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

by Shawn Achor

Every Monday, ask yourself these three questions: (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?

the Tetris Effect isn’t just about video games; as we’re about to explain in more detail, it is a metaphor for the way our brains dictate the way we see the world around us.

And worse, the better we get at scanning for the negative, the more we miss out on the positive—those things in life that bring us greater happiness, and in turn fuel our success.

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.

James once said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

psychologists call “inattentional blindness,” our frequent inability to see what is often right in front of us if we’re not focusing directly on it.

we tend to miss what we’re not looking for.

This selective perception is also why when we are looking for something, we see it everywhere.

Repeated studies have shown that two people can view the same situation and actually see different things, depending on what they are expecting to see. It’s not just that they come away with different interpretations of the same event, but that they have actually seen different things in their visual field.

Negative Tetris Effect, the consequences can be debilitating to both our happiness and our work performance.

the goal of a Positive Tetris Effect: Instead of creating a cognitive pattern that looks for negatives and blocks success, it trains our brains to scan the world for the opportunities and ideas that allow our success rate to grow.

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.

Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely.

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.

The better they got at scanning the world for good things to write down, the more good things they saw, without even trying, wherever they looked.

Here’s a common question I get when I discuss the virtues of a Positive Tetris Effect: “If I focus only on the good, won’t I be blind to real problems? You can’t run a business wearing rose-colored glasses.”

That’s why I like to offer a slightly revised version of the metaphor: rose-tinted glasses.

rose-tinted glasses let the really major problems into our field of vision, while still keeping our focus largely on the positive.

can positivity be overdone? Absolutely.

Being critical can also be useful not just to individuals and businesses but to society as a whole, especially when it drives us to acknowledge inequalities and work to right them.

When we train our brains to adapt a Positive Tetris Effect, we’re not just improving our chance at happiness, we’re setting off a chain of events that helps us reap all the benefits of a positive brain.

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.

the Third Path, that leads us from failure or setback to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fall.

our ability to find the Third Path is the difference between those who are crippled

by failure and those who rise above it.

Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more...

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, reminds us that “we are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeat...

Post-Traumatic Growth

While Tedeschi admits that the idea itself is ancient—surely you’ve heard the maxim “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”—he explains that “it has only been in the last 25 years or so that this phenomenon, the possibility of something good emerging from the struggle with something very difficult, has been the focus of systematic theorizing and empirical investigation.”

majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer.

After trauma, people also report enhanced personal strength and self-confidence, as well as a heightened appreciation for, and a greater intimacy in, their social relationships.6

A spotless résumé is not nearly as promising as one that showcases defeat and growth.

Tal Ben-Shahar writes that “we can only learn to deal with failure by actually experiencing failure, by living through it. The earlier we face difficulties and drawbacks, the better prepared we are to deal with the inevitable obstacles along our path.”

When people feel helpless in one area of life, they not only give up in that one area; they often “overlearn” the lesson and apply it to other situations.

We don’t have to stretch far to see this negative cycle on a larger social scale—learned helplessness is endemic in inner city schools, prisons, and elsewhere. When people don’t believe there is a way up, they have virtually no choice but to stay as down as they are.

Economic adversity forces companies to find creative ways to cut costs and inspires managers to get back in touch with the employees and operations on the ground floor.

Decades of subsequent study have since shown that explanatory style—how we choose to explain the nature of past events—has a crucial impact on our happiness and future success.

People with an optimistic explanatory style interpret adversity as being local and temporary (i.e., “It’s not that bad, and it will get better.”) while those with a pessimistic explanatory style see these events as more global and permanent (i.e., “It’s really bad, and it’s never going to change.”).

testing revealed that the agents with more optimistic styles sold 37 percent more insurance than those with pessimistic ones, and that the most optimistic agents actually sold fully 88 percent more than the most pessimistic ones. Furthermore, agents who were more optimistic were half as likely to quit as were the pessimists.

This was the answer MetLife was looking for. They decided to hire a special force of agents picked solely on the basis of explanatory style. And it paid off. The next year, these agents outsold their more pessimistic counterparts by 21 percent; during the second year, by 57 percent.

One way to help ourselves see the path from adversity to opportunity is to practice the ABCD model of interpretation: Adversity, Belief, Consequence, and Disputation.

Adversity is the event we can’t change; it is what it is.

Belief is our reaction to the event; why we thought it happened and what we think it means for the future.

if we see the adversity as short-term or as an opportunity for growth or appropriately confined to only part of our life—then we maximize the chance of a positive Consequence.

Disputation involves first telling ourselves that our belief is just that—a belief, not fact—and then challenging (or disputing) it.

the idea that things are never as bad as they seem is actually a fact based on our fundamental biology.

we overestimate how unhappy it will make us and for how long.

Adversities, no matter what they are, simply don’t hit us as hard as we think they will. Just knowing this quirk of human psychology—that our fear of consequences is always worse than the consequences themselves—can help us move toward a more optimistic interpretation of the downs we will inevitably face.

Success is about more than simple resilience. It’s about using that downward momentum to propel ourselves in the opposite direction.

It’s not falling down, it’s falling up.