Dr. Mark Holder: Three Words That Will Change Your Life at TEDxKelowna (Full Transcript)

Dr Mark Holder at TEDxKelowna

Full transcript of Dr. Mark Holder’s TEDx Talk: Three Words That Will Change Your Life at TEDxKelowna Conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Three words that will change your life by Dr. Mark Holder at TEDxKelowna

Dr. Mark Holder – Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about something I’m really passionate about: happiness.

I lead a research team at the University of British Columbia that studies the science of happiness. Lead a research team? How arrogant is that? What? Let me tell you what I really do.

What I really do is I work with really bright undergraduate, graduate students and professors who do just terrific work that I shamelessly take credit for. And that’s what I’m going to do now, just another example of it. And I’ve been doing this for the last 10 years.

In the last 10 years I’ve identified three words. Three words that will change your life: by increasing your happiness. But like a timeshare talk, you’ve got to wait till the very end before you get the reward, which is the three wards.

So when I found out the theme of this talk was: What I want to be when I grow up, I thought it was a perfect fit. It’s a lovely fit, because for most of us near the top of the list, at the top of the list, we want to be happy. And it reminded me of a story — a story by John Lennon, former member of the Beatles. John Lennon said that when he was a young boy, growing up, his mum said to him, ‘John, the most important thing in life. The most important thing is to be happy’.