Tag: ted talk

• Positivity in life (The happy secret to better work)

  https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

  Earlier this week I watched the above TED talk called, The happy secret to better work. It’s only 12 minutes long.

  In it, Shawn Achor argues that we’ve got it all wrong and backwards when it comes to our happiness. We constantly set (moving) goals and then tell ourselves that once we achieve those goals we’ll be happy.

  We tell ourselves that once we get that degree, buy that new home, or secure that new promotion, that we’ll be happier. And I’m definitely guilty of that sometimes. I think many goal oriented people are.

  But his argument is that if happiness sits outside of those moving targets, we’ll never be as happy as we could be. Happiness needs to sit within those goals. In other words, we need to focus on being happy today, not tomorrow.

  But the other powerful thing about this approach is that greater happiness has been shown to improve productivity. So if you simply flip this equation, you’ll probably be not only happier but more successful.

  At the end of last year, somebody told me that they were really enjoying my blog because of how positive I always seem to be about the future of cities and the world.

  And that was honestly one of the nicest things to hear from a reader, because I truly believe that optimism, not pessimism, is what moves the world forward.

  2015.01.10

• From bicycles to cars in Beijing

  

  Earlier this week, a friend of mine shared this TED talk on my Facebook wall talking about the state of climate change in the world. The talk is by Nicholas Stern. And at one point he talks about the incredible urban transformation that has taken place in Beijing over the last couple of decades; specifically, the shift from a bicycle oriented city to a now automobile oriented city.

  I knew that this was the case, but it got me thinking. Because alongside this mobility change, there’s also been – not surprisingly – pronounced changes to the urban fabric of the city. The most significant is perhaps the demolition of the city’s hutongs and siheyuan. Hutongs are basically narrow alleys (see above photo) and siheyuan are the traditional Chinese courtyard houses.

  For centuries, these alleyways and courtyard houses have defined Beijing. And while I realize that not all of them were as glamorous as Melbourne’s laneways, only about 1,000 of Beijing’s original 6,000 hutongs remain (according to Time). Which makes me wonder: Is China making the same mistakes that we made in the 20th century?

  Because as the developed world moves toward transit oriented development, bike lanes, heritage preservation, and compact urban living, China has seemingly gone and done the exact opposite. They got everyone off bicycles and into cars, and they went and erased a scale of urbanism that has been in place for centuries.

  This is not to say that China doesn’t deserve to have the same standard of living as the developed world. It absolutely does. It just seems a bit ironic to me that the things we’ve become sharply critical of, are exactly what China seems to want to recreate.

  Image: Flickr

  2014.09.25