was that last year 64% of people were wasting time at work.
And this year that number has jumped to 69%.
Now we've heard about disengagement,
that 70% of people in the United States are disengaged.
Why are they disengaged?
They're disengaged because they want to feel
a part of something greater than themselves,
and they do not.
In this survey, one out of three
said they routinely waste 30 minutes of company time a day.
And of those people that waste time at work,
15% said they were on Facebook.
Another 14% said they were on Yahoo.
What we're doing is we're removing our water cooler talk
and our one-on-one time,
and we're bringing it to the screen,
and we're trying desperately to connect with people.
And that's a normal thing.
But my concern is that we're moving away from our human interaction
and working more with our machines.
Now, this gets me to the one question.
The one question,
such that if you were to ask it of yourselves every single day,
it would change your lives forever.
Now, not many people ask themselves this one question.
And of those people that do ask themselves this question,
even fewer find an answer.
And of those people that find an answer,
even fewer actually act upon it.
But I promise you,
if you ask yourself this question routinely,
an answer will start to emerge.
Now, what is the question?
The question is:
"What is most important to me today?"
What is most important to me today,
such that if I did that one thing, if I experienced that one moment,
I would be one step closer to my higher vision.
I had the pleasure, several years ago, of interviewing Marianne Williamson,
who is a great thinker of our times.
For those not familiar with her,
she's the author of "The Age of Miracles," as well as many other books.
And she's been quoted by many people, including Nelson Mandela.
And so I asked her, "What is your favorite time of day?"
To which she quickly replied, "The morning."
"The morning," I said. "Why is that?"
She said, "Because the morning is where all things begin.
The morning is the time in which you have a new life,
a time of new possibility."
Well, this totally resonated with me
because my work is all about our personal bank account of time,
and every single day gets filled up 24 hours.
The mystery of our lives is that we don't know how often that happens.
The truth is, it doesn't matter that we don't know,
the question is, what do you do with the time you have now?
I got very inspired by Marianne Williamson.
She said, "Start the morning with a mantra or a benediction -
a prayer of gratitude that you have yet another day on this planet."
So I went home and I said, "Great, I want to be like Marianne.
I'm going to do that."
And so every morning since that day,
I wake up, and the first thing I do is I go to the sun,
and if the sun isn't there,
then I just go to the window, and I say the following mantra:
"I embrace this day
and all the possibilities that it brings.
And so it is, and so it shall be.
And I go into the receiving of love, light, and creativity,
such that I may meet my ultimate purpose
with ease and grace.
Namaste."
(Applause)
Thank you.
That sure beats checking your Facebook status
while still lying in that horizontal position in the bed,
before your feet have even touched the ground.
So what I would encourage you to do, when you start your morning,
is to connect with yourself first
before you connect with your 1,000 Facebook friends.
When we start to ask ourselves what is the most important thing,
we start to become more aware of what we're doing on this planet.
We only have a certain amount of units in our personal bank account,
and we don't know how often that will be filled.
But the truth is, that as we start to ask ourselves what moves us,
we become,
and our thoughts and our actions become more in alignment
with our higher vision.
I encourage you all to live at the speed of life
and not at the speed of light.
That, my friends, is my greatest wish for you.
Thank you.
(Applause)