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

by Shawn Achor

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

In essence, we tend to miss what we’re not looking for.

The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel—and

because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become.

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 more your brain picks up on the positive, the more you’ll expect this trend to continue, and so the more optimistic you’ll be.

optimism, it turns out, is a tremendously powerful predictor of work performance.

armed with positivity, the brain stays open to possibility. Psychologists call this “predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise.15

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.

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.

It’s not your age, or what you do for a living; it’s the training and consistency that count.

The ideal mindset isn’t heedless of risk, but it does give priority to the good. Not just because that makes us happier but because that is precisely what creates more good.

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.

Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth. Conversely, if we conceive of a fall as the worst thing in the world, it becomes just that.

Psychologists have termed this experience Adversarial Growth, or Post-Traumatic Growth, to distinguish it from the better-known term Post-Traumatic Stress.

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

mindset takes center stage.

so the strategies that most often lead to Adversarial Growth include positive reinterpretation of the situation or event, optimism, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on (rather than trying to avoid or deny it).

Reframing

They speak not just of “bouncing back,” but of “bouncing forward.”

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

As the Harvard Business authors conclude, making mistakes like this is “a powerful way to accelerate learning and increase competitiveness.”

psychologists actually recommend that we fail early and often.

lo and behold, the group encouraged to make errors not only exhibited greater feelings of self-efficacy, but because they had learned to figure their own way out of mistakes, they were also far faster and more accurate in how they used the software later on.

Seligman realized the value of what they had just stumbled upon: They had accidentally taught the dogs to be helpless.

The fact is that in our modern, often overstressed business world, cubicles are the new shuttleboxes, and workers the new dogs. In fact, one study shows just how closely we humans resemble our canine counterparts.

when we eliminate any upward options from our mental maps, and worse, eliminate our motivation to search for them, we end up undermining our ability to tackle the challenge at hand.

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

Similarly, America’s top companies have often used recessions to reevaluate and improve their business practices.

CHANGE YOUR COUNTERFACT

Because it’s invented, we actually have the power in any given situation to consciously select a counterfact that makes us feel fortunate rather than helpless. 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.

CHANGE YOUR EXPLANATORY STYLE

No matter what difficulty they faced, they always bounced right back. He soon discovered that they all shared a positive way of interpreting adversity—or what the researchers termed an optimistic “explanatory style.”

how we choose to explain the nature of past events—has a crucial impact on our happiness and future success.

Their beliefs then directly affect their actions; the ones who believe the latter statement sink into helplessness and stop trying, while the ones who believe the former are spurred on to higher performance.

Eeyor in retrospectives.

First-year plebes with a more optimistic explanatory style perform better than test scores predict, and are less likely to drop out than their peers.

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.

LEARN YOUR ABCD’S

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...

Is it a problem that is only temporary and local in nature or do we think it is permanent and pervasive? Are there ready solutio...

If we believe the former—that is, 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 m...

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

What is the evidence for this belief? Is it airtight? Would we let a friend get away with such reasoning? Or is the reasoning clearly specious once we step outside of ourselves and take a look? What are some other plausible interpretations of this event? What are some more adaptive reactions to it? Is there another counterfactual we can adopt instead?

And finally, if the adversity truly is bad, is it as bad as we first thought?

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 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.

PRINCIPLE #5 THE ZORRO CIRCLE

Similarly, employees who feel they have high levels of control at the office are better at their jobs and report more job satisfaction.

People who felt in control at work also had lower levels of stress, work-family conflict, and job turnover.