You’ve sworn off sweets in 2015. But, man, do these doughnuts look good. Kelly McGonigal shares how to formulate New Year’s Resolutions that help you think beyond immediate gratification. Photo: iStockphoto

By the second week of January, that resolution that once seemed so reasonable — go to the gym every other day, read a book a week, only drink alcohol on weekends — is starting to seem very … hard. As you are teetering on the edge of abandoning it all together, Kelly McGonigal is here to help. This Stanford University psychologist — who shared last year how you can make stress your friend — wants you to know that you’re not having a hard time sticking to a resolution because you are a terrible person. Perhaps you’ve just formulated the wrong resolution.

McGonigal has, for years, taught a course called “The Science of Willpower” through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program and, in 2011, she spun it into a book, The Willpower Instinct. The TED Blog spoke to McGonigal this week about how willpower is often misunderstood, and what we each can do to improve it. (We also asked her about the talk Why dieting doesn’t usually work.) Below, an edited transcript of the conversation.

So, why is willpower such a struggle?

It’s a great question. I define willpower as the ability to do what matters most, even when it’s difficult or when some part of you doesn’t want to. That begins to capture why it’s so difficult — because everything we think of as requiring willpower is usually a competition between two conflicting selves. There’s a part of you who is looking to the long-term and thinking about certain goals, and then another part of you that has a completely different agenda and wants to maximize current pleasure and minimize current stress, pain and discomfort. The things that require willpower pit those competing selves against each other. Willpower is the ability to align yourself with the brain system that is thinking about long-term goals — that is thinking about big values rather than short-term needs or desires.

The reason that so many things can trigger that kind of conflict is because that’s the essence of human nature. Modern cognitive neuroscientists see this as the fundamental structure of the human brain — that there are competing systems that think about the world differently and that respond to challenges differently. I think of it as: the immediate self versus the future self. We need both systems for survival. But a lot of our modern challenges really tempt us to be in the mind-state of immediate gratification, or escaping immediate discomfort. It can be quite a challenge to access the part of you who is willing to take that big picture and tolerate temporary discomfort.

So, given this idea of two competing selves who want different things, how effective are New Year’s resolutions for tapping into the ability to think long-term?

I think it depends on how you go about making your New Year’s resolution. Typically, when people are making a New Year’s resolution, they don’t start with the right questions, so they end up making a resolution that is ineffective. Most people start with the question: “What should I do?” It may not even be a conscious, implicit kind of thing, but they start from: “What do I criticize about myself that it’s time to change?” Or “what is it that I don’t really want to do that I know I should do?” It’s kind of a typical self-improvement perspective. “I don’t really like exercise, I guess I should do it.” Or “my closet is a mess, it’s time to get organized.” “I’ve never had a clean desk in my life, but I think that good people have clean desks, so this is the year I’m going to have one.”

People come up with resolutions that don’t reflect what matters most to them, and that makes them almost guaranteed to fail. Even if that behavior could be very valuable and helpful — like exercise — if you start from the point of view of thinking about what it is you don’t really want to do, it’s very hard to tap into willpower. If there’s no really important “want” driving it, the brain system of self-control has nothing to hold on to.

The kind of New Year’s resolution that works is when you start really slowing down and asking yourself what you want for yourself and your life in the next year. What is it that you want to offer the world? Who do you want to be, what do you want more of in your life? And then asking: “How might I get there? What would create that as a consequence?” When you start from that point of view, then New Year’s resolutions can be incredibly effective. They begin to turn your attention to choice points in your everyday life where there really are opportunities to align your energy and attention in the direction that matters to you. I think most people start from the choice points, without wondering whether this is even the right thing to be choosing. People get to the behaviors too soon, in my opinion.

Any tips for how to find those big things and then narrow them down to specific resolutions?

A very practical way is to ask: At the end of 2014 — on January 1st, 2015, looking backwards — what are you seriously going to be grateful that you did? Is there a change you know that you’re going to be glad you made? What would that feel like? That can tap into something that feels really authentic.

I was just doing a radio interview at one of the NPR stations in New York, and I was chatting with the studio producer. I asked her if she had any New Year’s resolutions, and she’s like, “Oh yeah — to stay fit.” She sounded so not enthusiastic. Then after a few seconds of silence, she said, “I’m kind of thinking about finding a way to play the piano again.” She was lighting up a little more. “It used to be so important to me, and I really miss it. It’s like my soul wants to play the piano again, and it would be giving it back to my soul.” And I’m like, “That’s your resolution! What is this getting fit stuff?”

By the way, you can spend the first week [of the year] looking around. One year my resolution was to focus on being a better mentor, and to look for ways in every professional relationship to do that. You start looking around, and you see every conversation as an opportunity to choose that value and move toward that goal. Just spend a week saying, “If what matters is improving my health, if what matters is spending more time with my family, if what matters is reconnecting to creativity, what choices do I make every day that either could get me closer to that?”

So on those things you feel like you should be doing — the going to the gym or the quitting smoking — is there a way to build your willpower towards those things?

One of the things I always encourage people to do is to not try to do things alone, and to start outsourcing their willpower a little bit. If it’s exercising, you should be doing it with a family member, a friend, a co-worker. Or sign up for a series of classes after work. Because then, it’s like a bigger pool of possible willpower. If you’re exhausted after work, and you normally would say, “Screw it, I’m going home,” if there’s somebody who is going to meet you in your office, and say, “Hey, aren’t we going for a walk now?,” it doesn’t matter if you feel like it in that moment. There’s going to be a bigger pool of motivation that will support you through when you’re feeling most exhausted or least motivated.

Another thing I encourage people to do is — if there’s a behavior that they put off or don’t do because of anxiety or self-doubt or because it’s boring or uncomfortable — bribe yourself. If you hate exercise but truly, truly want the consequences of exercising, you should give yourself permission to do whatever you don’t want to let yourself do — like read trashy gossip magazines, or download a whole series of a TV show that you can plop on in front of you on the treadmill. As long as it doesn’t conflict with your goal, then you should go ahead and pair the thing you don’t want to do with a reward that you might otherwise not give yourself permission for. That can be very effective for beginning to prioritize and make time for things.

Also, give yourself permission to do small steps rather than think that there’s an ideal you need to meet. I wrote a review paper about two years ago showing that you can get pretty much the same health benefits from doing 5 to 15 minutes of exercise a day as from an hour. There are a lot of things like that, where we think, “I won’t get my novel done unless I can put aside a whole weekend to write.” Well, you could create a novel in a paragraph a day. So I encourage people to think: what’s the smallest step that they could take that is consistent with their goal? And not necessarily worry about whether they believe it’s sufficient.

That is actually very freeing.

New Year’s resolutions can be fun! If you think of them like a science experiment, you can always learn something from a resolution.  A lot of times, people aren’t willing to learn the lesson — and sometimes the lesson is that you think you want to change this, but you don’t really want to, and sometimes you don’t need to. That sometimes we look for the things we think we can control.

It’s funny how this happens sometimes even when we go after the things that really are core to our identity. I did this New Year’s resolution makeover once with this woman who had made the same resolution year after year to become a better cook, because she thought that’s what good moms and good wives did. She was a terrible cook, and she didn’t want to learn how to cook. That’s a mistake people make, is they think they’re just going to fundamentally change who they are with a resolution. “I’m going to become a morning person.” “I’m going to become a health nut.” “I’m going to become organized.” The best resolutions are ones that strengthen something you already are, but you may not have been fully investing in.

Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself I wanted to ask about the idea of working with other people and outsourcing willpower. Have you ever seen Derek Sivers’ talk on TED.com? It’s called Keep your goals to yourself and it suggests that people are more likely to achieve goals if they keep them private.

There is some data that suggests you might feel like you have accomplished your goal if you can create a public identity as somebody who is pursuing that goal. And I have overwhelming feedback from my students in my Science of Willpower class that, if they actually can truly create the identity — that they really sense that “I am someone that trained for a marathon,” or “I am somebody who is committed to this” — that it actually makes it easier to make choices.

People are really interested in creating habits, and there’s so much excitement now about habit design. Habits are really, really hard to create because they require complete automaticity. You need to basically be making choices in the absence of any motivation and it takes a long time to get that in place. But when you have a value or commitment, that’s something different. It can be a conscious choice that when you’re in a restaurant — if your identity is as somebody who takes good care of your health — then that becomes a default way to make a good choice in that moment. Anything that you do to create that identity can actually make it easier to make choices that don’t feel like deprivation.

That’s one side of that research. Then there’s the whole other side of how social support and pride can support having more strength to move towards your goals. If you know that other people are paying attention to you, and you know that you’re going to be able to celebrate your success — you’re going to be able to post on Facebook that you actually did run that marathon, or even that you just made it to spin class, or whatever your version of that is — that anticipating that social sharing is very motivating for people. It’s more motivating than even success in itself. The self-savoring is not as motivating as knowing you’re going to be able to savor a success with somebody else. Then when you hit the wall — when you experience setbacks — social support encouragement is also so important for getting back on track.

I think that from top to bottom, making your resolution social allows you to access different supports, both internal and external. One more reason to go public — being a role model for someone. People will do things when they know that they’re inspiring change in others. It’s a natural progression that you see in many areas — whether it’s people who are recovering from addiction, or someone embarking on a physical challenge. This is what people naturally do.

Sandra Aamodt: Why dieting doesn't usually work And did you see Sandra Aamodt’s talk, Why dieting doesn’t usually work?

Yes! My talk was right after hers at TEDGlobal 2013. I remember basically agreeing with everything she said.

Her idea is that the brain seeks to keep weight stable over the long-run, so dieting can backfire because it makes a person so focused on food. Does that fit with your research?

There are two things she said that really stood out to me, and that I agree with very seriously. One was that she talked about the importance of being kind to yourself. She made the point that self-compassion is much more motivating than self-criticism. That’s very important. When I first started teaching the Science of Willpower, it was the thing nobody believed — researchers and psychologists and writers have done a great job of getting this message out, because I don’t get near the resistance I used to get to the idea. And still, it’s so amazing how many people believe that they are more motivated by self-criticism and shame than anything else. They aren’t really paying attention to the effect on their behavior and choices when they are that hard on themselves.

The other thing I remember Sandra saying was about the futility of trying to lose weight. And that’s absolutely right. Whenever I’m in any situation where people are asking me to talk about losing weight, I always try to change the language to creating health because you cannot control weight. It’s exactly what Sandra said — the brain and the body, they will fight you. Losing weight is almost always a consequence of making good choices — but it’s not always a consequence. You can make good choices and not lose the weight. The most important thing in Sandra’s talk was the idea that making the healthy choices is going to give you the consequence of health, even if you don’t lose the weight.

She showed a really interesting graph of four health factors — eating fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation — and how, if people who are overweight do just one of those things, their risk of mortality lowers to the same level as a normal weight person.

I hope TED has more talks from obesity experts, because nobody knows this research about how weight doesn’t predict health. There’s so much important science out there that people are not paying attention to. That was my favorite part of her talk.

To bring it back to your TED Talk, How to make stress your friend, it sounds to me like what you’re saying about willpower is related — that it’s not so much whether you have willpower, but how you think about willpower.

I’ve been joking about that — that my work has always been to basically take an inner experience that people reject, force them to accept it and understand it, so that they can make peace with it. One of the reasons why I teach this Science of Willpower class and wrote the book is because I kept hearing from people that they felt like they had no willpower. They thought they were the only ones and that their willpower struggle was uniquely wrong with them — they were so lazy, they were so stupid, they were so hopeless. They didn’t understand the fact that we all experience willpower challenges. It’s part of what it means to be human.

It is similar to the way that I’m now trying to help people appreciate stress, and understand that this is human and that it can help us. It’s not always helpful, but there are aspects to it that, when we can make friends with it, we have a lot better chance of using it to good ends. I feel the same way about willpower. When you understand what a craving is and why it’s there, you can also appreciate the part of you who can make a different choice.

One of the big lessons from The Science of Willpower is if you really fight the inner experiences, it’s not going to end well. If you decide you’re going to fight cravings, fight thoughts, fight emotions, you put all your energy and attention into trying to change the inner experiences. People tend to get more stuck, and more overwhelmed. When you try to control the things that aren’t really under your control, you get to feeling more out of control. Whereas where you really have the freedom is in your choices.

That’s very similar to stress. If you think you can’t feel stress and that stress is always going to be toxic, you’re magnifying any of the toxic aspects of stress. By fighting stress, you’re making stress worse.

So, make friends with the fact that you can move towards goals that are really important to you?

Yes. Willpower is about being able to hold opposites. So I can feel the emotion, I can feel the craving, and at the very same time, I just make my awareness big enough to hold my commitment to make a different choice. Your ability to hold those opposites is what gives people willpower over time.

1. Watch: “Want to be happy? Be thankful.” This TED Talk from David Steindl-Rast is the perfect Thanksgiving appetizer. In it, the Benedictine monk and interfaith scholar talks about what, exactly, it means to be grateful and offers a simple process for living gratefully: stop, look and go. Instead of rushing through life, he asks us to see the opportunities that are available and open ourselves up to them. This isn’t an idle or even simply personal concern: gratefulness has broad social implications. “If you’re grateful, you’re not fearful, and if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity and are willing to share,” Steindl-Rast says. 
   .
2. Read: “A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day.” This 2011 article in The New York Times shares that gratitude “has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners.” From there, writer John Tierney consults psychologists whose work falls in the area of gratitude for tips on how to feel more of it during the hectic Thanksgiving season. It’s a very cool survey of the research going on in this area.
   .
3. Watch: Jimmy Fallon’s Thank You Notes. In this long-standing segment on Friday night episodes of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the star of the show picks up a pen and writes thank you notes as piano music swells in the background. In recent episodes, Fallon has given sarcasm-tinged thank yous to peer pressure and the nub at the bottom of a banana. In fact, this segment is so popular that it even became a book. As the Amazon page reads, “Jimmy Fallon is very thankful. And in this first book to come from his TV show, he expresses his gratitude for everything from the light bulb he’s too lazy to replace to the F12 button on his computer’s keyboard.” Yes, there is a volume 2.
   .
4. Read: “Are You Thankful or Are You Grateful?” And in an essay commissioned for Thanksgiving 13 years ago, David Steindl-Rast describes the difference between thankfulness and gratefulness. “In a moment of gratefulness, you do not discriminate. You fully accept the whole of this given universe, as you are fully one with the whole,” he writes. “In the very next moment, when the fullness of gratitude overflows into thanksgiving, the oneness you were experiencing is breaking up. Now you are beginning to think in terms of giver, gift and receiver. Gratefulness turns into thankfulness. This is a different fullness. A moment ago you were fully aware; now you are thoughtful. Gratefulness is full awareness; thankfulness is thoughtfulness.”
   .
5. Watch: “7 TED Talks to help you give thanks.” From Louie Schwartzberg’s incredible time-lapse photography that inspires deeper reflection on the wonder of nature, to Tania Luna’s inspiring reflection on how a childhood of scarcity allowed her to fully appreciate life as an adult—this playlist of talks is sure to leave you in the right spirit for gratitude.
   .
6. Read: Zen Habits. In 2005, Leo Babauta — a father of six kids then living in Guam (he’s now in San Francisco) — radically changed his life. He began focusing on spirituality by honoring his emotions, his physical well-being, and the current moment. Soon after, he began this blog, in which he shares his experiences and offers tools for becoming more mindful. Like this: “Put the word ‘Breathe’ as a screensaver or desktop pic, or put it up as a note on your wall or fridge or on your desk. Then do it every time you see the word.”
   .
7. Listen to: Tara Brach’s podcast. After college, Tara Brach spent 10 years in an ashram, then attended a Buddhist Insight Meditation retreat. “I knew that this was a path of true freedom,” she says on her website. Now armed with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and a five-year Buddhist teacher training program, Brach works as a psychotherapist and meditation teacher and runs the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC. She offers free recordings of her beautiful talks and meditations. They are also available on iTunes.
   .
8. Read: thxthxthx: Thank Goodness for Everything. Leah Dietrich is brilliant — and hilarious — at being thankful for the mundane. On what look like oversized Post-It notes, she scrawls hand-written thank you notes that raise a chuckle. This effort started as a blog, then became a book and a Twitter feed. A classic, to give you a taste: “Dear Words, Thank you for letting me make art with you. I can’t really draw well, so you’re a big help. See you soon. Love, Leah.”
   .
9. Watch: Brené Brown on how increasing vulnerability leads to gratitude. Social scientist Brené Brown became a TED superstar for sharing her observations on vulnerability, gleaned from thousands of interviews. Something she didn’t expect to find during the course of her research: “I did not interview in all that time a person who would describe themselves as joyful or their lives as joyous who did not actively practice gratitude. For me, it was very counterintuitive.” Watch her TED Talk, and then hear her explanation of the relationship between joy and gratitude in this short video. 
   .
10. Watch: Room to Breathe. The 2012 documentary Room to Breathe follows a class of San Francisco middle school students as they undergo training by a therapist from Mindful Schools. This Oakland-based nonprofit helps make mindfulness a part of education, defining it as “a particular way of paying attention. It is the mental faculty of purposefully bringing awareness to one’s experience.”
    .
11. Read: It’s Easier Than You Think. In this book, Sylvia Boorstein, a Jewish-Buddhist meditation teacher and psychotherapist, demystifies spirituality and mindfulness. “Being a meditator and developing equanimity do not mean becoming weird,” she writes at the outset. The idea: spirituality and mindfulness can coexist with drinking coffee or being a passionate football fan. It isn’t about the tools you use or what you do, it’s how you do it.
    .
12. Study: A step-by-step guide to gratefulness. David Steindl-Rast and his colleagues run Gratefulness.org, a website that is full of wisdom on the art of thankfulness. One of the most interesting things on the site: this collection of articles, which is designed as a journey of personal reflection or as a guide for group study.

This piece was originally posted in November of 2013. It was updated for Thanksgiving 2014.

Bad days are the worst. But these TED Talks are very likely to cheer you up. Enjoy.

Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude. Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude What better to do on a meh day than to stop and smell the flowers? Photographer Louie Schwartzberg’s talk lets you do that very quickly, as he gives them to you in timelapse form. This talk meditates on the beautiful dance of nature, with words from Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, soothing flute music and the insights of an adorable kid.

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong Perhaps it’s maybe, kind of, sort of possible that something you did contributed to your bad day. Kathryn Shulz’s talk will make you feel very comfortable with the idea of being wrong, because fallibility is just part of being human. Bonus: the opening anecdote will make you laugh.

Improv Everywhere: A TED speaker's worst nightmare Improv Everywhere: A TED speaker’s worst nightmare At the beginning of this talk, a speaker gets hung up on a technical malfunction with his slide deck. And then … things get really interesting as the Mac “spinning beachball” turns into an incredible dance.

Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating Maybe it’s that slippery thing called “love” that’s got you down. If that’s the case, this talk from Amy Webb is the answer. After a string of disastrous dating incidents, she decided to write her own algorithm for love and reverse-engineer online dating. The result: well, it’s really good. And her conclusion: the problem wasn’t that she was being too picky, it was that she wasn’t being picky enough.

Candy Chang: Before I die I want to ... Candy Chang: Before I die I want to… This talk will get you motivated to do that thing you really want to do. Candy Chang has asked people around the world to (anonymously) finish the sentence: “Before I die, I want to _________.” Their answers are revealing, inspiring and often very amusing.

Andrew Bird: A one-man orchestra of the imagination Andrew Bird: A one-man orchestra of the imagination What, people, is more uplifting than a glockenspiel? Here, musician Andrew loops that wonderful instrument with his signature whistles and violin work, to a beautiful end.

Phil Hansen: Embrace the shake Phil Hansen: Embrace the shake When artist Phil Hansen developed a debilitating hand tremor, he thought his career was done. And then a doctor suggested: “Embrace the shake.” In this talk, he shares how a physical limitation drove him on to incredible creativity. Think: portraits in matches, painting with karate chops and tattooed bananas.

E.O. Wilson: Advice to a young scientist E.O. Wilson: Advice to young scientists “The world needs you: badly.” That’s what legendary biologist and TED Prize winner E.O. Wilson has to say to young scientists in this talk. Here, he reminds us that wonder and creativity are at the center of science — and, well, life — and that every mind involved helps contribute to what we know.

John Legend: “True Colors” Here, the piano man gives a heart-melting rendition of the Cyndi Lauper classic. Seriously, it’s the next most touching thing to those athlete documentaries that air during the Olympics.

Ed Gavagan: A story about knots and surgeons Ed Gavagan: A story about knots and surgeons This talk is about taking a moment to be thankful for something we rarely think about — the incredible skill of surgeons. In a very moving story, Ed Gavagan shares how this skill helped him recover after being stabbed — and how it gives him a continued appreciation for life.

Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion Work can be draining, yes. But this talk from Rita Pierson will have you up on your feet and ready to take on any challenge. A long time educator working in some of the most challenging classrooms in the country, Pierson has found a foolproof way to get through to any student: by actually taking the time to form a relationship with them.

Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness Psychologist Dan Gilbert has spent decades studying what makes us happy — and it isn’t what we think. This talk gives insight into why lottery winners and paraplegics report themselves as being equally happy a year after the moment that changed their life. Because of our incredible “psychological immune system,” which helps us synthesize happiness when things go wrong. It’s certainly something to tap into on a bad day.

Sleepy Man Banjo Boys: Bluegrass virtuosity from ... New Jersey? Sleepy Man Banjo Boys: Bluegrass virtuosity from … New Jersey? And your final cheer-up talk: Kids! Playing bluegrass! Really well!

Now get back out there, tiger …

BLACK works a yo-yo at TED2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Yo-yo champion BLACK does, in fact, wear a special costume — all black, with a red sash. But he has not always been a superhero. In his very sweet talk from TED2013, BLACK: My journey to yo-yo mastery BLACK reveals that as a young teenager he struggled with feelings of worthlessness — and that it was dedicating himself to the yo-yo that pulled him through it. Again as an adult, he gave up his yo-yo dreams, thinking he needed a more conventional job.

Today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post brings a variety of reactions to this unique talk, in which yo-yos twirl with the grace, speed and power of flipping gymnasts. Essentially, it asks: What does it take to unlock an inner hero?

Black: From zero to yo-yo hero

When I was a boy, I was at the bottom of the school hierarchy. I was a bullied child.

I loved TV programs like Power Rangers. In that kind of program, the hero rescues someone in distress. But in the real society around me, there was no organization of evil. In my school, boys who were good at sports were treated like the heroes. But I was not good at any sports. I hated all sports. I couldn’t become a hero.

One day, I bought a yo-yo.

When I first tried, I wasn’t too dexterous — the simplest yo-yo trick was impossible. But after one week of practicing, my throws became a bit better. Read the essay »

Candace Walsh: The 99-cent gift that saved my life

My father brought home treasures left behind on the Long Island Rail Road: a folded, read New York Post, umbrellas, even a pair of binoculars unclaimed at the lost and found. He brought home the smells of mingled passengers and their commute: cologne, cigarettes, the fug of hot underground tunnel exhaust, hot dogs with mustard and onions, hot coffee trucks.

But what he pulled out of his pocket one night in autumn 1981 was new in its packaging. A two-tone, bee-yellow and candy-pink butterfly-emblazoned yo-yo. Its weight in my palm was surprising; its presence was as well. My father was not one for non-holiday season gifts. Read the essay »

Dr. Gail Gross: Only the outcast can lead

Watching BLACK’s TED Talk, one clearly sees not only a young man who is talented, but a man who has undeniably discovered his authentic self. Psychologist Carl Jung described this as individuation, the process by which the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness to reveal one’s whole personality. In short: it is the process of finding your true self.

BLACK’s journey is one of inspiration and motivation to those who may not yet be living their most authentic life. BLACK himself admits he was unhappy until he discovered a passion for yo-yoing at the tender age of 14. Yet even after winning his first World Championship at age 18 in 2001, he succumbed to societal pressures and set his passion aside to go into engineering, which was a more “normal,” revered, and universally understood upstanding profession in the eyes of the outside world compared to professional yo-yo artist. Read the essay »

By Susan Zimmerman

David Steindl-Rast has the honor of closing this year’s TEDGlobal. Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude. The Benedictine monk, whose words made an appearance in Louie Schwartzberg’s classic talk “Nature. Beauty. Gratitude,” is known for bridging Catholicism and Buddhism. In the book The Ground We Share, he reveals that the key to both faiths, when you boil it down, is gratefulness.

We sat down with Steindl-Rast before his talk to ask him a few questions.

What is your definition of gratefulness?

Two things have to come together for someone to be grateful: First, we have to experience something we really like, and the second is that it has to be a gift. In other words, it must be a free gift — we haven’t bought it, we haven’t traded it in, we haven’t earned it. It is really a gift to us. When these two things come together — something that we really like is given to us — then spontaneously, in every human being, that joy rises up. It is something that happens once in a while – that gratefulness triggers joy. But we can live in such a way where we are constantly triggering joy. That is, if we realize that every moment is a given moment. Every moment is a gift. We have not bought it, we have not earned it. It is simply given to us. And with this moment is given to us opportunity. That is the key word. Every moment gives us another opportunity. And to respond to that opportunity, moment by moment by moment as a free gift, releases that joy that we are really looking forward to as human beings.

In your work you say that faith is deep trust, and that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.  With many areas of the world in conflict, how do we as individuals and society keep the faith?

This is really our basic choice: to trust in life or not to trust in life. And it is a choice — we can simply refuse to trust in life. We can try it out. If somebody isn’t sure, if somebody doesn’t do that spontaneously, they can try it out and see that by doing so, one lives against the grain and everything goes wrong. If one trusts in life, life will not disappoint us. It may seem at the moment disappointing, but we all know, looking back through the rearview mirror of our lives, that something happened in the past, to practically every one of us, that at the time we thought was absolute disaster and turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us. And since we know it in our past, we can trust as we go forward that it will also happen to us in the future.  But it is made very difficult for some people to trust in life. One has to have profound compassion for them, because they may have been so often disappointed. If people are injured and have scar tissue with regard to trust in life, then it is mine and your responsibility to be particularly trustworthy towards them — and particularly loving and kind — so that they regain their trust in life.

For almost five decades, you have been one of the leaders of the Christian-Buddhist dialogue as both a Benedictine Monk and a Zen Buddhist practitioner. How do we encourage a more positive inter-religious dialogue?

For most people this inter-religious dialogue will be something that they only read about, because they have no opportunity to engage in it. But openness towards life through gratefulness is one way in which one is at least prepared when the opportunity comes to engage in it. If you are interested in promoting the inter-religious dialogue — which I think we should be interested in the world today because it’s a very important thing — then we should expose ourselves. Exposure is the key word.  All the people who have been exposed to other traditions — really exposed and not just told about them and not just made fearful about them — meet somebody who is from a different religion. So make a special effort to meet other people from other religions.

Charles Duhigg talks about the incredible staying power of habits at TED@250 “A Better You.” Photo: Ryan Lash

Last night in the TED office, we held a salon all about spring cleaning — for your life. Themed “A Better You,” the event featured four speakers with ideas on how to make a better, happier, more productive self.

First to speak was The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his series The iEconomy. Duhigg began his talk describing a habit he just couldn’t kick: Every day at around 3 pm, he would leave his desk and go to the cafeteria for a chocolate chip cookie. As a result he gained 8 pounds, and his wife was starting to make pointed comments. As he looked more closely at this habit, he realized why it was so hard to break — because habits become part of tightly wound behavior loops. Habits are extremely powerful: Bad ones can be harmful, he said, while good ones can improve all aspects of your life. He capped his talk with an unexpected example — Starbucks, which endows its employees with good conflict resolution habits in order to provide the customer service they are known for.

Tech writer Jill Duffy shares tips for taming one’s email inbox. Photo: Ryan Lash

Tech reporter Jill Duffy spoke next, giving nine useful tips on how to conquer email before it conquers you. Among them: Keep your unread emails to about a page, save canned responses or email templates so you don’t always end up typing the same thing, and don’t be afraid to delete emails — and let go of the obligations that they represent.

Jay Silver shows how a cat can take photos of itself — using a bowl of water and the Photo Booth program on a computer. Photo: Ryan Lash

You see a banana for eating; Jay Silver sees a yellow edible space bar for his keyboard. Silver, an MIT Media Lab Maker, brought in a bag of tricks to demonstrate how to hack everyday objects. He connected his laptop to two slices of pizza to use as a clicker to advance his slides, and painted a streak of ketchup — then played it like a piano. See more uses from his invention kit, MaKey MaKey »

Amy Webb concluded the program, giving a hilarious and heartbreaking talk about how she gamed the online dating system. Photo: Ryan Lash

Finally, author Amy Webb closed the night with a lesson in love, explaining how she reverse engineered online dating sites to find her perfect mate. Webb drew from her new book, Data: A Love Story, to explain what she did when she found herself frustrated with her online dating prospects. Since she’s a digital strategist, she naturally turned to data analysis. She devised a point system by which to rate all her prospects, only to realize that she had left out one important element from the equation: the competition. In this incredibly honest talk, she explained why she created 10 fake male accounts to scrape data about successful female candidates and how they presented information about themselves. (Note: optimistic language and photos with just enough skin.) Webb’s story has a happy ending. She is now married to Brian Woolf, who she met as a result of her data gathering. Sitting next to me in the audience, last night was the first time he heard her tell the story.

“A Better You” was part of TED@250, a new series of salons held at our New York headquarters at 250 Hudson Street. Since our main conferences are only twice a year, TED@250 is an opportunity for talks that rethink headlines and respond to conversation happening in real time. It’s also a place for speakers with the kind of personal stories that simply work better on the small scale. Stay tuned. Some of these talks may be coming to TED.com.

Kylie Dunn embarked on a mission to change her life by emulating TED Talks. Here, illustrations of her “30 days of drive” and “30 days of fashion” activities. Illustrations: Matthew Dunn

By Kylie Dunn

What do you get when you cross a 39-year-old perfectionist with 54 TED Talks and far more honesty than any person probably needs to experience? You get my Year of TED.

I’ve been inspired by TED Talks for years, and felt the urge to do something noteworthy and challenging to ring in my fortieth year on the planet. Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days Inspiration struck when I watched Matt Cutts’ talk, “Try something new for 30 days.” Something in this talk reminded me of A.J. Jacobs’ “My Year of Living Biblically” — and the seed was sown. I decided to develop a list of new-to-me activities based on TED Talks, and to try each one of them in my life for 30 days.

How did it work? On the 1st of the month, I’d start one new activity, and then roll out another on the 15th — so at any given time I was doing two activities that were new to me.  Some activities were practical (30 days with less meat), others more philosophical (30 days of vulnerability). To plan out a year’s slate of 23 activities, I listened (or re-listened) to around 200 TED Talks. The whole list took a couple of months to plan out, and I left a few gaps in case there were any new talks during the year I really wanted to include. I pledged to blog the full experience, being completely vulnerable as I wrote.

I also decided to contact each of the speakers whose talks inspired my activities, to let them know just how much their talk resonated with me. Many of them wrote back — I cannot tell you how it feels to open your inbox and find emails from Seth Godin, Alain de Botton, Barry Schwartz, JD Schramm, Susan Cain, Derek Sivers and Richard St. John. Their words were powerful, and many were generous with support and encouragement, too. Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new Carl Honoré and Sheena Iyengar tweeted about the project, which gave the blog a massive boost; David Logan had a lengthy email chat with me about leadership.

On November 1, 2011, I started the year-long challenge. My first activity was 30 days of fashion, inspired by Jessi Arrington’s talk “Wear Nothing New.” I thought this would be a fun, easy way to start the project — to break free from my standard black, white and gray wardrobe and do some strategic shopping at secondhand clothing stores to make my appearance more colorful. But by the end of day two, I was feeling incredibly exposed to the world. When it comes to clothing, my subconscious mantra had always been  “just don’t stand out.” Not caring whether people thought I was a little odd for dressing a certain way? Graham Hill: Why I'm a weekday vegetarian It felt like a big change.

I realised that this entire project would be harder than I ever imagined.

By Activity 4, in mid-December, I had a pretty good routine down: think through the activity, then set up practical steps to put it into action. And by Activity 9, I was pleasantly surprised to find that 30 days of less meat was an easy challenge. For the month of February, I became a weekday vegetarian, as suggested in Graham Hill’s talk. Not only was this activity inspiring, but I liked the change in my diet … and in my weekly grocery bill. I’ve kept it up ever since.

“30 days of choice” and “30 days of compassion.” Illustrations: Matthew Dunn

As I got into the second half of the year, my Year of TED became a struggle. The last six activities were all so introspective that I’m surprised I made it to the end of October. Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice 30 days of choice was based on three talks — Barry Schwartz’s “The paradox of choice,” Sheena Iyengar’s “The art of choosing” and Alain de Botton’s “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.” This activity involved putting a magnifying glass on my choices — being aware of what was driving my choices, setting boundaries to limit my choices when I could, and recognizing that there is no such thing as a perfect choice. I also took time to think about what success means to me — writing this out helped me understand myself better and gave me vital information to help inform future choices. That said, who enjoys looking at themselves on paper in the third person? I wasn’t always proud of how I dealt with past choices.

Speaking of being unprepared, the 30 days of time activity brought a revelation that helped me understand some of my not-so-good perceptions of myself. Based on the talk “The psychology of time” by Philip Zimbardo, I took a careful inventory of how I think about the past, present and future. Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of time I found that what Zimbardo calls “past negative” weighs heavily on my mind. I thought hard about what I needed to do to shift my focus.

My complete list of activities, in order: fashion; thanks, praise and mindfulness; better listening; living the 3 A’s; an Asian diet; drive; slowing down; simplicity; less meat; more happiness; preconceptions; letters; starting a movement; choice; being wrong; vulnerability; time; compassion; and balance.

By the end of October 2012, I had completed 21 activities and one project — the development of the Do-Pad, a notepad for people who like to doodle, based on Sunni Brown’s “Doodlers, unite!” I learned so much about my strengths, my weaknesses, my hopes and, most of all, what I really want in this world. I am extremely proud that I finished the full year.

These activities were emotional, particularly since they coincided with the stresses and demands of day-to-day life. At times, they helped me get through hard times — I’m so glad that I was working on “more happiness” when we visited my father-in-law for the last time. At other times, these challenges made my life so much more difficult. I spent way too much time on “choice” and “being wrong” when I was far too busy with work.

Overall, here are the main lessons that I’ve taken away from this project:

• You never really know what you are capable of until you try. I’m stronger than I thought I was — certainly more so than I ever thought I could be.
• Being open about imperfections is important. It has deepened my connections with so many others.
• There is a power in simply doing something. Really, don’t underestimate it.
• Sometimes you can be too introspective, to the point that it is not good for your mental health.
•  If you are going to try something like this, you need to build in time to be kind to yourself.

In the end, I’ve developed a new appreciation for my capacity to be courageous. I’ve always known that I am a survivor, and that I usually come out the other side of life challenges as a better person – if not a little more scarred and cynical. I always thought of strength and courage as things I wanted in my life, but wasn’t quite sure how to harness them. Now I see that this is already inside of me. It’s just one of the realisations this project allowed me to discover, and which I’m still trying to process.

I’d like to thank TED for providing me with such a fantastic source of inspiration. And I’d love to thank the speakers who inspired me to take action and think differently. Most important, though, I couldn’t have done this without the love and support of my partner, my family (particularly my wonderful brother for his artwork, featured above) and my close friends. Hopefully it wasn’t too onerous.

Read Kylie Dunn’s Year of TED Blog »

See nore artwork from Matthew Dunn »