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

by Shawn Achor

But with each victory, our goalposts of success keep getting pushed further and further out, so that happiness gets pushed over the horizon.

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

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. My friends wanted to know, Why study happiness at Harvard?

“cult of the average”

“the error of the average.” That’s the first mistake traditional psychology makes. If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.

You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.

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

But they had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains’ potential or how to find meaning and happiness.

tyranny of expectations

Countless studies have found that social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being and lowered stress, both an antidote for depression and a prescription for high performance.

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 Happiness Advantage starts at a different place. It asks us to be realistic about the present while maximizing our potential for the future.

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.

“subjective well-being”—because

pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

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

“joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.”

This revelation provides companies an additional incentive to care about employee happiness, since healthy employees will be more productive on the job.

What this means is that companies and leaders who take measures to cultivate a happy workplace will not only have more productive and efficient workers—they’ll have less absenteeism and lower healthcare expenditures.

“Broaden and Build Theory.”14

Instead of narrowing our actions down to fight or flight as negative emotions do, positive ones broaden the amount of possibilities we process, making us more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas.

The importance of a great teacher!

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

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

Sadly, in the modern workplace, leaders often scoff at the idea that focusing on happiness can have real bottom-line results.

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.

So the next time you interact with a colleague or direct report, make an effort to adopt a more positive tone and facial expression.

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.

Simply put, by changing the fulcrum of our mindset and lengthening our lever of possibility, we change what is possible.

have done this experiment in nearly 40 countries, and every time I conduct it, I hear a tremendous range in answers. (Shanghai wins for the largest split: from 20 seconds to 7 minutes!) The

Afterward, all 13 of the students’ arms reacted with the classic symptoms of poison ivy:

What??

One answer is that the brain is organized to act on what we predict will happen next, something psychologists call “Expectancy Theory.”

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

What if you forced yourself to learn three new things before the meeting ended?

What I mean is that the more you believe in your own ability to succeed, the more likely it is that you will.

More important, our beliefs about our abilities are not necessarily innate, but can change, as our mindset is almost always in flux.

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.

This phenomenon is called the Pygmalion Effect: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life.

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.

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?

How do we know what our potential is, and what kind of limits should we put on it?

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.

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.

“predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise.15

The key, then, is not to completely shut out all the bad, all the time, but to have a reasonable, realistic, healthy sense of optimism.

In other words, the people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened.

When people don’t believe there is a way up, they have virtually no choice but to stay as down as they are.

And choosing a positive counterfact, besides simply making us feel better, sets ourselves up for the whole host of benefits to motivation and performance we now know accompanies a positive mindset.

If, however, we first concentrate our efforts on small manageable goals, we regain the feeling of control so crucial to performance.

Among students, greater feelings of control lead not only to higher levels of happiness, but also to higher grades and more motivation to pursue the careers they really want.