TED演讲｜哈佛教授谈人生：坦然接受「差一点的成功」

Embrace the near win

在馆长罗伯特·斯托从她一生的作品中选取了画作之后，我爱上了欣赏这些20世纪70年代的画作。

There were some motifs and elements that would come up again later in her life. I remember asking her what she thought of those early works. If you didn't know they were hers, you might not have been able to guess. 

在她生命的后期，一些主题和元素得到重现。我记得自己问她，她对那些早期作品的想法是什么。如果人们起先不知道，也许就猜不到这些是她的作品了。

She told me that a few didn't quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be. One of the works, in fact, so didn't meet her mark, she had set it out in the trash in her studio, and her neighbor had taken it because she saw its value.

她告诉我，一些作品并没有达到她所希望的水准。其中一幅，事实上，远没有满足她的要求，她把它扔进了公寓的垃圾箱里，之后被她的邻居拿走了，因为她看到了其中的价值。

In that moment, my view of success and creativity changed. I realized that success is a moment, but what we're always celebrating is creativity and mastery. But this is the thing: What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I've long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win.

在那一刻，我对成功和创新的想法改变了。我意识到成功是一个瞬间，然而我们总是在庆祝创新和卓越。问题来了：我们如何将一次成功转化为卓越的成就呢？这个问题我已经问了自己很久。我想这个转换在于我们开始重视每一次“差一点的成功”。

I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers, all women as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia's Baker Athletics Complex. I wanted to see what's called archer's paradox, the idea that in order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skew from it.

我是这样开始理解这一点的：那是一个寒冷的五月天，我在曼哈顿的北角，哥伦比亚大学的贝克田径综合楼里，观看校队弓箭手比赛，碰巧的是选手全是女性。我很想看看所谓的“弓箭手悖论”，就是说，为了击中目标，你必须在瞄准时稍微偏离目标。

I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus. One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one hand and arrows in the left with yellow fletching. 

我站在那里，看到教练把那些女生用灰色的卡车送过去，然后她们离开，神情自若，有个人的右手还拿着一个吃了一半的甜筒冰淇淋，左手拿着黄色箭羽的箭。

And they passed me and smiled, but they sized me up as they made their way to the turf, and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers, degrees, I thought, positions for how they might plan to hit their target.

她们笑着从我身边走过，不过她们走向场地的时候打量了我一下，她们不出声地彼此交流，我猜是用数字、角度之类来谈论她们可能计划好的射击位置。

 I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support, and watched her, and I didn't understand how even one was going to hit the ten ring. The ten ring from the standard 75-yard distance, it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm's length. And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot. She first hit a seven, I remember, and then a nine, and then two tens, and then the next arrow didn't even hit the target. 

我当时站在一个弓箭手后面，她的教练站在我们中间，可能是看看谁需要支撑，还有照看她，我甚至不知道怎么样才能击中十环。十环在75码之外，看上去和一臂以外的火柴头一般大小，而且每次发射都要发力50磅。而且每次发射都要发力50磅。那个弓箭手第一次射中了7环，我记得接下来是个9环，然后是2个十环，接下来的那支箭甚至没有射到靶上。

And I saw that gave her more tenacity, and she went after it again and again. For three hours this went on. At the end of the practice, one of the archers was so taxed that she lied out on the ground just star-fished, her head looking up at the sky, trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call that still point of the turning world.

我看出这些使她更有韧性了，她一次又一次地射箭。三小时就这样过去了。在练习的最后，其中一个弓箭手精疲力竭地躺在地上，像只海星，她仰头望天，试图寻找艾略特所说的（T.S.Eliot：诗人，1948年诺贝尔文学奖得主）转动不息的世界里的静止点。

It's so rare in American culture, there's so little that's vocational about it anymore, to look at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude, what it means to align your body posture for three hours in order to hit a target, pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity. But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing what's so rare to glimpse, that difference between success and mastery.

在美国文化里，这种现象很少见。已经很少有如此专业的事情，看上去这么傻，还要如此精确。这意味着你要摆好姿势，坚持3个小时去射击一个目标，在一片模糊中追寻卓越。我留下来，是因为自己亲眼目睹了这难得的瞬间：成功和卓越的区别。

So success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can't do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It's not the same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do this, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win. 

所以说，成功是打中十环，然而卓越是你懂得：如果不去一次次地尝试，就会一无所得。但是，卓越和优异不尽相同，也和成功不一样，成功在我看来是一次事件，一个时刻，一个世界赋予你的标签。卓越不是对某个目标的承诺，而是一个持续的追求。而让我们不断追求，能把我们推得更远的方法，就是重视“差一点的胜利”。

How many times have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win?

有多少次我们将一些作品定义为经典之作，甚至是大师级作品，即使作者认为它根本无望完成，充满了困难和瑕疵，换言之，是一个“差一点的成功”？

 Elizabeth Murray surprised me with her admission about her earlier paintings. Painter Paul Cézanne so often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the intention of picking them back up again, but at the end of his life, the result was that he had only signed 10 percent of his paintings. 

伊丽莎白·默里让我感到惊讶，她接受了自己早期的画作。画家保罗·塞尚经常认为他的作品不够完善，他会故意把它们丢在一边，心里想着一会再捡回来。然而到了他生命的终点，结果就是他只在10%的画作上签了名。

His favorite novel was "The [Unknown] Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac, and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself. Franz Kafka saw incompletion when others would find only works to praise, so much so that he wanted all of his diaries, manuscripts, letters and even sketches burned upon his death. His friend refused to honor the request, and because of that, we now have all the works we now do by Kafka: "America," "The Trial" and "The Castle," a work so incomplete it even stops mid-sentence.

塞尚最喜欢的小说是巴尔扎克的《不为人知的杰作》，他觉得自己就是那个画家主角。弗兰兹·卡夫卡能看到缺点，而其他人只找到赞美的作品，以至于他想把他所有的日记、手稿、信件和草稿，死后全部焚烧。他的朋友拒绝这样做，正因如此，我们现在还有这些卡夫卡的作品：《亚美利加》、《审判》、《城堡》，这个作品不完整到有破句。

The pursuit of mastery, in other words, is an ever-onward almost.

换句话说，对卓越的追求几乎是一种不断前进的过程。

"Lord, grant that I desire more than I can accomplish," Michelangelo implored, as if to that Old Testament God on the Sistine Chapel, and he himself was that Adam with his finger outstretched and not quite touching that God's hand.

 “神啊，您赐给我的欲望超过了我的能力。“米开朗基罗这样祷告，对着西斯廷教堂穹顶上的旧约之神，他自己变成了亚当，向前伸出手指却无法碰触到神的手。

Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It's in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft and not for the sake of crafting your career. How many inventors and untold entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon? We see it even in the life of the indomitable Arctic explorer Ben Saunders, who tells me that his triumphs are not merely the result of a grand achievement, but of the propulsion of a lineage of near wins.

卓越在于追求的过程，而不是结果。它要持续不断地缩小现实的自己和理想的自己之间的差距。卓越是为自己的才华而做出牺牲，而不是为了开发自己的事业。有多少发明家和无名的企业家们在现实中印证了这一现象？我们甚至能看到不屈不挠的北极探险家本·桑德斯，他跟我说起自己的辉煌不仅仅是一次伟大成功的结果。而是由一系列“差一点的成功”推动的。

We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge. It's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington, who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one, always the one he had yet to compose. 

当我们处于领先优势时，我们就能成长。艾灵顿公爵领悟了这一智慧，（DukeEllington（1899–1974年），美国著名作曲家、钢琴家、乐队队长。）他说在自己的作品中，最喜欢的永远是下一首。永远是他还没有写好的那首。

Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to mastery is because the greater our proficiency, the more clearly we might see that we don't know all that we thought we did. It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect. The Paris Review got it out of James Baldwin when they asked him, "What do you think increases with knowledge?" and he said, "You learn how little you know."

差一点的胜利是卓越的内涵，一部分是因为我们做事越熟练，就越清楚地知道：我们并不完全了解那些我们自认为了解的事物。这被称为“达克效应”。（Dunning–Krugereffect）《巴黎评论》采访詹姆斯·鲍德温时，（JamesBaldwin：美国当代著名小说家、散文家、戏剧家和社会评论家）他的回应正是如此。他被问道：“您认为是什么随着知识而增加？”他回答说：“你会知道你学到的太少了。”

Success motivates us, but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest. One of the most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver medalists and bronze medalists after a competition. 

成功激励我们，然而“差一点儿成功”能推动我们不断追寻。最生动的例子之一，就是当奥运比赛结束时，我们观察银牌获得者和铜牌获得者之间的差距。

Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to bronze, who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not medaled at all, gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition. 

托马斯·季洛维奇和他在康奈尔大学的团队研究了银牌和铜牌获得者的情绪差别。他们发现银牌获得者相对沮丧，而铜牌获得者通常更开心一点，因为他们没有拿到第四名，总比没有奖牌的强。在后续的比赛中集中关注银牌获得者。

We see it even in the gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created these scratch-off tickets that had a higher than average rate of near wins and so compelled people to buy more tickets that they were called heart-stoppers, and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s. 

我们发现甚至在博彩界，那里从前就深谙“差点就成功”这一现象。“刮刮乐”类型的彩票被创造出来，这些彩票可能的中奖率超过平均数，这样会促使人们去买更多的彩票，这些人被称作"心脏骤停者",这些博彩界的滥用手法发生在1970年代的英国。

The reason the near win has a propulsion is because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals, which we tend to put at a distance, into more proximate vicinity to where we stand.

差一点的成功之所以有推动力，是因为它改变了我们观察的角度，同时，把我们的目标从我们认为的那个距离拉近到我们所在的地方。

 If I ask you to envision what a great day looks like next week, you might describe it in more general terms. But if I ask you to describe a great day at TED tomorrow, you might describe it with granular, practical clarity. And this is what a near win does. It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights.

如果我请你想象下周一个美好的日子，你可能会更笼统地描述。然而，如果我请你描述一下明天在TED，美好的一天是什么样的，你也许会说得很清晰又真实。这就是“差一点的成功”做到的。它能让我们集中注意力在当下的计划，去处理我们目之所及的那座大山。

It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984 missed taking the gold in the heptathlon by one third of a second, and her husband predicted that would give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition. In 1988, she won the gold in the heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points, a score that no athlete has come very close to since.

杰西·乔伊娜-柯西(Joyner-Kersee)在1984年以三分之一秒的差距和七项全能金牌失之交臂，她的丈夫预测说，这个经历会带给她在后续比赛中所需要的韧性。1988年，她获得了七项全能金牌，并刷新了7291分的记录，之前从未有运动员能接近这个分数。

We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do. I stand here thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near win in this room, how your lives might play this out, because I think on some gut level we do know this. 

我们不是在一切完工之后再突破，而是当我们还有更多作为的时候。我站在这里思索和想象每一种方法，让我们有可能在这个房间里完成哪怕一项差一点的成功。你的生命可能如何去实现这一切，因为我想，潜意识里我们确实知道。

We know that we thrive when we stay at our own leading edge, and it's why the deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics. It's what's called a spirit line, a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out, but also a reason to continue making work. Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They're masters because they realize that there isn't one.

我们知道当我们处于领先地位时，我们就能迅速成长，这就是为什么在创新的神话里蕴含了有意识的未完成。在纳瓦霍文明中，一些男女工匠会故意在纺织品和陶瓷上留下一点缺陷。这被称为“精神之线”，在花样上有意留下缺陷，不去太苛求纺织工和制陶工人，同时也是为了让制作过程得以继续下去。大师之所以是专家，并不是因为他们完结了某个学科的概念。而是因为他们意识到终点并不存在。

Now it occurred to me, as I thought about this, why the archery coach told me at the end of that practice, out of earshot of his archers, that he and his colleagues never feel they can do enough for their team, never feel there are enough visualization techniques and posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins.

如今当我想到这些，我明白了为什么在那场练习的最后，在队员听不见的地方，射箭队教练告诉我，他和他的同事们总是觉得为队伍做的还是不够。总觉得还有更多的视觉技巧、姿势训练可以帮助她们去克服那些连续的“差一点的成功”。

It didn't sound like a complaint, exactly, but just a way to let me know, a kind of tender admission, to remind me that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious, unfinished path that always required more.

这听上去真不像什么抱怨，而是为了让我明白，一种软性的承认，提示我，他知道自己全身心地投入了这条没有止境的征程，这条路还在不停地延伸。

We build out of the unfinished idea, even if that idea is our former self. This is the dynamic of mastery. Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more than you ever dreamed you could. It's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray was thinking when I saw her smiling at those early paintings one day in the galleries. Even if we created utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end.

我们挖掘未完成的想法，即使它们就是过去的自己。这就是卓越的动态优化。不断接近你心中想要的东西，可以帮助你获得比你一度梦想的还要多的东西。当我看到有一天，伊丽莎白·默里对着画廊里她的早期画作微笑的时候，我想她一定也是这么想的。虽然我们创作出了乌托邦，我相信我仍旧有未完成的追求。完满是一种目标，但我们希望它永无止境。