Weekend Viewing: Matthieu Ricard

Wow, another TED Talk!? How original! Yes, TED is basically my go-to place for videos, but the collections are usually so interesting that I feel no shame in doing so.

Today's video is courtesy of Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk with an education in molecular genetics. He completed his doctoral thesis in 1972, but left the Institut Pasteur to move to the Himalayas. You may also recognize him from his work with Richard Davidson studying the neurological effects of meditation. He has also received the French Order of Merit for humanitarianism in the East.

Matthieu talks about desire, meditation, neuroplasticity, Richard Davidson, and more, so give it a look-see!

Weekend Viewing: Nic Marks

Sorry I didn't update yesterday, in case you noticed. My birthday is tomorrow and I may have been derelict in my duties. Luckily Saturday is also a lazy day for me, except I can still do my job. I can just post a video and run! Love how I've set that up.

This weekend, take a gander at this TED Talk with statistician Nic Marks. He argues for a new measure of human progress that takes happiness and environmental impact into account. This sounds quite similar to Bhutan's measurement of Gross National Happiness, which I'm a huge fan of, but Nic prefers the Happy Planet Index. This index combines life expectancy, life satisfaction, and ecological footprint into one measure on a scale of 1 to 100. You can look at a world map showing each country's HPI score here.

So that's it for the week. I'll just be over here, continuing my slide into unproductivity!

Weekend Viewing: Shawn Achor's Five Tips for Happiness

Here's a short video to balance out last weekend's loooooong one. It's Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, talking about five easy tips for a happier life. I haven't read the book, so I'm not exactly sure what he means by "Tetris effect," but his basic tips are good. He talks about journaling, good deeds, etc.

Anyway, the video is so short that I probably don't even need to summarize it, so just watch!

Weekend Viewing: The Dalai Lama's Happiness Conference at Emory

Hey, this is something to view on the weekend:  it's a full video of the Dalai Lama's visit to Emory University, moderated by NPR's Krista Tippett. I already wrote about this conference two weeks ago, but here is the full video of the conversation. Watching the video is better than reading about it, because the humor of the participants comes through much better, especially from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the Dalai Lama himself. You can also go to the official website to download a podcast version of the discussion.

With that said, you should get something to eat right now, because you'll be in it for the long haul:  this video is just shy of two hours long. Here are some time codes, in case you want to skip ahead (though maybe that defeats the purpose of the dialog in the first place):

• Beginning -  The Dalai Lama gives his introduction to happiness
• 7:19 - The Dalai Lama puts on a visor while Krista Tippett gives her introduction to the panel
• 10:36 - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gives his introduction to happiness in Judaism and the importance of making happiness for others
• 19:20 - Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori gives her introduction to happiness in Christianity
• 23:10 - Professor Sayyed Hossein Nasr gives his introduction to happiness in Islam while also using Buddhist terms
• 32:10 - Beginning of question and answer time, where Krista asks questions and everyone on the panel answers individually. This goes on so long that it's hard to document each question and answer, so you should watch the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
• 33:20 - The Dalai Lama talks about happiness in relation to suffering
• 54:18 - The Dalai Lama talks about the right to pursue happiness and his definition of happiness as the meaning of life
• 1:10:35 - Professor Nasr makes jokes about prayer in Islam
• 1:22:13 - Rabbi Sacks jokes about the importance of food in Judaism

Anyway, this post is becoming as long as the video itself, so here it is:


Pursuing Happiness with the Dalai Lama from Being on Vimeo.

Weekend Viewing: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Watch this video to learn how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pronounces his name! Just kidding. He never says it out loud, but I've since learned that you pronounce his last name "chick-sent-me-HIGH-ee." See if you can remember that!

In this TED Talk, Csikszentmihalyi (a living advertisement for copy-and-paste if ever there was one) gives a presentation about creativity and how to maximize flow experiences. What's interesting is how he and his team can predict what activities give each person flow. A nice companion piece to my previous post. I'll stop typing now so you can watch:

Weekend Viewing: Tony Hsieh

Ah, the first weekend back after a long trip! Today I found an excellent speech that Tony Hsieh (pronounced "Shay") gave at Google headquarters. As I said in my previous post, Tony gave one of my favorite presentations at the Global Happiness Summit. This Google Talk is a longer version of that presentation.

Tony mostly talks about corporate culture and how to increase employee happiness. He emphasizes core values and bottom-up communication. The video is in widescreen format, which screws up the blog formatting a little bit, so I downsized it. Just use the fullscreen button if you want a bigger size, or click here if you want it directly on YouTube. I'll quiet down now so you can watch!

Weekend Viewing: Tal Ben-Shahar's Happiness Class

Hey, let's watch Tal Ben-Shahar teach a class! You may remember me writing about Tal in my very first Casual Friday. As a quick refresher, he is the author of the excellent book Happier, as well as being the professor of the famously popular happiness class at Harvard. This video shows him on the first day of a new semester, but after he had already become famous.

For some reason, I was only able to find this video on a Chinese version of YouTube, but don't worry--it's all in English. I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but he starts by talking about one of my favorite topics:  the difference between the popular notion of outgoing cheeriness and real happiness. After a few notes on the class itself, he goes on to talk about the importance of silence in our lives. He is an engaging and informative speaker, so give it a try! (Embedding seems to stop working periodically. If that happens, use this link:  http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTE5MTAzODgw.html)

Weekend Viewing: The Minds of Animals

Jeffrey Kluger, floating in Charlie Rose's
empty void of an interview room.

Ah, Weekend Viewing. It's the equivalent of a teacher putting in a video for the kids because he or she wants to sleep in the back of the room.

Anyway, Charlie Rose is my favorite interviewer on television. He always has the most interesting guests and he always lets them get to the heart of the matter, instead of just fishing for soundbites. In this interview, we meet Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine, who talks about animal consciousness. It turns out that animals are more self-aware than most people realize. He also goes into detail about teaching apes to "speak" using pictograms. The implication is that since many animals have consciousness, perhaps we need to think more about their happiness and emotional wellbeing instead of making life hard for them.

So watch the video, kids. You can see it here:  http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11157, because I don't know how to embed Charlie Rose's content. I'll just be at my desk, working with my head down.

Weekend Viewing: Martin Seligman

Here he is, the father of modern happiness science:  Martin Seligman. Mr. Seligman coined the term "positive psychology" in the early '90s as a response to most psychologists' focus on mental disorder (as opposed to the good parts of the human psyche). Psychology students may also recognize him as the creator of the learned helplessness concept.

In this TED Talk, Seligman gives a good introduction to his theories. He starts out being maybe a little too down on regular psychology, but he soon moves on to discuss the difference between real happiness and "Hollywood happiness," flow, and optimism. He gives very practical advice on finding happiness, especially after the 18-minute mark, so give it a watch! Hopefully it'll get your weekend off to a (meaningfully) happy start!

Weekend Viewing

Yes, another new weekly feature! Weekend Viewing is a chance to share interesting videos, so you can take a break from reading (and I can take a break from writing).

To get the ball rolling, I've chosen a TED Talk by Daniel Gilbert. Mr. Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, the book that got me into this subject in the first place. This video was recorded in 2004, before the book was published. It should serve as a good introduction for those of you new to the science of happiness, but it's also extremely informative if your an old hand at the subject.

So without further ado, watch this video and enjoy your weekend!