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

by Shawn Achor

At one large company, researchers found that managers who felt the most swamped by job pressure ran teams with the worst performance and the lowest net profits.8

When our brain hits the panic button, reason goes out the window and our wallets, our careers, and our bottom lines all suffer.

The point is to tease apart the stresses that we have to let go of because they’re out of our hands, while at the same time identifying the areas where our efforts will have a real impact, so that we can then focus our energy accordingly.

At work, the equivalent of this is concentrating your efforts on small areas where you know you can make a difference.

That’s why psychologists who specialize in goal-setting theory advocate setting goals of moderate difficulty—not so easy that we don’t have to try, but not so difficult that we get discouraged and give up.14

The point: Small successes can add up to major achievements. All it takes is drawing that first circle in the sand.

Common sense is not common action.

Because it’s the default option. And whether we’re aware of it or not, default options are everywhere, shaping our choices and our behavior in all areas of our lives.

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

Even though most of us live far removed from the football field, we each have our own version of an offensive line: our spouses, our families, and our friends. Surrounded by these people, big challenges feel more manageable and small challenges don’t even register on the radar. Just as the offensive line protects a quarterback from a particularly brutal sack, our social support prevents stress from knocking us down and getting in the way of our achieving our goals. And

At IBM, for example, when MIT researchers spent an entire year following 2,600 employees, observing their social ties, even using mathematical formulas to analyze the size and scope of their address books and buddy lists, they found that the more socially connected the IBM employees were, the better they performed.

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