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Home » Happiness Matters: Tshering Tobgay at TEDxThimphu (Transcript)

Happiness Matters: Tshering Tobgay at TEDxThimphu (Transcript)

Tshering Tobgay

Tshering Tobgay – TRANSCRIPT

TED is about ideas. It’s about smart ideas. TED is about smart people sharing smart ideas with other smart people.

I have a smart idea. It’s happiness. But I’ve stolen that smart idea, so, in a way, it makes me smart.

That idea is also very common. How common? I did a search online, and not on Google. I did a specific search on ted.com, and a lot of talks came up on “happiness.”

Here is a sampling; this is just a sampling. Dan Gilbert. He asks, “Why are we happy?” And then he goes on to say that we human beings can “synthesize” happiness; we can “manufacture” happiness. If we don’t get what we want, we can convince ourselves that that is actually good for us.

Nancy Etcoff. She tells us about the science of happiness. Who you see there is our friend Sigmund Freud, who said that happiness is not in our fate, that the pursuit of happiness is doomed. Look at him!

This is the real Nancy Etcoff. She really believes that we can train ourselves to be happy, and she really looks happy, indeed.

Now, my search for happiness on ted.com ultimately took me to spirituality and to Buddhism. Matthieu Ricard is somebody who comes to Bhutan quite often, and he says we can train our minds to develop good habits, habits that lead us to happiness.

Chip Conley talks of measuring happiness and measuring what really counts in life. And what he talks about is what he learned about measuring what really counts in life, from two people.

One is a Vietnamese refugee who took on an American name called Vivian, and Vivian worked as a housekeeper for one of his old hotels that he owned.

And the other person he learned from is His Majesty, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan.