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

by Shawn Achor

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.