RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
Uploaded on Apr 1, 2010
This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.
Watch the full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vi...
http://www.influenceatwork.com This animated video describes the six universal Principles of Persuasion that have been scientifically proven to make you most effective based on the research in Dr. Cialdini’s groundbreaking book, Influence. This video is narrated by Dr. Robert Cialdini and Steve Martin, CMCT.
That is: Do you scroll down to see the other stuff?
Definitions of help
noun
the action of helping someone to do something; assistance.
I asked for help from my neighbors
synonyms: assistance, aid, a helping hand, support, succor, advice, guidance, benefit, use, advantage, service, comfort, a shot in the arm
verb
make it easier for (someone) to do something by offering one's services or resources.
Roger's companion helped him with the rent
synonyms: assist, aid, lend a (helping) hand to, give assistance to, come to the aid of, be of service to, be of use to, do someone a favor, do someone a service, do someone a good turn, bail someone out, come to someone's/the rescue, give someone a leg up, get someone out of a tight spot, save someone's bacon, save someone's skin
exclamation
used as an appeal for urgent assistance.
Help! I'm drowning!
synonyms: SOS, mayday
2 more definitions
See also
Help!, to help, please help me, help out, need help, help yourself, Thank you for your help., help desk, How can I help you?, ask for help, May I help you?
Translations of help
noun
hjälp
help, assistance, aid, support, helpmate, service
bistånd
assistance, aid, help, succour, succor
verb
hjälpa
help, assist, aid, be helped, relieve, support
hjälpa till
help, assist
bistå
assist, help, aid
låta bli
help, refrain, let be, leave alone, let alone, lay off
English culture is the sum total of all the bits and pieces that have been borrowed, adapted and appropriated from other places and cultures, stitched together to form something different and distinctive. The result is that, when you try to define Englishness or try to defend some kind of pure Englishness (there is, of course, no such thing), the whole thing slips through your fingers.
Here are five institutions you might have thought were English but which actually originated elsewhere.
Morris dancing(Italian)
As with so many of the traditions that seem to be cornerstones of English life, it is difficult to trace the real origins of morris dancing. Some sources suggest it arrived in England via Italian dancers during the renaissance. Others contend that the word originally derived from “Moorish”, adopted at a time when Moorish decorations were suddenly fashionable. Even if the morris dancers were dramatising an English tradition, therefore, the bells on their ankles may have made them seem exotically foreign. It’s a mystery, but not a wholly English one.
Pigeon racing(Belgian)
Pigeon racing first attracted attention during the siege of Paris in 1870-71. The English that were present watched entranced as French pigeons carried more than a million messages to and from the city, crossing Prussian lines. But the sport of racing pigeons was developed by the Belgians, and it was only when the king of Belgium, Leopold II, gave the British royal family breeding stockthat the sport took off in Britain. The first race was held there in 1881, inspired by the Belgians who would start their races in the south of England.
Punch and Judy (Italian)
Mr Punch is Italian. He derives from the commedia dell’arte and the Italian Renaissance, a direct descendent of the character Pulcinella; the show owes much to the presence of itinerant Italian players in London during the 16th century. When Samuel Pepys saw his first Punch and Judy show in Covent Garden on 9 May 1662, performed by an Italian puppeteer called Pietro Gimonde, he described it as “an Italian puppet show”.
The Women’s Institute(Canadian and a bit Welsh)
The WI began in Canada. To be precise, it was formed in 1897 in Stoney Creek, Ontario by Adelaide Hoodless, after she gave a talk at the Farmers’ Institute about domestic science and agriculture. Even when, in 1915, the movement arrived in the UK, its first branch wasn’t in England but in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Anglesley, where it was set up to encourage more women to get involved in food production.
Tennis(Basque, Welsh and English)
Around 1859, a Birmingham solicitor called Harry Gem and his Spanish friend Augurio Perara combined the best of rackets with the best of pelota – a Basque ball game – to create tennis. They played it on the croquet lawn at Edgbaston. When they moved to Leamington Spa in 1872, they took the game with them and founded the world’s first tennis club. The following year, Walter Wingfield, a Welsh inventor and army officer, patented a similar game which he called stické, borrowing from the Greek word sphairistiké (meaning “the art of playing ball”) and from the rules of real tennis. The two were combined, creating the game that is now played at Wimbledon and around the world.
There is no evidence that beer is anything other than English, though tea (China) and marmalade (Portuguese and other nationalities) come from overseas. As for King Arthur (partly French, partly Welsh) and Henry V (very Welsh), don’t get me started. And don’t mention bungalows (Indian), or umbrellas (French), or Christmas trees (German) …
What the English can’t do is to complain that “foreignness” begins at Calais, or that borders should be put up to protect English culture from foreign influences. Those influences, to a large degree, are English culture.
• David Boyle’s How to Be English is published by Square Peg.
Fish & chips, Saint George, a brew – all quintessentially British, right? Wrong!
I can’t believe it’s not British!
The good ole cockney accent, a stiff upper lip and a game of cricket, all typically British.
Turns out though, not everything we think of as homegrown is.
1. Fancy a cuppa?
iStockphoto
While we may like to lay claim to the mighty brew, beware…
Tea originated in China as a medicinal drink. It came West during the 16th century. But putting the kettle on for a cuppa only became fashionable in Britain during the 17th century, when King Charles II married Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.
The Queen made tea the drink of royalty, which quickly became a popular import via the East India Company.
2. Oh my cod!
iStockphoto
Wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper, this traditional greasy dinner is anything but old news. But is the seaside staple really British?
Nope!
Battered fried fish first arrived on our shores around 1660 with Jewish refugees from Portugal and Spain.
Then, 20 years later, as the story goes, a Belgian housewife unable to get hold of any fish got creative with some spuds, cutting them into fish shapes and frying them.
Us Brits can, however, take credit for uniting the two imports and serving up a classic combo.
3. Make mine a double!
iStockphoto
A pint down your local? Such a British tradition…
In fact, the great British boozer actually started out as an Italian wine bar!
It was after the arrival of the Romans, and the Roman road network, that inns began to pop up and became the go-to place for a refreshing beverage.
4. Saintly support
iStockphoto
The patron saint of England, Saint George, is closely identified with us Brits and our ideals of honour, bravery and gallantry. But the legendary soldier was actually born abroad! Although many have debated his birthplace, it’s believed the dragon-slayer was born to a Greek Christian noble family in Syria.
5. Pull the chukker one!
iStockphoto
Nothing says summer to the upper classes more than a game of polo. However, it originated in Persia way back in the 6th century. And the modern incarnation for British high-rollers is an anglicised version of the game English plantation owners learned from locals in the Indian state of Assam, in the 19th century.
6. One saucy story
iStockphoto
Slathered, spattered or squirted onto your grub, you can’t beat a splodge of tommy k. The sweet yet savoury condiment is an essential for most British diners. Except, it originates from Southeast Asia, and was a completely tomato-free, fermented fish sauce…yum!
7. Eye, eye!
iStockphoto
Teamed with a top hat, three-piece suit and a toff, monocles just feel British, in every respect. But the dandy little magnifying lens was actually created by Germans in the 18th century.
Still the ultimate indication of class, it was British gentlemen who popularised the so-called ‘eye ring’ at the turn of the 19th century.
8. Pedal power
iStockphoto
Named after the British penny and farthing coins, one much larger than the other, you’d be forgiven for thinking us clever lot are the pedal power behind the penny-farthing bike.
Alas, it’s based on the French high-wheeler, designed by Parisian Eugène Meyer in the 1860s.
Anthropologist David Graeber explores the theology of debt.
The Bible is peppered with the language of debt. Sin, forgiveness, reckoning, redemption - all of these words actually derive from the language of ancient finance. What's more, this seems to be true in all the great religious traditions - not just Judaism and Christianity, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam - all of their texts are filled with financial metaphors, many of which relate to issues surrounding debt.
We tend to think of these religions as teaching us that we must repay our debts. But the truth is that the financial metaphors in religious texts are oddly ambivalent. The original translation of the Lord's Prayer from 1381 reads "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors". But do we forgive our debtors? Actually, most of us don't.
David Graeber explains that the great religions talk about the forgiveness of debt more than the repayment of debt and that the deeper teachings they offer is that it is the annihilation of debt which is ultimately divine. To understand why all the religious texts discuss the forgiveness of debt with such frequency, David examines the historical context of when these works were written and reveals that, in the ancient world, the institutionalised forgiveness of debts was commonplace.
In a time of anxiety about debt, the latest RSC production about to be screened in cinemas strikes a nerve. Yet the play also warns against the language of money infecting our lives and loves
Cheap talk … Al Pacino as Shylock (left) and Jeremy Irons as Antonio (far right) in the 2004 film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures
As a tale of debt mercilessly pursued, The Merchant of Venice, it seems, will always be topical. In planning new productions at the Globe in the spring and theRSC this summer – the latter to be broadcast live in cinemas on 22 July – theatrical producers didn’t necessarily have the battle between Greece and the EU in mind. But they did know the UK was going to have a general election that would largely focus on the right way to manage the country’s money. Shakespeare’s play, of course, is all about money. But more specifically, it is all about the danger of allowing ideas associated with money to reign over our non-economic lives.
A few years ago, I saw Al Pacino playing Shylock in an open-air production in New York’s Central Park. The scenery-chewing eccentricity of Pacino’s performance turned out to be a compelling match for his outcast character, but the production’s most striking aspect was the ironic weight the actors gave to all the financial metaphors that Shakespeare deploys in the love plot. Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia is first announced as his scheme “to get clear of all the debts I owe”, because Portia is rich. He refers to Portia’s famed “worth”, and calls her a “rich” “gem”. He marvels: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchas’d by the weight.” And while Shylock demands the fulfilment of the “bond” that Antonio signed, the pledged lovers twitter happily about “love’s bonds”, and Graziano speaks of the “bargain” of their faith. At the end, Portia tells Antonio that he is going to be Bassanio’s “surety”, to guarantee his faithfulness.
Nadia Albina and Patsy Ferran in the RSC’s Merchant of Venice. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning
It seemed obvious, in that production’s aftermath, that Shakespeare was satirising the commercialisation of love relations, the infection of ordinary life by money-talk. Yet most critics – including the editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition, John Russell Brown – have assumed that the Portia story represents a redemptive and happy version of finance, shown to be harmonious with true love. There seems an awful lot of room to doubt this interpretation. For example, Portia promises to pay off Antonio’s debt and then says: “Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear.” Alexander Pope thought this line unworthy of Shakespeare, but Brown calls it “a joyful acknowledgement of the pleasures of giving for love”. Yet it’s surely a deliberately uncomfortable echo of Shylock’s reference, in the trial scene, to his “dearly bought” pound of flesh.
After the game of rings in the play, the Arden editor concludes: “Love is not like merchandise; it is not simply a question of possessor and possessed.” This is nice to think, but it sounds more like Brown’s uplifting moral than Shakespeare’s. At the outset, Bassanio has announced his scheme to marry Portia with the words: “I have a mind presages me such thrift / That I should questionless be fortunate.” Thrift means mercenary profit in particular (Shylock refers to his own “well-won thrift”) as well as success more generally; while Bassanio’s “fortunate” is the kind of pun a man makes with dollar signs in his eyes.
Not only romantic love but friendship, too, is metaphorically securitised in this play, as when Bassanio says: “to you Antonio / I owe the most in money and in love”. (Note that the cash debt is mentioned before the love debt.) For his part, Antonio says to Salarino: “Your worth is very dear in my regard.” There does not seem sufficient rhetorical quarantine established between these usages and Shylock’s naked announcement of a deliberate trade (“To buy his favour, I extend this friendship”) to keep the former as innocent as a sunnily redemptive interpretation of the play would wish.
The Merchant of Venice also plays on the semantic doublings (relatively recent at the time) of terms such as “interest” and “credit”. “Interest” was curiosity, or a legal claim to something, before it became the mechanism by which money breeds more money, and “credit” was belief. And so, for instance, Bassanio’s greeting, “Lorenzo and Salerio, welcome hither, / If that the youth of my new int’rest here / Have power to bid you welcome” is sardonically echoed by Shylock, referring to “my well-won thrift, / Which he [Antonio] calls interest”. And Antonio’s announcement that he will “go forth / Try what my credit can in Venice do … ” is mirrored by Portia’s instruction to Bassanio to “swear by your double self, / And there’s an oath of credit”.
The historian Quentin Skinner argues, in his classic 1974 essay “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action”, that the emerging merchant class deliberately adopted such virtuous terms to describe their own activities. And this has had long and arguably noxious effects ever since. In Hamlet, the hero expresses his ennui at one point by declaring: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world … ” The word “profitable” meant advantageous in a general sense before it acquired its financial meaning of “lucrative”, about 100 years later. (The root, “profit”, is from the Latin for progress or benefit.) When Hamlet says the uses of the world seem “unprofitable” to him, he is not complaining that he can’t figure out a way to get rich quick. But once the term “profitable” was adopted for the meaning of “offering financial gain”, it tended to imply something that we might not want to take for granted: that only what is “profitable” in the monetary sense is “profitable” in the general sense of useful or beneficial.
Centuries later, our ordinary language today is shot through with economic metaphor. And the effect might be to encourage our thoughts to run along certain rails rather than others. For an exclusively economic definition of the good is often built into our speech. Take, for instance, the term “investment”. This originally meant simply the putting on of clothes, or the clothes themselves. But then it acquired a financial sense, in the dealings of the East India company in the 17th century. And now “investment” is one of those primarily financial terms that is also morally inflected in a positive way: “investment” is distinguished from “speculation”, which is supposed to be mere reckless gambling; it is prudent and wise and good for everyone. (In fact, “speculation” itself meant scientific observation or hypothetical reasoning before it acquired a disapproving financial sense in the late 18th century.)
We also, after all, use the term “investment” today when we’re not talking about money. We might say something is a good “investment” of time, or energy. But the financial crisis has reminded us that, as they say in the small print, the value of your investment can go down as well as up. And anyway, isn’t it strange, when you think about it, to speak of investing time? When you invest time in something, you don’t get that time back at a later date, with added interest. The time is gone, whatever you did with it.
Instead we sometimes talk about “spending” time. (In Merchant, Antonio mildly rebukes Bassanio thus: “You know me well, and herein spend but time / To wind about my love with circumstance.”) But still, as with investing time, “spending” time conceives of time as a currency. The implication that mere moment-to-moment existence is a transaction, and that you expect to get something from it, might imply a strange way to live.
Another metaphorical currency in our language is attention. “Pay attention.” All right, perhaps I’ll “pay” attention, but I’m going to want something in return. The danger is that conceiving of matters of the intellect as transactions might lead to a certain impatience, a sense of entitlement, or even a more general instrumentalisation of reason. If education, for example, has no “payoff” – if it’s not going to be “profitable” in the commercial sense – why should anyone pursue it?
When we talk meanwhile about the “payoff” of a piece of writing or a work of art, we’re implicitly constraining the field of our evaluation to the instant effect, the immediate reaction. That way, we risk elevating the merely sensational over the more ambiguous or deep. This seems to be clear if we imagine asking the question: “So, what’s the payoff of virtue ethics; what’s the payoff of Beethoven’s Ninth or The Tempest?” Just to ask the question seems a little … well, cheap.
“Cheap”, of course, is another economic metaphor that we often use in an unexamined way. To equate an intellectually unrigorous idea or a morally shabby act – “what you did was really cheap”, or “that was a cheap shot” – with a commodity whose price is low certainly works to the benefit of people who want to sell us commodities at high prices. As Skinner points out, the term “commodity” itself meant convenience or benefit before it was hijacked to describe a thing to be bought and sold. Hence another pun in The Merchant of Venice, where Antonio warns: “For the commodity that strangers have / With us in Venice, if it be denied, / Will much impeach the justice of the state”.
We are now plainly living in what the writer FS Michaels calls an “economic monoculture”, where an economic definition of success is the dominant “story” – it’s what rules our lives, not just at work but in our relationships, and our ideas of education, health, and so forth. The economic metaphors of our everyday conversation are part of the invisible substructure of this monoculture, and tend to undermine attempts to rewrite the dominant story.
English, they say, is fast becoming or has already become the global lingua franca. And English is infested with ossified metaphors from finance. Embedded within our language are innumerable attitudes to money and work that are at the very least arguable, or ought to be argued for explicitly. If we wish to rethink our political economy in whole or in part, it will help to make sure that our language is not betraying us as we speak.
• The RSC production of The Merchant of Venice is broadcast live in cinemas on 22 July. onscreen.rsc.org.uk.
