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

by Shawn Achor

The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life.

The Happiness Advantage: Capitalize on positivity to improve productivity/performance—retrain your brain to be positive. • The Fulcrum and the Lever: Adjust your mindset (the fulcrum) in ways that give us more power (lever)—we control how we think about the world. • The Tetris Effect: Retrain our brains to find opportunity wherever we look or wherever we are—focus on opportunity. • Falling Up: Find the path out and up from the negative events of our lives. How can this make us stronger? • The Zorro Circle: Regain control in the midst of chaos by bringing our circle in—focus on small, manageable goals until we get stronger. • The 20-Second Rule: With limited willpower we need to make small energy adjustments to reroute the path of least resistance and instead build better habits. • Social Investment: Invest in our friends, peers, and family so that when challenges and stress present themselves, you have a social support network.