The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work

by Shawn Achor

happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result.

happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement—giving us the competitive edge that I call the Happiness Advantage.

Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive bra...

The students who were so focused on the stress and the pressure—the ones who saw learning as a chore—were missing out on all the opportunities right in front of them.

If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you’ll only attain the average and you’ll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average.

In the midst of stress, rather than investing, these individuals divested from the greatest predictor of success and happiness: their social support network.

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.

Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.

Happiness implies a positive mood in the present and a positive outlook for the future. Martin Seligman, the pioneer in positive psychology, has broken it down into three, measurable components: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.

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

Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina and perhaps the world’s leading expert on the subject, describes the ten most common positive emotions: “joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.”

“study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.

Happiness can improve our physical health, which in turn keeps us working faster and longer and therefore makes us more likely to succeed.

Eye-tracking experiments have shown the same thing: Positive emotions actually expand our peripheral line of vision.17

Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge.

Because in addition to broadening our intellectual and creative capacities, positive emotions also provide a swift antidote to physical stress and anxiety, what psychologists call “the undoing effect.”

In other words, a quick burst of positive emotions doesn’t just broaden our cognitive capacity; it also provides a quick and powerful antidote to stress and anxiety, which in turn improves our focus and our ability to function at our best level.

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

Our power to maximize our potential is based on two important things: (1) the length of our lever—how much potential power and possibility we believe we have, and (2) the position of our fulcrum—the mindset with which we generate the power to change.

In other words, “reality” is merely our brain’s relative understanding of the world based on where and how we are observing it.

psychology has shown that mindset doesn’t just change how we feel about an experience—it actually changes the objective results of that experience.

beliefs can actually change the concrete results of our efforts and our work.

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

When we reconnect ourselves with the pleasure of the “means,” as opposed to only focusing on the “ends,” we adopt a mindset more conducive not only to enjoyment, but to better results.

their belief in their own ability was an even stronger predictor of job performance than the actual level of skill or training they had.

So when faced with a difficult task or challenge, give yourself an immediate competitive advantage by focusing on all the reasons you will succeed, rather than fail. Remind yourself of the relevant skills you have, rather than those you lack. Think of a time you have been in a similar circumstance in the past and performed well. Years of research have shown that a specific and concerted focus on your strengths during a difficult task produces the best results.

“although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”

By changing the way we perceive ourselves and our work, we can dramatically improve our results.

After many years and hundreds of interviews with workers in every conceivable profession, she has found that employees have one of three “work orientations,” or mindsets about our work. We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling.

Well, if you can’t make actual changes to your daily work, ask yourself what potential meaning and pleasure already exist in what you do.

Researchers have found that even the smallest tasks can be imbued with greater meaning when they are connected to personal goals and values. The more we can align our daily tasks with our personal vision, the more likely we are to see work as a calling.

The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.

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?

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.

Trained to be on the lookout for the flaws in every argument, the holes in every case, they start “to overestimate the significance and permanence of the problems they encounter,” the fastest route to depression and anxiety—which in turn interferes with their ability to do their job.

Tax auditors should look for errors. Athletes should be competitive. Traders should apply rigorous risk analysis. The problem comes when individuals cannot “compartmentalize” their abilities.

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 best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life.

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.

The most successful decisions come when we are thinking clearly and creatively enough to recognize all the paths available to us, and accurately predict where that path will lead.

“we are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices.”1

“it appears that it is not the type of event per se that influences posttraumatic growth, but rather the subjective experience of the event.”

“things do not necessarily happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best out of things that happen.”

When we fail, or when life delivers us a shock, we can become so hopeless that we respond by simply giving up.

“It was as if they’d learned they were helpless to turn off noise, so they didn’t even try, even though everything else—the time and place, all that—had changed. They carried that noise-helplessness right through to the new experiment.”15

When people feel helpless in one area of life, they not only give up in that one area; they often “overlearn” the lesson and apply it to other situations. They become convinced that one dead-end path must be proof that all possible paths are dead ends.