ted经典励志英文演讲稿简短 ted优秀英文演讲稿简短(三篇)

演讲稿也叫演讲词，它是在较为隆重的仪式上和某些公众场合发表的讲话文稿。大家想知道怎么样才能写得一篇好的演讲稿吗？以下我给大家整理了一些优质的演讲稿模板范文，希望对大家能够有所帮助。

有关ted经典励志英文演讲稿简短一

i'd like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago whilewriting an article for italian wired. i always keep my thesaurus handy wheneveri'm writing anything, but i'd already finished editing the piece, and i realizedthat i had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what i'dfind.

let me read you the entry. "disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless,useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down,worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile,decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see alsohurt, useless and weak. antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." i was reading thislist out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, buti'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and i had to stop andcollect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from thesewords unleashed.

you know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so i'm thinking thismust be an ancient print date, right? but, in fact, the print date was the early1980s, when i would have been starting primary school and forming anunderstanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kidsand the world around me. and, needless to say, thank god i wasn't using athesaurus back then. i mean, from this entry, it would seem that i was born intoa world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever goingfor them, when in fact, today i'm celebrated for the opportunities andadventures my life has procured.

so, i immediately went to look up the __ online edition, e_pecting to finda revision worth noting. here's the updated version of this unately, it's not much better. i find the last two words under "nearantonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."

so, it's not just about the words. it's what we believe about people whenwe name them with these words. it's about the values behind the words, and howwe construct those values. our language affects our thinking and how we view theworld and how we view other people. in fact, many ancient societies, includingthe greeks and the romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was sopowerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into e_istence. so, whatreality do we want to call into e_istence: a person who is limited, or a personwho's empowered? by casually doing something as simple as naming a person, achild, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. wouldn't wewant to open doors for them instead?

one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the institute in wilmington, delaware. his name was dr. pizzutillo, anitalian american, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most americansto pronounce, so he went by dr. p. and dr. p always wore really colorful bowties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.

i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with thee_ception of my physical therapy sessions. i had to do what seemed likeinnumerable repetitions of e_ercises with these thick, elastic bands --different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and i hated thesebands more than anything -- i hated them, had names for them. i hated them. and,you know, i was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with dr. p to tryto get out of doing these e_ercises, unsuccessfully, of course. and, one day, hecame in to my session -- e_haustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and hesaid to me, "wow. aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, i thinkyou're going to break one of those bands. when you do break it, i'm going togive you a hundred bucks."

now, of course, this was a simple ploy on dr. p's part to get me to do thee_ercises i didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richestfive-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me wasreshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising e_perience for i have to wonder today to what e_tent his vision and his declaration of meas a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as aninherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.

this is an e_ample of how adults in positions of power can ignite the powerof a child. but, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, ourlanguage isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want,the possibility of an inpidual to see themselves as capable. our languagehasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have beenbrought about by technology. certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs,laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements foraging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities,and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mentionsocial networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their owndescriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their ownchoosing. so, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what hasalways been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer oursociety, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.

the human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people havecontinually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and i'm going tomake an admission: this phrase never sat right with me, and i always felt uneasytrying to answer people's questions about it, and i think i'm starting to figureout why. implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea thatsuccess, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenginge_perience unscathed or unmarked by the e_perience, as if my successes in lifehave come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumedpitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as mydisability. but, in fact, we are changed. we are marked, of course, by achallenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. and i'm going to suggestthat this is a good thing. adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to getaround in order to resume living our life. it's part of our life. and i tend tothink of it like my shadow. sometimes i see a lot of it, sometimes there's verylittle, but it's always with me. and, certainly, i'm not trying to diminish theimpact, the weight, of a person's struggle.

there is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real andrelative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you'regoing to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. so, our responsibilityis not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them tomeet it well. and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel thatthey're not equipped to adapt. there's an important difference and distinctionbetween the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjectivesocietal opinion of whether or not i'm disabled. and, truthfully, the only realand consistent disability i've had to confront is the world ever thinking that icould be described by those definitions.

in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hardtruth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the e_pectedquality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick ina wall that will actually disable someone. perhaps the e_isting model of onlylooking at what is broken in you and how do we fi_ it, serves to be moredisabling to the inpidual than the pathology itself.

by not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging theirpotency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle theymight have. we are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. so weneed to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. and,most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies andour greatest creative ability. so it's not about devaluing, or negating, thesemore trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, butinstead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. so maybe the ideai want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is openingourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term,maybe even dancing with it. and, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural,consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it.

this year we celebrate the 200th birthday of charles darwin, and it was 150years ago, when writing about evolution, that darwin illustrated, i think, atruth about the human character. to paraphrase: it's not the strongest of thespecies that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is theone that is most adaptable to change. conflict is the genesis of creation. fromdarwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability tosurvive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit throughconflict into transformation. so, again, transformation, adaptation, is ourgreatest human skill. and, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we'remade of. maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of ourown power. so, we can give ourselves a gift. we can re-imagine adversity assomething more than just tough times. maybe we can see it as change. adversityis just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet.

i think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is thisidea of normalcy. now, who's normal? there's no normal. there's common, there'stypical. there's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige personif they e_isted? (laughter) i don't think so. if we can change this paradigmfrom one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even alittle bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children,and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with thecommunity.

anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have alwaysrequired of our community members is to be of use, to be able to 's evidence that neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly andthose with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life e_perienceof survival of these people proved of value to the community. they didn't viewthese people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.

a few years ago, i was in a food market in the town where i grew up in thatred zone in northeastern pennsylvania, and i was standing over a bushel oftomatoes. it was summertime: i had shorts on. i hear this guy, his voice behindme say, "well, if it isn't aimee mullins." and i turn around, and it's thisolder man. i have no idea who he is.

and i said, "i'm sorry, sir, have we met? i don't remember meetingyou."

he said, "well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. i mean, when we met i wasdelivering you from your mother's womb." (laughter) oh, that guy. and, but ofcourse, actually, it did click.

this man was dr. kean, a man that i had only known about through mymother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, i arrivedlate for my birthday by two weeks. and so my mother's prenatal physician hadgone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to myparents. and, because i was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turnedin, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer-- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.

he said to me, "i had to give this prognosis to your parents that you wouldnever walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids haveor any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me eversince." (laughter) (applause)

the e_traordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippingsthroughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee,marching with the girl scouts, you know, the halloween parade, winning mycollege scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, andintegrating it into teaching resident students, med students from hahnemannmedical school and hershey medical school. and he called this part of the coursethe _ factor, the potential of the human will. no prognosis can account for howpowerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. anddr. kean went on to tell me, he said, "in my e_perience, unless repeatedly toldotherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices,a child will achieve."

see, dr. kean made that shift in thinking. he understood that there's adifference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. andthere's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at15 years old, if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, iwouldn't have hesitated for a second. i aspired to that kind of normalcy backthen. but if you ask me today, i'm not so sure. and it's because of thee_periences i've had with them, not in spite of the e_periences i've had withthem. and perhaps this shift in me has happened because i've been e_posed tomore people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and castshadows on me.

see, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your ownpower, and you're off. if you can hand somebody the key to their own power --the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door forsomeone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. you'reteaching them to open doors for themselves. in fact, the e_act meaning of theword "educate" comes from the root word "educe." it means "to bring forth whatis within, to bring out potential." so again, which potential do we want tobring out?

there was a case study done in 1960s britain, when they were moving fromgrammar schools to comprehensive schools. it's called the streaming trials. wecall it "tracking" here in the states. it's separating students from a, b, c, dand so on. and the "a students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers,etc. well, they took, over a three-month period, d-level students, gave thema's, told them they were "a's," told them they were bright, and at the end ofthis three-month period, they were performing at a-level.

and, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that theytook the "a students" and told them they were "d's." and that's what happened atthe end of that three-month period. those who were still around in school,besides the people who had dropped out. a crucial part of this case study wasthat the teachers were duped too. the teachers didn't know a switch had beenmade. they were simply told, "these are the 'a-students,' these are the'd-students.'" and that's how they went about teaching them and treatingthem.

so, i think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spiritthat's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer hasour natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. if instead,we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves andothers, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and newways of being.

i'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century persian poetnamed hafiz that my friend, jacques dembois told me about, and the poem iscalled "the god who only knows four words": "every child has known god, not thegod of names, not the god of don'ts, but the god who only knows four words andkeeps repeating them, saying, 'come dance with me. come, dance with me. come,dance with me.'"

thank you. (applause)

有关ted经典励志英文演讲稿简短二

when i was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we wereplaying on top of a bunk bed. i was two years older than my sister at the time-- i mean, i'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she hadto do everything that i wanted to do, and i wanted to play war. so we were up ontop of our bunk beds. and on one side of the bunk bed, i had put out all of myg.i. joe soldiers and weaponry. and on the other side were all my sister's mylittle ponies ready for a cavalry charge.

there are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, butsince my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story --(laughter) -- which is my sister's a little bit on the clumsy side. somehow,without any help or push from her older brother at all, suddenly amy disappearedoff of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. now inervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallensister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fourson the ground.

i was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that mysister and i played as safely and as quietly as possible. and seeing as how ihad accidentally broken amy's arm just one week before ... (laughter) ...heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet,(laughter) for which i have yet to be thanked, i was trying as hard as i could-- she didn't even see it coming -- i was trying as hard as i could to be on mybest behavior.

and i saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprisethreatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from thelong winter's nap for which they had settled. so i did the only thing my littlefrantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. and if youhave children, you've seen this hundreds of times before. i said, "amy, amy,wait. don't cry. don't cry. did you see how you landed? no human lands on allfours like that. amy, i think this means you're a unicorn."

(laughter)

now that was cheating, because there was nothing in the world my sisterwould want more than not to be amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but amythe special unicorn. of course, this was an option that was open to her brain atno point in the past. and you could see how my poor, manipulated sister facedconflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the painand suffering and surprise she just e_perienced, or contemplating her new-foundidentity as a unicorn. and the latter won out. instead of crying, instead ofceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negativeconsequences that would have ensued for me, instead a smile spread across herface and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of ababy unicorn ... (laughter) ... with one broken leg.

what we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we hadno idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of ascientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at thehuman brain. what we had stumbled across is something called positivepsychology, which is the reason that i'm here today and the reason that i wakeup every morning.

when i first started talking about this research outside of academia, outwith companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is tostart your talk with a graph. the very first thing i want to do is start my talkwith a graph. this graph looks boring, but this graph is the reason i gete_cited and wake up every morning. and this graph doesn't even mean anything;it's fake data. what we found is --

(laughter)

if i got this data back studying you here in the room, i would be thrilled,because there's very clearly a trend that's going on there, and that means thati can get published, which is all that really matters. the fact that there's oneweird red dot that's up above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- iknow who you are, i saw you earlier -- that's no problem. that's no problem, asmost of you know, because i can just delete that dot. i can delete that dotbecause that's clearly a measurement error. and we know that's a measurementerror because it's messing up my data.

so one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statisticsand business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do weeliminate the weirdos. how do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the lineof best fit? which is fantastic if i'm trying to find out how many advil theaverage person should be taking -- two. but if i'm interested in potential, ifi'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy orcreativity, what we're doing is we're creating the cult of the average withscience.

if i asked a question like, "how fast can a child learn how to read in aclassroom?" scientists change the answer to "how fast does the average childlearn how to read in that classroom?" and then we tailor the class right towardsthe average. now if you fall below the average on this curve, then psychologistsget thrilled, because that means you're either depressed or you have a disorder,or hopefully both. we're hoping for both because our business model is, if youcome into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leaveknowing you have 10, so you keep coming back over and over again. we'll go backinto your childhood if necessary, but eventually what we want to do is make younormal again. but normal is merely average.

and what i posit and what positive psychology posits is that if we studywhat is merely average, we will remain merely average. then instead of deletingthose positive outliers, what i intentionally do is come into a population likethis one and say, why? why is it that some of you are so high above the curve interms of your intellectual ability, athletic ability, musical ability,creativity, energy levels, your resiliency in the face of challenge, your senseof humor? whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what i want to do is studyyou. because maybe we can glean information -- not just how to move people up tothe average, but how we can move the entire average up in our companies andschools worldwide.

the reason this graph is important to me is, when i turn on the news, itseems like the majority of the information is not positive, in fact it'snegative. most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negativeto positive in the world. what that's doing is creating something called themedical school syndrome -- which, if you know people who've been to medicalschool, during the first year of medical training, as you read through a list ofall the symptoms and diseases that could happen, suddenly you realize you haveall of them.

i have a brother in-law named bobo -- which is a whole other story. bobomarried amy the unicorn. bobo called me on the phone from yale medical school,and bobo said, "shawn, i have leprosy." (laughter) which, even at yale, ise_traordinarily rare. but i had no idea how to console poor bobo because he hadjust gotten over an entire week of menopause.

(laughter)

see what we're finding is it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us,but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we canchange every single educational and business outcome at the same time.

when i applied to harvard, i applied on a dare. i didn't e_pect to get in,and my family had no money for college. when i got a military scholarship twoweeks later, they allowed me to go. suddenly, something that wasn't even apossibility became a reality. when i went there, i assumed everyone else wouldsee it as a privilege as well, that they'd be e_cited to be there. even ifyou're in a classroom full of people smarter than you, you'd be happy just to bein that classroom, which is what i felt. but what i found there is, while somepeople e_perience that, when i graduated after my four years and then spent thene_t eight years living in the dorms with the students -- harvard asked me to; iwasn't that guy. (laughter) i was an officer of harvard to counsel studentsthrough the difficult four years. and what i found in my research and myteaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with theiroriginal success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains werefocused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or theirphysics. their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles,the stresses, the complaints.

when i first went in there, i walked into the freshmen dining hall, whichis where my friends from waco, te_as, which is where i grew up -- i know some ofyou have heard of it. when they'd come to visit me, they'd look around, they'dsay, "this freshman dining hall looks like something out of hogwart's from themovie "harry potter," which it does. this is hogwart's from the movie "harrypotter" and that's harvard. and when they see this, they say, "shawn, why do youwaste your time studying happiness at harvard? seriously, what does a harvardstudent possibly have to be unhappy about?"

embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science ofhappiness. because what that question assumes is that our e_ternal world ispredictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if i know everything aboutyour e_ternal world, i can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness.90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the e_ternal world,but by the way your brain processes the world. and if we change it, if we changeour formula for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way that wecan then affect reality. what we found is that only 25 percent of job successesare predicted by i.q. 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimismlevels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challengeinstead of as a threat.

i talked to a boarding school up in new england, probably the mostprestigious boarding school, and they said, "we already know that. so everyyear, instead of just teaching our students, we also have a wellness week. andwe're so e_cited. monday night we have the world's leading e_pert coming in tospeak about adolescent depression. tuesday night it's school violence andbullying. wednesday night is eating disorders. thursday night is elicit druguse. and friday night we're trying to decide between risky se_ or happiness."(laughter) i said, "that's most people's friday nights." (laughter) (applause)which i'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. silence on thephone. and into the silence, i said, "i'd be happy to speak at your school, butjust so you know, that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. whatyou've done is you've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but nottalked about the positive."

the absence of disease is not health. here's how we get to health: we needto reverse the formula for happiness and success. in the last three years, i'vetraveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in themidst of an economic downturn. and what i found is that most companies andschools follow a formula for success, which is this: if i work harder, i'll bemore successful. and if i'm more successful, then i'll be happier. thatundergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that wemotivate our behavior.

and the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for tworeasons. first, every time your brain has a success, you just changed thegoalpost of what success looked like. you got good grades, now you have to getbetter grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a betterschool, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your salestarget, we're going to change your sales target. and if happiness is on theopposite side of success, your brain never gets there. what we've done is we'vepushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. and that's because wethink we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.

but the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. if you canraise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their braine_periences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain atpositive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral orstressed. your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levelsrise. in fact, what we've found is that every single business outcome brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain atnegative, neutral or stressed. you're 37 percent better at sales. doctors are 19percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis whenpositive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. which means we can reversethe formula. if we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then ourbrains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and moreintelligently.

what we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start tosee what our brains are actually capable of. because dopamine, which floods intoyour system when you're positive, has two functions. not only does it make youhappier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you toadapt to the world in a different way.

we've found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able tobecome more positive. in just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in arow, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually workmore optimistically and more successfully. we've done these things in researchnow in every single company that i've worked with, getting them to write downthree new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three newthings each day. and at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a patternof scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.

journaling about one positive e_perience you've had over the past 24 hoursallows your brain to relive it. e_ercise teaches your brain that your behaviormatters. we find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural adhdthat we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows ourbrains to focus on the task at hand. and finally, random acts of kindness areconscious acts of kindness. we get people, when they open up their inbo_, towrite one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social supportnetwork.

and by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we trainour bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness andsuccess, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create areal revolution.

thank you very much.

(applause)

有关ted经典励志英文演讲稿简短三

简介：残奥会短跑冠军aimeemullins天生没有腓骨，从小就要学习靠义肢走路和奔跑。如今，她不仅是短跑选手、演员、模特，还是一位稳健的演讲者。她不喜欢字典中“disabled”这个词，因为负面词汇足以毁掉一个人。但是，坦然面对不幸，你会发现等待你的是更多的机会。

i'd like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago whilewriting an article for italian wired. i always keep my thesaurus handy wheneveri'm writing anything, but i'd already finished editing the piece, and i realizedthat i had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what i'dfind.

let me read you the entry. "disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless,useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down,worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile,decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see alsohurt, useless and weak. antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." i was reading thislist out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, buti'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and i had to stop andcollect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from thesewords unleashed.

you know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so i'm thinking thismust be an ancient print date, right? but, in fact, the print date was the early1980s, when i would have been starting primary school and forming anunderstanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kidsand the world around me. and, needless to say, thank god i wasn't using athesaurus back then. i mean, from this entry, it would seem that i was born intoa world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever goingfor them, when in fact, today i'm celebrated for the opportunities andadventures my life has procured.

so, i immediately went to look up the __ online edition, e_pecting to finda revision worth noting. here's the updated version of this unately, it's not much better. i find the last two words under "nearantonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."

so, it's not just about the words. it's what we believe about people whenwe name them with these words. it's about the values behind the words, and howwe construct those values. our language affects our thinking and how we view theworld and how we view other people. in fact, many ancient societies, includingthe greeks and the romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was sopowerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into e_istence. so, whatreality do we want to call into e_istence: a person who is limited, or a personwho's empowered? by casually doing something as simple as naming a person, achild, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. wouldn't wewant to open doors for them instead?

one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the institute in wilmington, delaware. his name was dr. pizzutillo, anitalian american, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most americansto pronounce, so he went by dr. p. and dr. p always wore really colorful bowties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.

i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with thee_ception of my physical therapy sessions. i had to do what seemed likeinnumerable repetitions of e_ercises with these thick, elastic bands --different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and i hated thesebands more than anything -- i hated them, had names for them. i hated them. and,you know, i was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with dr. p to tryto get out of doing these e_ercises, unsuccessfully, of course. and, one day, hecame in to my session -- e_haustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and hesaid to me, "wow. aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, i thinkyou're going to break one of those bands. when you do break it, i'm going togive you a hundred bucks."

now, of course, this was a simple ploy on dr. p's part to get me to do thee_ercises i didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richestfive-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me wasreshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising e_perience for i have to wonder today to what e_tent his vision and his declaration of meas a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as aninherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.

this is an e_ample of how adults in positions of power can ignite the powerof a child. but, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, ourlanguage isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want,the possibility of an inpidual to see themselves as capable. our languagehasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have beenbrought about by technology. certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs,laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements foraging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities,and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mentionsocial networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their owndescriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their ownchoosing. so, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what hasalways been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer oursociety, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.

the human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people havecontinually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and i'm going tomake an admission: this phrase never sat right with me, and i always felt uneasytrying to answer people's questions about it, and i think i'm starting to figureout why. implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea thatsuccess, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenginge_perience unscathed or unmarked by the e_perience, as if my successes in lifehave come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumedpitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as mydisability. but, in fact, we are changed. we are marked, of course, by achallenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. and i'm going to suggestthat this is a good thing. adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to getaround in order to resume living our life. it's part of our life. and i tend tothink of it like my shadow. sometimes i see a lot of it, sometimes there's verylittle, but it's always with me. and, certainly, i'm not trying to diminish theimpact, the weight, of a person's struggle.

there is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real andrelative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you'regoing to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. so, our responsibilityis not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them tomeet it well. and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel thatthey're not equipped to adapt. there's an important difference and distinctionbetween the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjectivesocietal opinion of whether or not i'm disabled. and, truthfully, the only realand consistent disability i've had to confront is the world ever thinking that icould be described by those definitions.

in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hardtruth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the e_pectedquality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick ina wall that will actually disable someone. perhaps the e_isting model of onlylooking at what is broken in you and how do we fi_ it, serves to be moredisabling to the inpidual than the pathology itself.

by not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging theirpotency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle theymight have. we are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. so weneed to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. and,most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies andour greatest creative ability. so it's not about devaluing, or negating, thesemore trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, butinstead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. so maybe the ideai want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is openingourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term,maybe even dancing with it. and, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural,consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it.

this year we celebrate the 200th birthday of charles darwin, and it was 150years ago, when writing about evolution, that darwin illustrated, i think, atruth about the human character. to paraphrase: it's not the strongest of thespecies that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is theone that is most adaptable to change. conflict is the genesis of creation. fromdarwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability tosurvive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit throughconflict into transformation. so, again, transformation, adaptation, is ourgreatest human skill. and, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we'remade of. maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of ourown power. so, we can give ourselves a gift. we can re-imagine adversity assomething more than just tough times. maybe we can see it as change. adversityis just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet.

i think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is thisidea of normalcy. now, who's normal? there's no normal. there's common, there'stypical. there's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige personif they e_isted? (laughter) i don't think so. if we can change this paradigmfrom one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even alittle bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children,and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with thecommunity.

anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have alwaysrequired of our community members is to be of use, to be able to 's evidence that neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly andthose with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life e_perienceof survival of these people proved of value to the community. they didn't viewthese people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.

a few years ago, i was in a food market in the town where i grew up in thatred zone in northeastern pennsylvania, and i was standing over a bushel oftomatoes. it was summertime: i had shorts on. i hear this guy, his voice behindme say, "well, if it isn't aimee mullins." and i turn around, and it's thisolder man. i have no idea who he is.

and i said, "i'm sorry, sir, have we met? i don't remember meetingyou."

he said, "well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. i mean, when we met i wasdelivering you from your mother's womb." (laughter) oh, that guy. and, but ofcourse, actually, it did click.

this man was dr. kean, a man that i had only known about through mymother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, i arrivedlate for my birthday by two weeks. and so my mother's prenatal physician hadgone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to myparents. and, because i was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turnedin, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer-- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.

he said to me, "i had to give this prognosis to your parents that you wouldnever walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids haveor any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me eversince." (laughter) (applause)

the e_traordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippingsthroughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee,marching with the girl scouts, you know, the halloween parade, winning mycollege scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, andintegrating it into teaching resident students, med students from hahnemannmedical school and hershey medical school. and he called this part of the coursethe _ factor, the potential of the human will. no prognosis can account for howpowerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. anddr. kean went on to tell me, he said, "in my e_perience, unless repeatedly toldotherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices,a child will achieve."

see, dr. kean made that shift in thinking. he understood that there's adifference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. andthere's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at15 years old, if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, iwouldn't have hesitated for a second. i aspired to that kind of normalcy backthen. but if you ask me today, i'm not so sure. and it's because of thee_periences i've had with them, not in spite of the e_periences i've had withthem. and perhaps this shift in me has happened because i've been e_posed tomore people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and castshadows on me.

see, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your ownpower, and you're off. if you can hand somebody the key to their own power --the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door forsomeone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. you'reteaching them to open doors for themselves. in fact, the e_act meaning of theword "educate" comes from the root word "educe." it means "to bring forth whatis within, to bring out potential." so again, which potential do we want tobring out?

there was a case study done in 1960s britain, when they were moving fromgrammar schools to comprehensive schools. it's called the streaming trials. wecall it "tracking" here in the states. it's separating students from a, b, c, dand so on. and the "a students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers,etc. well, they took, over a three-month period, d-level students, gave thema's, told them they were "a's," told them they were bright, and at the end ofthis three-month period, they were performing at a-level.

and, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that theytook the "a students" and told them they were "d's." and that's what happened atthe end of that three-month period. those who were still around in school,besides the people who had dropped out. a crucial part of this case study wasthat the teachers were duped too. the teachers didn't know a switch had beenmade. they were simply told, "these are the 'a-students,' these are the'd-students.'" and that's how they went about teaching them and treatingthem.

so, i think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spiritthat's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer hasour natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. if instead,we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves andothers, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and newways of being.

i'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century persian poetnamed hafiz that my friend, jacques dembois told me about, and the poem iscalled "the god who only knows four words": "every child has known god, not thegod of names, not the god of don'ts, but the god who only knows four words andkeeps repeating them, saying, 'come dance with me. come, dance with me. come,dance with me.'"

thank you. (applause)