Everything you think, everything you feel, everything you imagine, everything you hope for, everything you do, down to the tiniest, most minute, personal, and private actions, everything is shaped by factors and forces outside of your control that you’ll never see nor will you ever understand. She said, “Sam, this freedom that you’re talking about all the time…” She said, “I don’t know what you’re telling the students, but let me tell you what this book is telling you to tell them. I wasn’t really expecting much, it was an old textbook.ĪLSO READ: The Gift & Power of Emotional Courage: Susan David (Full Transcript)īut what happened? In 30 minutes, this young woman, this 23-year-old girlfriend of mine, who had never taken a sociology class in her life, turned me into a sociologist. This is the most amazing material I have ever read.” She said, “This is life-changing.”Īnd to me, at the time, I had been teaching for four years, I had taken probably 30 sociology classes, written maybe 40 or 50 papers, I was studying for my PhD comprehensive exams. And she got to the end of the first chapter and she said, “This is amazing. In the summer of 1988, I was in my bedroom, and I was preparing a lecture for the following day I had a class I was teaching an Intro to Sociology class, and my girlfriend, at the time, said, “Hey, can I look at your book?” So I said, “Sure.” And she started reading my textbook. So I continued, and then this all came to a crashing halt. So how could I be free? But nonetheless, I continued, I held these two things in balance largely because I only understood sociology down here.Īnd I think, in retrospect, I was like most people, because we all know that we are shaped by other people, but so many of us, myself included, for many years, still felt that, in the end, we are drivers of our destiny in the end, we make free decisions. And this threw a wrench into that thinking because the core idea of sociology is that we are shaped by other people around us. And in fact, I thought that happiness could only come from me directing my own destiny, in a way that was independent and free from the influences of other people.Īnd then I began studying sociology. When I was young, I thought that my freedom and my independence were the two most important things in my life.

Following is the full transcript of sociologist Sam Richards’ TEDx Talk: The Wisdom of Sociology at TEDxLacador conference.

Mr. sam speaking about his drivers