The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life

by Shawn Achor

The benefits of priming the brain with positive thoughts don’t end at childhood either. To the contrary, studies have found that across the board, in both academic and business settings, these same benefits persist throughout our adult

The implications of these studies are undeniable: People who put their heads down and wait for work to bring eventual happiness put themselves at a huge disadvantage, while those who capitalize on positivity every chance they get come out ahead.

the happy doctors made the right diagnosis much faster and exhibited much more creativity. On average, they came to a correct diagnosis only 20 percent of the way through the manuscript—nearly twice as fast as the control group—and showed about two and half times less anchoring.

Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge.

positive emotions also provide a swift antidote to physical stress and anxiety, what psychologists call “the undoing effect.”

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.

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.

As we have seen, just a short humorous video clip, a quick conversation with a friend, or even a small gift of candy can produce significant and immediate boosts in cognitive power and job performance.

acts of altruism—giving to friends and strangers alike—decrease stress and strongly contribute to enhanced mental health.

while the positive feelings we get from material objects are frustratingly fleeting, spending money on experiences, especially ones with other people, produces positive emotions that are both more meaningful and more lasting.

reapportion money from your “having” column to your “doing” column.

Each time we use a skill, whatever it is, we experience a burst of positivity. If you find yourself in need of a happiness booster, revisit a talent you haven’t used in a while.

Even more fulfilling than using a skill, though, is exercising a strength of character, a trait that is deeply embedded in who we are.

When 577 volunteers were encouraged to pick one of their signature strengths and use it in a new way each day for a week, they became significantly happier and less depressed than control groups.38 And these benefits lasted: Even after the experiment was over, their levels of happiness

remained heightened a full six months later.

Studies have shown that the more you use your signature strengths in daily life,...

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.

Bosses and managers have a tendency to honor the employees who can go the longest without breaks or vacation and those who don’t “waste” their time socializing. Few executives encourage their employees to take time out from their work days for exercise or meditation, or allow them to leave 30 minutes early one night a week to do some local volunteering—even though, as the research proves, the return on investment for each of these activities is huge.

Most of the people I work with admit that they would be embarrassed or ashamed if the boss walked by as they were laughing at a YouTube video, or talking to their five-year-old son on the phone, or telling a joke to colleagues in the hallway. And yet as we’ve seen, all these practices provide exactly the kinds of quick bursts of positive emotions that can improve our performance on the job.

sacrificing positivity in the name of time management and efficiency actually slows us down.

Toyota saw an instant jump in productivity at its North American Parts Center when it instituted a strength-based training for employees.40

provide frequent recognition and encouragement. As studies have shown, managers who do so see a substantial increase in their employees’ productivity.

one study found that project teams with encouraging managers performed 31 percent better than teams whose managers were less positive and less open with

Chip Conley, CEO of a wildly successful chain of boutique hotels, makes time at the end of his executive meetings to allow one person to talk for one minute about someone in the company who deserves recognition.44 It could be a peer or someone many ranks down, a manager or a maid. After the executive has spoken for one minute about why this employee deserves recognition, a different executive at the meeting volunteers to call, e-mail, or visit that employee to tell him or her what a great job that employee is doing.

To help these people capitalize on the Happiness Advantage, I often recommend that they keep one thing in mind: the number 2.9013. This may seem random, but a decade of research on high and low performance teams by psychologist and business consultant Marcial Losada shows just how important it is.47 Based on Losada’s extensive mathematical modeling, 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful. This means that it takes about three positive comments, experiences, or expressions to fend off the languishing effects of one negative. Dip below this tipping point, now known as the Losada Line, and workplace performance quickly suffers. Rise above it—ideally, the research shows, to a ratio of 6 to 1—and teams produce their very best work.

Once we accept this new order in the working universe—that happiness is the center around which success orbits—we can change the way we work, interact with colleagues, and lead our teams, to give our own careers, and our whole organizations, the competitive edge.

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.

we can use our brain to change how we process the world, and that in turn changes how we react to it.

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 ...

Archimedes, the greatest scientist and mathematician of ancient Greece, famously posited, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

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.

you don’t need to try so hard to generate power and produce results. Our potential, as we saw in Part 1, is not fixed. The more we move our fulcrum (or mindset), the more our lever lengthens and so the more power we generate.

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

In 1979, Langer designed a week-long experiment on a group of 75-year-old men.1 The men knew little about the nature of the experiment except that they would be gone for a week at a retreat center, and they could bring along no pictures, newspapers, magazines, or books dated later than 1959. When they arrived, the men were gathered into a room and told that for the next week they were to pretend as though it was the year 1959–a time when these 75-year-old men were merely 55 years young. To reinforce the scenario, they were supposed to dress and act like they did at the time, and they were given ID badges with pictures of themselves in their mid-50s. Over the course of the week, they were instructed to talk about President Eisenhower and other events in their lives that had happened at that time. Some took to referring to their old jobs in the present tense, as if they had never retired. Life and Saturday Evening Post issues from 1959 were displayed on the coffee tables. In short, everything was designed to make them see the world through the lens of being 55.

She wanted to prove that our “mental construction”—the way we conceive of ourselves—has a direct influence upon the physical aging process. Langer had other words for it, but essentially she was arguing that by moving the fulcrum and lever of these 75-year-old men, she could change the “objective” reality of their age.

And that is exactly what happened. Before the retreat, the men were tested on every aspect we assume deteriorates with age: physical strength, posture, perception, cognition, and short-term memory. After the retreat, most of the men had improved in every category; they were significantly more flexible, had better posture, and even much-improved hand strength. Their average eyesight even improved by almost 10 percent, as did their performance on tests of memory. In over half the men, intelligence, long thought to be fixed from adolescence, moved up as well. Even their physical appearance changed; random people who didn’t know anything about the experiment were shown pictures of the men both before and after the experiment, and asked to guess their age. Based on these objective ratings, the men looked, on average, three years younger than when they arrived. This flew in the face of everything we thought we understood about physiology and aging, and revealed radical new implications about the power of mindset to shape reality.

our external “reality” is far more malleable than many of us think, and far more dependent on the e...

allowing ourselves to engage in activities we enjoy can actually greatly enhance our performance at work.

when faced with a difficult task or challenge, give yourself an immediate competitive advantage by focusing on all the reasons you will succeed, rather than fail.

Years of research have shown that a specific and concerted focus on your strengths during a difficult task produces the best results.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore your weaknesses or chant empty affirmations to yourself or take on tasks you can’t handle, it just means to focus on what you are actually

good at as you walk down the hallway.

our external circumstances predict only about 10 percent of our total happiness.12 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.”

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.

Imagine two janitors at the local elementary school. One focuses only on the mess he must clean up each night, while the other believes that he is contributing to a cleaner and healthier environment for the students. They both undertake the same tasks every day, but their different mindsets dictate their work satisfaction, their sense of fulfillment, and ultimately how well they do their job.

rewrite their “job description” into what Tal Ben-Shahar calls a “calling description.” I have them think about how the same tasks might be written in a way that would entice others to apply for the job. The goal is not to misrepresent the work they do, but to highlight the meaning that can be derived from it.

Now fast-forward to the twentieth century, to one of the most well-known psychology experiments ever performed. A team of researchers led by Robert Rosenthal went into an elementary school and administered intelligence tests to the students.20 The researchers then told the teachers in each of the classrooms which students—say, Sam, Sally, and Sarah—the data had identified as academic superstars, the ones with the greatest potential for growth. They asked the teachers not to mention the results of the study to the students, and not to spend any more or less time with them. (And, in fact, the teachers were warned they would be observed to make sure they did not.) At the end of the year, the students were tested again, and indeed, Sam, Sally, and Sarah posted off-the-chart intellectual ability. This would be a predictable story, except for an O. Henry-type twist at the end. When Sam, Sally, and Sarah had been tested at the beginning of the experiment, they were found to be absolutely, wonderfully ordinary. The researchers had randomly picked their names and then lied to the teachers about their ability. But after the experiment, they

had in fact turned into academic superstars.

Pygmalion Effect: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life.

This is a shining example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: People act as we expect them to act, which means that a leader’s expectations about what he thinks will motivate his employees often end up coming true.