Shawn Achor Quotes

Habits are like financial capital – forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come.

Happiness is not the belief that we don't need to change; it's the realization that we can.

..the more you believe in your own ability to success the more likely it is that you will.

Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.

If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average.

Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect . And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.

The best leaders are the ones who show their true colors not during the banner years but during times of struggle.

Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.

Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.

If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.

For me, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.

Without action, knowledge is often meaningless.

Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.

When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.

You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.

The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.

When we are happy—when our mindset and mood are positive—we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.

Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full. It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life.

I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality.

The Tetris Effect—When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. This principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunity wherever we look.

the key to daily practice is to put your desired actions as close to the path of least resistance as humanly possible. Identify the activation energy—the time, the choices, the mental and physical effort they require—and then reduce it. If you can cut the activation energy for those habits that lead to success, even by as little as 20 seconds at a time, it won’t be long before you start reaping their benefits.

Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies.

our fear of consequences is always worse than the consequences themselves—can

It’s for this reason that, however counterintuitive it may seem, psychologists actually recommend that we fail early and often.

The point is, as we will see throughout this book, what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality.

Every second of our own experience has to be measured through a relative and subjective brain. In other words, “reality” is merely our brain’s relative understanding of the world based on where and how we are observing it.

students who were told to think about the happiest day of their lives right before taking a standardized math test outperformed their peers.19 And people who expressed more positive emotions while negotiating business deals did so more efficiently and successfully than those who were more neutral or negative.

We’ve all heard the usual examples: Michael Jordan cut from his high school basketball team, Walt Disney fired by a newspaper editor for not being creative enough, the Beatles turned away by a record executive who told them that “guitar groups are on their way out.” In fact, many of their winning mantras essentially describe the notion of falling up: “I’ve failed over and over again in my life,” Jordan once said, “and that is why I succeed.” Robert F. Kennedy said much the same: “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” And Thomas Edison, too, once claimed that he had failed his way to success.

The person we have the greatest power to change is ourselves.

Meditate. Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for feeling happy. But don’t worry, you don’t have to spend years in sequestered, celibate silence to experience a boost. Take just five minutes each day to watch your breath go in and out.

Shawn Achor’s five happy habits:   Every morning write down three new things you’re grateful for. Journal for two minutes a day about a positive experience from the past 24 hours. Meditate daily for a few minutes. At the start of every day, write an email to someone praising or thanking them. Get fifteen minutes of simple cardio exercise a day.

book, what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality.

When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.

When you write down a list of “three good things” that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—

It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

The reason some people see the world so differently from others is that the human brain doesn’t just take a picture of the external world like a camera; it is constantly interpreting and processing the information it receives.

When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel—and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The second mechanism at work here is gratitude, because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become. Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being.11 Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups.

only when we choose to believe that we live in a world where challenges can be overcome, our behavior matters, and change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional and intellectual resources to make that change happen.

Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news.32

Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina and perhaps the world’s leading expert on the subject, describes the ten most common positive emotions: “joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.

I defined happiness as “the joy we feel moving toward our potential.

What identity are you wearing today?

one of the greatest paradoxes of human behavior: Common sense is not common action.

All it takes is consciously remembering that we need to include others in our reality.

Ninety percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world.” —Shawn Achor, author and happiness researcher

Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.

Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.” This definition really resonates with me because it acknowledges that happiness is not all about yellow smiley faces and rainbows. For me, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.

When you write down a list of “three good things” that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future. In just five minutes a day, this trains the brain to become more skilled at noticing and focusing on possibilities for personal and professional growth, and seizing opportunities to act on them.

when I say, “creating a positive reality,” I don’t mean simply being optimistic. I also don’t mean adopting some sort of deluded view of the world in which simply wishing for wealth will suddenly result in a windfall of millions, or simply envisioning your cancer disappearing will cure you forever. This is neither positive nor productive.

This is a very important study because it shows that when we perceive a reality in which success is likely, that success become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

when we make eye contact with someone, it actually sends a signal to the brain that triggers empathy and rapport.

Look around at the people in your office, on the subway, sitting across from you at the cafe. Have you ever wondered if the world you see is the same one they see?

how happy individuals were as college freshmen predicted how high their income was nineteen years later, regardless of their initial level of wealth.

Happiness is the joy you feel striving toward your potential

In fact, rarely have I seen an optimistic and motivated worker under the supervision of a pessimistic, apathetic manager. As the leaders go, so go their employees.

Before potential, there is a motivation. Before motivation, there is an emotion. And before emotion, there is your reality.

And only when we choose to believe that we live in a world where challenges can be overcome, our behavior matters, and change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional

Seeing the positives in life is a muscle, a skill you can develop. It requires practice. Psychologist Shawn Achor’s research on gratitude journals found that simply writing down three new things you are grateful for, every night for three weeks, will start to change the way your brain perceives the world. The exercise trains you to notice things you might have otherwise missed,

So when a colleague stops you in the hallway at work to say hello and ask about your day, the brief interaction actually sparks a continual upward spiral of happiness and its inherent rewards.

Researcher Richard Wiseman, in his article “The Luck Factor,” says that if you are an apple picker and you keep coming back to the same trees every day, eventually you’re going to run out of fruit.

Afterward, I jokingly asked Salim why the children of Soweto were so weird. “They see schoolwork as a privilege,” he replied, “one that many of their parents did not have.” When I returned to Harvard two weeks later, I saw students complaining about the very thing the Soweto students saw as a privilege. I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality.

As researchers at New York University have found, putting unrealistic, fantastical goals onto a vision board actually makes us feel worse about ourselves because it makes us think we are missing out on life.25

We are taught to believe that total makeovers of house, body, and psyche are possible all in a 30-minute episode (minus commercials). But in the real world, this all-or-nothing mindset nearly guarantees failure.

Turn on the news, and the majority of airtime is spent on accidents, corruption, murders, abuse. This focus on the negative tricks our brains into believing that this sorry ratio is reality, that most of life is negative.

As St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century said it best, “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive.

This is why Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leader in the scientific study of well-being, has written that she prefers the phrase “creation or construction of happiness” to the more popular “pursuit,” since “research shows that it’s in our power to fashion it for ourselves.”13

Here was someone who had dismissed most of what I had just been saying as too obvious to even discuss; yet apparently it wasn't obvious enough. I realized that he was the living embodiment of one of the greatest paradoxes of human behavior: Common sense is not common action.

if you want to set the tone or mood, make sure you get some of the first words in. Think about it, which meeting would you prefer to attend? One that starts with “Let’s get going because we have so much to do today and a lot of fires to put out” or one that starts with “I’m happy to see you all today—it’s great that we have such a strong team working on these exciting new projects”? Same reality but a very different outlook. Then sit back and watch how people’s engagement and motivation improve in response to your power lead. It’s one of the most effective tools in this book.

You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you’ll only attain the average and you’ll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average.

In the midst of challenges and stress at work, nothing is more crucial to our success than holding on to the people around us. Yet when the alarm bells at work go off, all too often we become blind to this reality and try to go it alone; and as a result we end up like I did, circling helplessly at some dead-end corner until we run out of air.

Just as our brains can be wired in ways that hold us back, we can retrain them to scan for the good things in life—to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels. The first step is understanding just how much of what we see is solely a matter of focus. As William James once said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Now I realize that I want Leo to be like my father. I don't just want him to be happy, but also to make everyone around him happier. To not only be creative, but to make everyone around him more creative. To not only be successful, but to make everyone around him more successful. I don't just want him to be a bright light; I want him to make others shine brighter as well.

Think about it: In the work world, as in our personal lives, we are often rewarded for noticing the problems that need solving, the stresses that need managing, and the injustices that need righting. Sometimes this can be very useful. The problem is that if we get stuck in only that pattern, always looking for and picking up on the negative, even a paradise can become a hell.

Of all the social ties we have at work, the boss/employee relationship, what Daniel Goleman has cleverly termed a “vertical couple,” is the single most important social bond you can cultivate at work. Studies have found that the strength of the bond between manager and employee is the prime predictor of both daily productivity and the length of time people stay at their jobs.

You are what you read. And science confirms this. Researchers from Dartmouth and Ohio State found that when you become engrossed with a book you may actually begin to not just identify with, but actually take on some of the traits and characteristics of, the main character. For example, if you read a book about someone with a strong social conscience, your likelihood of doing something socially conscientious rises.

Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn’t surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women’s life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12

What was going on here was that like so many people in contemporary society, along the way to gaining their superb educations, and their shiny opportunities, they had absorbed the wrong lessons. They had mastered formulas in calculus and chemistry. They had read great books and learned world history and become fluent in foreign languages. But they had had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains' potential or how to find meaning and happiness. Armed with iPhones and personal digital assistants, they had multitasked their way through a storm of resume-building experiences, often at the expense of actual ones. In their pursuit of high achievement, they had isolated themselves from their peers and loved ones and thus compromised the very support systems they so ardently needed. Repeatedly, I noticed these patterns in my own students, who often broke down under the tyranny of expectations we place on ourselves and those around us.

We become more successful when we are happier and more positive. For example, doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56 percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

And yet, my research shows that this isn't actually the case. The lightning bug researchers discovered that when the fireflies were able to time their pulses with one another with astonishing accuracy (to the millisecond!), it allowed them to space themselves apart perfectly, thus eliminating the need to compete. In the same way, when we help others become better, we can actually increase the available opportunities, instead of vying for them. Like the lightning bugs, once we learn to coordinate and collaborate with those around us, we all begin to shine brighter, both individually and as an ecosystem.

We worry so much about negative peer pressure- whether from the toxic coworkers who infect us with their pessimism, the classmates constantly getting our kids into trouble, or the wealthy friends who pressure us into taking vacations we can't afford- that we often forget all about the power of positive peer pressure. Just as being around negative, unmotivated people drains our energy and potential, surrounding ourselves with positive, engaged, motivated, and creative people causes our positivity, engagement, motivation and creativity to multiply. In my work with companies, I created a formula to highlight the basic principle at the heart of this strategy: Big Potential = individual attributes X (positive influences - negative influences)

Of all the things that we think matter to SAT scores, the number of test takers in the room is never one of them. What do you normally think is most predictive of SAT scores? Scores at the school over the past decade? The amount of federal funding received? The percentage of minority students? Socioeconomic class? Nope. The N, or number of test takers. Amazingly, the researchers found a –0.68 correlation between the N of test takers per location and their SAT score, meaning that the more test takers in the room, the lower their SAT scores. And that is a huge effect. A correlation of –1.0 would mean that test takers’ entire SAT score was determined solely by the number of people in the room and that none of it was based upon their intelligence and education. A –0.68 correlation is massive.

After many years and hundreds of interviews with workers in every conceivable profession, she has found that employees have one of three “work orientations,” or mindsets about our work. We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling.14 People with a “job” see work as a chore and their paycheck as the reward. They work because they have to and constantly look forward to the time they can spend away from their job. By contrast, people who view their work as a career work not only out of necessity, but also to advance and succeed. They are invested in their work and want to do well. Finally, people with a calling view work as an end in itself; their work is fulfilling not because of external rewards but because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose. Unsurprisingly, people with a calling orientation not only find their work more rewarding, but work harder and longer because of it. And as a result, these are the people who are generally more likely to get ahead. For

what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality.

None of this seems particularly groundbreaking to us today. But what William James concluded was indeed crucial to our understanding of behavioral change. Given our natural tendency to act out of habit, James surmised, couldn’t the key to sustaining positive change be to turn each desired action into a habit, so that it would come automatically, without much effort, thought, or choice? As the Father of Modern Psychology so shrewdly advised, if we want to create lasting change, we should “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

So how do we reclaim control from the Jerk and put it back into the hands of the Thinker? The answer is the Zorro Circle. The first goal we need to conquer—or circle we need to draw—is self-awareness. Experiments show that when people are primed to feel high levels of distress, the quickest to recover are those who can identify how they are feeling and put those feelings into words. Brain scans show verbal information almost immediately diminishes the power of these negative emotions, improving well-being and enhancing decision-making skills.13 So whether you do it by writing down feelings in a journal or talking to a trusted coworker or confidant, verbalizing the stress and helplessness you are feeling is the first step toward regaining control.

in both academic and business settings, these same benefits persist throughout our adult lives. For instance, students who were told to think about the happiest day of their lives right before taking a standardized math test outperformed their peers.19 And people who expressed more positive emotions while negotiating business deals did so more efficiently and successfully than those who were more neutral or negative.20

we all know that we should exercise, sleep eight hours, eat healthier, and be kind to others. But does this common knowledge make doing these things any easier? Of course not. Because in life, knowledge is only part of the battle. Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently. Yet the action required to follow through on what we know is often the hardest part. That’s why even though doctors know better than anyone the importance of exercise and diet, 44 percent of them are overweight.

DAILY STROKES OF EFFORT Of course, this is where the phrase “easier said than done” has particular relevance. Good habits may be the answer, but how do we create them in the first place? William James had a prescription for that, too. He called it “daily strokes of effort.” This is hardly revelatory, basically a reworking of the old dictum “practice makes perfect.” Still, he was on to something far more sophisticated than he could possibly have known at the time. “A tendency to act,” he wrote, “only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use.”5 In other words, habits form because our brain actually changes in response to frequent practice.

This isn’t just about getting yourself to exercise. Think of the positive changes you want to make at your job, and figure out what it would mean to “just get your shoes on” at work. The less energy it takes to kick-start a positive habit, the more likely that habit will stick.

As Harvard Business School professor Peter Bregman advises, “Don’t write a book, write a page.… Don’t expect to be a great manager in your first six months, just try to set expectations well.

Based on Losada’s extensive mathematical modeling, 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful.

Conventional psychology consciously ignores outliers because they don't fit the pattern.

What was going on here was that like so many people in contemporary society, along the way to gaining their superb educations, and their shiny opportunities, they had absorbed the wrong lessons. They had mastered formulas in calculus and chemistry. They had read great books and learned world history and become fluent in foreign languages. But they had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains' potential or how to find meaning and happiness.

You can have the best job in the world, but if you can’t find the meaning in it, you won’t enjoy it, whether you are a movie maker or an NFL playmaker.

Success, then, is not just about how much intelligence you have; it’s about how much of your intelligence you believe you can use.

(1) Do I believe that the intelligence and skills of my employees are not fixed, but can be improved with effort?; (2) Do I believe that my employees want to make that effort, just as they want to find meaning and fulfillment in their jobs?; and (3) How am I conveying these beliefs in my daily words and actions?

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else’s toxic state.

Um artigo de 2005, que realizou uma meta-análise de aproximadamente 225 artigos com mais de 275 mil participantes, revelou que o caminho é justamente o inverso. As pessoas são bem-sucedidas por ser felizes, de acordo com a afirmação: “A felicidade leva ao sucesso em quase todos os domínios das nossas vidas, incluindo casamento, saúde, amizade, participação na comunidade, criatividade e, principalmente, trabalho, na carreira e nos negócios”. Essa também é a conclusão de O jeito Harvard de ser feliz,12 de Shawn Achor, leitura mais

Happiness is not about lying to ourselves, or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brain so that we see the ways to rise above our circumstances.

Studies show that each positive interaction employees have during the course of the work day actually helps return the cardiovascular system back to resting levels (a benefit often termed “work recovery”), and that over the long haul, employees with more of these interactions become protected from the negative effects of job strain.

the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins illuminated a similar truth: “The people we interviewed from good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did largely because they loved who they did it with.”24

In fact, emotions are so shared, organizational psychologists have found that each workplace develops its own group emotion, or “group affective tone,” which over time creates shared “emotion norms” that are proliferated and reinforced by the behavior, both verbal and nonverbal, of the employees.7 We have all encountered office environments that suffer from toxic emotion norms, and now we also know that their bottom-line results suffer because of it.

Mastery has no fixed state or prerequisite. Your brain can literally grow and adapt with challenges. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor refers to a study that showed that London cab drivers had a larger hippocampus (the part of the brain that’s devoted to spatial memory) due to the complexity of London’s streets.

The Happiness Advantage—Because positive brains have a biological advantage over brains that are neutral or negative, this principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to capitalize on positivity and improve our productivity and performance.

the research and experiences of privileged American college students and wealthy, powerful business leaders seemed inappropriate. So I tried to open a dialogue. Struggling for points of common experience, I asked in a very clearly tongue-in-cheek tone, “Who here likes to do schoolwork?” I thought the seemingly universal distaste for schoolwork would bond us together. But to my shock, 95 percent of the children raised their hands and started smiling genuinely and enthusiastically. Afterward, I jokingly asked Salim why the children of Soweto were so weird. “They see schoolwork as a privilege,” he replied, “one that many of their parents did not have.” When I returned to Harvard two weeks later, I saw students complaining about the very thing the Soweto students saw as a privilege. I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality. The students who were so focused on the stress and the pressure—the ones who saw learning as a chore—were missing out on all the opportunities right in front of them. But those who saw attending Harvard as a privilege seemed to shine even brighter. Almost unconsciously at first, and then with ever-increasing interest, I became fascinated with what caused those high potential individuals to develop a positive mindset to excel, especially in such a competitive

Afterward, I jokingly asked Salim why the children of Soweto were so weird. “They see schoolwork as a privilege,” he replied, “one that many of their parents did not have.” When I returned to Harvard two weeks later, I saw students complaining about the very thing the Soweto students saw as a privilege. I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality. The students who were so focused on the stress and the pressure—the ones who saw learning as a chore—were missing out on all the opportunities right in front of them. But those who saw attending Harvard as a privilege seemed to shine even brighter.

The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality.

Based on my study of Harvard undergraduates, the average number of romantic relationships over four years is less than one. The average number of sexual partners, if you’re curious, is 0.5 per student. (I have no idea what 0.5 sexual partners means, but it sounds like the scientific equivalent of second base.) In my survey, I found that among these brilliant Harvard students, 24 percent are unaware if they are currently involved in any romantic relationship. What

statistical analysis revealed that the training was responsible for the positive effects.

Luckily, I was in a unique position to conduct this research.

Shawn Achor’s research at Harvard shows that college grades aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice. A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.

Try this exercise: Turn a piece of paper horizontally, and on the left hand side write down a task you’re forced to perform at work that feels devoid of meaning. Then ask yourself: What is the purpose of this task? What will it accomplish? Draw an arrow to the right and write this answer down. If what you wrote still seems unimportant, ask yourself again: What does this result lead to? Draw another arrow and write this down. Keep going until you get to a result that is meaningful to you. In this way, you can connect every small thing you do to the larger picture, to a goal that keeps you motivated and energized.

even though doctors know better than anyone the importance of exercise and diet, 44 percent of them are overweight.1

For that matter, you might also try watching less TV in general; studies have shown that the less negative TV we watch, specifically violent media, the happier we are. This doesn’t mean shutting ourselves off from the real world or ignoring problems. Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news.32 That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly. Exercise

One study proved just how powerful exercise can be: Three groups of depressed patients were assigned to different coping strategies—one group took antidepressant medication, one group exercised for 45 minutes three times a week, and one group did a combination of both.33 After four months, all three groups experienced similar improvements in happiness. The very fact that exercise proved just as helpful as anti-depressants is remarkable, but the story doesn’t end here. The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent! In short, physical activity is not just an incredibly powerful mood lifter, but a long-lasting one.

happiness is not just a mood—it’s a work ethic.

Our power to maximize our potential is based on two important things: (1) the length of our lever—how much potential power and possibility we believe we have, and (2) the position of our fulcrum—the mindset with which we generate the power to change.

Habits are like financial capital—forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come.

No matter what you may have heard from motivational speakers, coaches, and the like, reaching for the stars is a recipe for failure. In

When we make a positive social connection, the pleasure-inducing hormone oxytocin is released into our bloodstream, immediately reducing anxiety and improving concentration and focus.

researchers concluded that feeling a lack of control over pressure at work is as great a risk factor for heart disease as even high blood pressure.

Neuroscientists have found that financial losses are actually processed in the same areas of the brain that respond to mortal danger.

simply introducing two employees who don’t know each other is probably the easiest and fastest way to invest in social dividends.

Coercing employees into awkward icebreakers or forced bonding activities, like making everyone at a meeting share something about their private lives, only breeds disconnection and mistrust.42 Better that these moments happen organically—which they will if the environment is right.

That was a brilliant reminder that looking at the world from the vantage point of other cultures can open us up to all kinds of ideas, possibilities, and paths to success that we might otherwise have missed.

Even the way we describe seemingly straightforward tasks can make a difference in how people perform. In one experiment, subjects were asked to play either the “Wall Street Game” or the “Community Game,” a task designed to measure people’s willingness to cooperate under different conditions.19 In reality, they were the exact same game. But those who had been primed to think of community were more likely to be cooperative than those thinking of Wall Street. What we expect from people (and from ourselves) manifests itself in the words we use, and those words can have a powerful effect on end results. This means, as you will continue to see in the coming chapters, that the best managers and leaders view each interaction as an opportunity to prime their employees for excellence.

Por gerações e gerações, fomos levados a acreditar que a felicidade girava em torno do sucesso. Que, se nos empenharmos o suficiente, teremos sucesso e só quando tivermos sucesso é que poderemos ser felizes. Acreditava-se que o sucesso era o ponto fixo do universo do trabalho, com a felicidade gravitando em torno dele. Agora, graças às descobertas revolucionárias do campo emergente da psicologia positiva, estamos aprendendo que o que acontece na verdade é o contrário. Quando estamos felizes - quando a nossa atitude e estado de espírito são positivos -, somos mais inteligentes, mais motivados e, em consequência, temos mais sucesso. A felicidade é o centro, e o sucesso é que gira em torno dela.

As pessoas de maior sucesso, aquelas que possuem a vantagem competitiva, não consideram a felicidade como sendo alguma recompensa distante pelo empenho, nem passam os dias com uma postura neutra ou negativa; elas capitalizam os aspectos positivos e seguem colhendo as recompensas.

Acontece que o nosso cérebro é literalmente configurado para apresentar o melhor desempenho não quando está negativo ou neutro, mas quando está positivo.

Mike Morrison, vice president and dean of the University of Toyota, likes to ask employees: “What’s on the other side of your card?” In other words, the front of your business card may read “Managing Director,” but you may better identify with “big picture thinker” or “educator” or “calm under fire.” This kind of information—or even a few simple details like where a person lives, what his or her favorite hobby is—cuts through the red tape to get somewhere more meaningful, and it can more immediately and effectively forge a connection between two people.

Why did some of the impoverished children in Indonesia create a happy playtime with only some sticks and string, while others sat bored and sullen?

Yet hundreds of years ago cartographers from Europe decided that Madrid was above Rio de Janeiro and that Australia should be way “down under.” From then on, we have always looked at the world from the same fixed viewpoint.

We become more successful when we are happier and more positive.

okapi—indeed

Because our brain’s resources are limited, we are left with a choice: to use those finite resources to see only pain, negativity, stress, and uncertainty, or to use those resources to look at things through a lens of gratitude, hope, resilience, optimism, and meaning.

Researchers found that social bonds weren’t just predictive of overall happiness, but also of eventual career achievement, occupational success, and income.20

Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old.

happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement—giving us the competitive edge that I call the Happiness Advantage.

In the world of marketing, the term is “opt-out”—a genius invention, really, that takes supreme advantage of human psychology. Opt-out marketing is when people are added to mailing lists without ever consciously consenting, so that if they want to stop the barrage of promotional e-mails, they must actively unsubscribe themselves.

Technology may make it easier for us to save time, but it also makes it a whole lot easier for us to waste it.

put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance,

As a society, we know very well how to be unwell and miserable and so little about how to thrive.

Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news.

reality” is merely our brain’s relative understanding of the world based on where and how we are observing it.

The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality

For the most part, our jobs require us to use our skills, engage our minds, and pursue our goals—all things that have been shown to contribute to happiness. Of course, leisure activities can do this too, but because they’re not required of us—because there is no “leisure boss” leaning over our shoulder on Sunday mornings telling us we’d better be at the art museum by 9 A.M. sharp

the happy doctors made the right diagnosis much faster and exhibited much more creativity.

We often feel the most stress, or the most emotionally hijacked, when we stare into the void of our jam-packed to-do list, in-box, or desk top. One look at the towering pile of papers looming on our desk, or the 300 unread e-mails, and our feelings of control fly right out the window.

As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.

Remember, happiness is not just a mood—it’s a work ethic.

Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result—social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge—most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life.

In a study performed by Margaret Shih and her colleagues at Harvard, a group of Asian women were given similar math tests on two separate occasions.7 The first time around, they were primed to think about the fact that they were women, stereotypically worse at math than men. The second time around, they were told to focus on their identity as Asians, generally thought to be math whizzes compared to other ethnic groups. The result: The women performed far better in the second situation than they did in the first. Their math IQs hadn’t changed and neither had the difficulty of the questions. But in the second instance they believed more in their ability, and this was enough to make a substantive difference in performance.

and for that, every single one of your direct descendants had to overcome dangers, looks, and sickness long enough to be able to have sex.

So, now, in this new situation, they didn’t try jumping to the safe half of the box because they believed there was nothing they could do to avoid the shock. Just like the workers at the Johannesburg construction company, they essentially figured, “why bother?” After decades of studying human behavior, Seligman and his colleagues found that the same patterns of helplessness that he saw in those dogs are incredibly common in humans. When we fail, or when life delivers us a shock, we can become so hopeless that we respond by simply giving up.

The primary one among executives, she says, is an inability to rely on other people: when most executives face a massive challenge or stressor, they try to figure out how to solve the problem alone.

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old.

It’s not the weight of the world that determines what we can accomplish. It is our fulcrum and lever.

Success is about more than simple resilience. It’s about using that downward momentum to propel ourselves in the opposite direction. It’s about capitalizing on setbacks and adversity to become even happier, even more motivated, and even more successful. It’s not falling down, it’s falling up.

Believing that, for the most part, our actions determine our fates in life can only spur us to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger.

if

By scanning our mental map for positive opportunities, and by rejecting the belief that every down in life leads us only further downward, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them.

These best and brightest willingly sacrificed happiness for success because, like so many of us, they had been taught that if you work hard you will be successful—and only then, once you are successful, will you be happy. They had been taught that happiness is the reward you get only when you become partner of an investment firm, win the Nobel Prize, or get elected to Congress. But in fact, as you will learn throughout this book, new research in psychology and neuroscience shows that it works the other way around: We become more successful when we are happier and more positive.

For untold generations, we have been led to believe that happiness orbited around success.

Each one of us is like that butterfly in the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.

One of my favorite studies found that if you memorize sets of positive, neutral, and negative words, then sleep for seven to eight hours, you will remember around 80 percent of all three lists a day later. If you miss a night of sleep and stay up for thirty-six hours as I did, you still remember most of the negative and neutral words, but you remember 59 percent fewer positive words!20 This is because your brain interprets a lack of sleep as a threat to the central nervous system, then goes on high alert, scanning the world for additional threats—that is, negatives.

our willpower weakens the more we use it.

Just as it takes days of concentrated practice to master a video game, training your brain to notice more opportunities takes practice focusing on the positive. The best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life.

Nothing had changed except that now instead of being 20 seconds away, the guitar was in immediate reach.

The key to creating these habits is ritual, repeated practice, until the actions become ingrained in your brain’s neural chemistry.

Yet in today’s world, we ironically sacrifice happiness for success only to lower our brains’ success rates.

2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful.

The belief that we are just our genes is one of the most pernicious myths in modern culture—the insidious notion that people come into the world with a fixed set of abilities and that they, and their brains, cannot change.

happiness is the precursor to success,

As my mentor Tal Ben-Shahar likes to say, “things do not necessarily happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best out of things that happen.

eudaimonia,

the things scientists have found to be most crucial to human happiness, like pursuing meaningful life goals, scanning the world for opportunities, cultivating an optimistic and grateful mindset, and holding on to rich social relationships.

With apologies to the delicate nuances of neuroscience, here is what is happening in a nutshell: Within our brains are billions upon billions of neurons, interconnected in every which way to form a complex set of neural pathways. Electrical currents travel down these pathways, from neuron to neuron, delivering the messages that make up our every thought and action. The more we perform a particular action, the more connections form between the corresponding neurons. (This is the origin of the common phrase “cells that fire together, wire together.”) The stronger this link, the faster the message can travel down the pathway. This is what makes the behavior seem second nature or automatic.

We have such a biological need for social support, our bodies can literally malfunction without it.6 For instance, lack of social contact can add 30 points to an adult’s blood pressure reading.

Some even treat it as a weakness, a sign that we’re not working hard enough. Every time we fall for this misguided creed, we undercut not only our mental and emotional well-being, but also our chances at success and achievement.

Happiness is not about lying to ourselves, or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brain so that we see the ways to rise above our circumstances

Not only had the happy films made them feel better, but they had undone the physiological effects of stress. In other words, a quick burst of positive emotions doesn’t just broaden our cognitive capacity; it also provides a quick and powerful antidote to stress and anxiety, which in turn improves our focus and our ability to function at our best level.

There were at least fifty other people in the bank. Surely someone deserved getting shot more than I did.

Anyone can send ripples of positivity throughout their workplace. But one thing I’ve found in my work with managers and companies is that this is even more true for leaders or people in a position of authority—mainly because (a) they determine company policies and shape the workplace culture; (b) they are often expected to set an example for their employees; and (c) they tend to interact with the most people over the course of the day. Sadly, in the modern workplace, leaders often scoff at the idea that focusing on happiness can have real bottom-line results.

In a study appropriately titled “Very Happy People,” researchers sought out the characteristics of the happiest 10 percent among us.4 Do they all live in warm climates? Are they all wealthy? Are they all physically fit? Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result—social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge—most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3.

The better your brain is at using its energy to focus on the positives, the greater your chances at success.

By denying the light of praise, we extinguish it. By bending the light toward others, we magnify it.

In Shawn Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage, he states, “positive emotions broaden our scope of cognition and behavior . . . they dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly . . . and see new ways of doing things.

As pessoas mais bem-sucedidas fazem exatamente o contrário. Em vez de se voltarem para dentro de si, elas se aproximam ainda mais de sua rede social de apoio. Em vez de não investir nela, as pessoas de sucesso recorrem a ela. Essas pessoas não apenas são mais felizes como também são mais produtivas, envolvidas, energizadas e resilientes. Elas sabem que seus relacionamentos sociais constituem o maior investimento que elas podem fazer para se favorecer do Benefício da Felicidade. INVISTA NA SUA FELICIDADE Um dos estudos psicológicos mais longos de todos os tempos – o estudo dos Homens de Harvard –, acompanhou 268 homens desde a entrada na faculdade no final dos anos 1930 até os dias de hoje.1 Com base no enorme volume de dados resultante, os cientistas conseguiram identificar as circunstâncias na

just as Copernicus discovered that the earth actually orbits the sun, recent advances in positive psychology and neuroscience have taught us that success actually revolves around happiness, not the other way around. Well, as it turns out, and as you’ve seen in this chapter, this finding is even more revolutionary than we could have ever imagined. Because we now also know that it’s not just our own individual success that orbits around our happiness. By making changes within ourselves, we can actually bring the benefits of the Happiness Advantage to our teams, our organizations

For untold generations, we have been led to believe that happiness orbited around success. That if we work hard enough, we will be successful, and only if we are successful will we become happy. Success was thought to be the fixed point of the work universe, with happiness revolving around it. Now, thanks to breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of positive psychology, we are learning that the opposite is true. When we are happy—when our mindset and mood are positive—we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.

experienced doctors back to school

we now know that happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement—

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.

The Cleveland Clinic Foundation funded a study in which one group of healthy volunteers spent fifteen minutes a day practicing “finger abductions,” which are basically like a biceps curl but with one finger.

before happiness and success comes your perception of your world. So before we can be happy and successful, we need to create a positive reality that allows us to see the possibility for both.

Fortune 500 companies are still using incentive programs that were proven ineffective almost a generation ago.

One of the very first things students in intro psychology, statistics, or economics courses learn is how to “clean up the data.

Seventy-five percent of success is predicted by your optimism level, your social support, and (perhaps most of all for entrepreneurs) your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat, according to Shawn Achor in a fabulous TED talk called “The Happy Secret to Better Work.

to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.