英语智慧背囊 08-寻求大改变，从小处做起

[00:01.48]Tiny Steps, Big Changes寻求大改变，从小处做起
[00:04.53]If you have failed in the past at trying to make big changes in your life,
[00:10.25]try again now, one tiny step at a time.
[00:14.18]Every year it’s the same.
[00:16.15]As December comes to an end,
[00:18.15]you think about the new year and all the ways you want to improve your life.
[00:22.94]But as you start to write down your hopes for the new year,
[00:26.22]you think about last year.
[00:28.23]You excitedly wrote down all the changes you were going to make,
[00:32.48]but by the end of January those ideas got lost in your crowded life.
[00:36.99]Here’s a suggestion:
[00:39.28]Forget the overreaching, hard-to-achieve goals.
[00:42.67]Just think small.
[00:44.42]"We have this extreme-makeover culture that thinks you’ve got to do everything in big steps,
[00:50.34]even though the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t work,"
[00:54.06]says psychologist Robert Maurer,
[00:56.35]who recently published One Small Step Can Change Your Life.
[01:00.32]"What we try to do is to break down to a step so small
[01:04.14]that people couldn’t possibly resist or have any excuse not to do it."
[01:08.87]The technique is called kaizen,
[01:11.05]a Japanese word for an American business philosophy adapted to change behavior and attitudes.
[01:17.74]During World War II, American factory managers increased productivity by trying small,
[01:24.54]continuous improvements rather than sudden radical change.
[01:28.58]After the war, U.S. occupation forces brought that philosophy to a rebuilding Japan,
[01:35.57]which made it a cornerstone of the country’s amazing economic rebound.
[01:40.19]The Japanese called it kaizen, which means "improvement".
[01:44.70]Maurer, who teaches at the UCLA and University of Washington medical schools,
[01:50.71]says he began studying whether the idea could help people who couldn’t tackle big challenges.
[01:56.97]"Some of it is psychological, and some of it is just their overwhelmed lifestyles," he says.
[02:03.40]"They don’t have the time to go to the gym and do all those other things we know are good for us.
[02:09.12]So kaizen seemed a logical thing to experiment with."