英语课堂三分钟的小演讲（精选3篇）
good morning, ladies and gentlemen. today i want to tell you a story about one of my friends, a lovely and smart girl who is always ready to help others. being our grade leader, she is good at both work and study. in many people's opinion, she is excellent and perfect. but one day she told me she was gloomy and insecure. people around her considered her outstanding and flawless, thinking she could handle everything. but the more she thought about herself, the more disappointed she became. she found that she was far from perfection. last week, she didn't do well in her french quiz, and the day before yesterday, she was late for a conference. she felt depressed and frustrated, because she failed to be a perfect girl without any mistakes.
i was surprised to hear that for i thought she had every reason to be confident. however, the expectation of perfection has become a burden to her. i told her no one could be perfect and i suggested she find her own position.
now of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point, is steve wozniak famously coming together with steve jobs to start apple computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. and in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. it's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. if you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- moses, jesus, buddha, muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. so no wilderness, no revelations.
this is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. it turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing.
and groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- i mean zero. so ... (laughter) you might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. and do you really want to leave it up to chance? much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.
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.“
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.