我从2000个讣告中学到的

And so, we looked at the data. 2,000 editorial, non-paid obituaries over a 20-month period between 2015 and 2016. What did these 2,000 deaths — rather, lives — teach us?

所以，我们检视了数据。我们分析了总共2000 篇由编辑部刊登，非付费的讣闻，范围是 2015到2016年的20个月之间。究竟这2000个死亡──应该说是生命──教导了我们什么？

 

Well, first we looked at words. This here is an obituary headline. This one is of the amazing Lee Kuan Yew. If you remove the beginning and the end, you're left with a beautifully worded descriptor that tries to, in just a few words, capture an achievement or a lifetime. Just looking at these is fascinating. Here are a few famous ones, people who died in the last two years. Try and guess who they are.

好，首先来看讣闻的用字。这是一篇讣闻的标题。这一位是传奇人物李光耀。移除开头和结尾后的内容，只剩短短的几句话，一些优美的描述词汇，能让你捕捉到亡者的成就，或是他的一生。看著这些词汇就够令人著迷了。这里有几位，在这两年内过世的名人。试着猜猜看他们是谁。

 

[An Artist who Defied Genre] That's Prince.

[Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century] Oh, yes.

[Muhammad Ali]

[Groundbreaking Architect] Zaha Hadid.

「一位颠覆形式的艺术家」这是王子。

「二十世纪的拳击巨星」是的，拳王阿里。

「开创未来的建筑师」札哈．哈蒂。

 

So we took these descriptors and did what's called natural language processing, where you feed these into a program, it throws out the superfluous words — "the," "and," — the kind of words you can mime easily in "Charades," — and leaves you with the most significant words. And we did it not just for these four, but for all 2,000 descriptors.

因此，我们找出这些描述词，进行所谓的自然语言处理。也就是你将文字输入程式，它能剔除不必要的文字，例如 「the」——并且剔除在玩「比手画脚」游戏时，很容易以手势表示的文字，最后留下最重要的词汇。我们不只分析上面这四则，而是分析了所有2000则讣闻的描述词汇。

 

And this is what it looks like. Film, theatre, music, dance and of course, art, are huge. Over 40 percent. You have to wonder why in so many societies we insist that our kids pursue engineering or medicine or business or law to be construed as successful. And while we're talking profession, let's look at age — the average age at which they achieved things. That number is 37. What that means is, you've got to wait 37 years ... before your first significant achievement that you're remembered for — on average — 44 years later, when you die at the age of 81 — on average.

我们来看看结果是什么样子。电影、戏剧、音乐、舞蹈。当然「艺术」是最明显的。出现的频率多出40%。你不得不惊讶的是，为什么在大多数的社会中，我们一直认为让孩子读工程、医学、商业或法律科系，才是所谓的成功。当我们关注职业时，也来看看年龄──这些人功成名就的平均年龄。这个数字是37年。这意味着什么？就是你平均必须等待37 年…… 才能获得第一个成就，44 年后，当你过世时才会被纪念，平均年龄是81岁。

 

Talk about having to be patient.

这告诉我们要有耐心。