英语演讲稿范文
now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces? and why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? one answer lies deep in our cultural history. western societies, and in particular the u.s., have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and "man" of contemplation. but in america's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. and if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "character, the grandest thing in the world." and they featured role models like abraham lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. ralph waldo emerson called him "a man who does not offend by superiority."
but then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. what happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. and so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. and instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. so, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. and sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "how to win friends and influence people." and they feature as their role models really great salesmen. so that's the world we're living in today. that's our cultural inheritance.
now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and i'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. the same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. and the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. but i am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems.
so now i'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. guess what? books. i have a suitcase full of books. here's margaret atwood, "cat's eye." here's a novel by milan kundera. and here's "the guide for the perplexed" by maimonides. but these are not exactly my books. i brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors.
my grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when i was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. i mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.
but he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. he would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. and people would come from all over to hear him speak.
but here's the thing about my grandfather. underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. and even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. but when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. and so these days i try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way.
so i just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. and for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because i was reading, i was writing, i was thinking, i was researching. it was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. but now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. (laughter) and that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as i am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu.
so i prepared for moments like these as best i could. i spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance i could get. and i call this my "year of speaking dangerously." (laughter) and that actually helped a lot. but i'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. i mean, we are. and so i am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision.