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by
Shawn Achor
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December 16 - December 16, 2020
It’s the very definition of pessimism and depression—an event map with all dead ends—and a surefire route to failure.
When people don’t believe there is a way up, they have virtually no choice but to stay as down as they are.
One way to help ourselves see the path from adversity to opportunity is to practice the ABCD model of interpretation: Adversity, Belief, Consequence, and Disputation.
Adversities, no matter what they are, simply don’t hit us as hard as we think they will.
Feeling that we are in control, that we are masters of our own fate at work and at home, is one of the strongest drivers of both well-being and performance.
productivity, happiness, and health have less to do with how much control we actually have and more with how much control we think we have.
Well, the most successful people, in work and in life, are those who have what psychologists call an “internal locus of control,” the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes.
Believing that, for the most part, our actions determine our fates in life can only spur us to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger.
feeling a lack of control over pressure at work is as great a risk factor for heart disease as even high blood pressure.
Our reality-TV culture, which tells us that change isn’t worth making (or televising) unless it’s immediate and Olympian in size, doesn’t help either.
When the challenges we face are particularly challenging and the payoff remains far away, setting smaller, more manageable goals helps us build our confidence and celebrate our forward progress, and keeps us committed to the task at hand.
As the Father of Modern Psychology so shrewdly advised, if we want to create lasting change, we should “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
Habits are like financial capital—forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come.
“A tendency to act,” he wrote, “only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use.”5 In other words, habits form because our brain actually changes in response to frequent practice.
Because the students who had to use every ounce of their willpower to avoid eating the enticing chocolate chip cookies didn’t have the willpower or mental energy left to struggle with a complex puzzle—even though avoiding cookies and persisting on a puzzle are seemingly completely unrelated.
“many widely different forms of self-control draw on a common resource, or self-control strength, which is quite limited and hence can be depleted readily.”10 Put another way, our willpower weakens the more we use it.
we are drawn—powerfully, magnetically—to those things that are easy, convenient, and habitual, and it is incredibly difficult to overcome this inertia.
Active leisure is more enjoyable, but it almost always requires more initial effort—getting the bike out of the garage, driving to the museum, tuning the guitar, and so on. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “activation energy.” In physics, activation energy is the initial spark needed to catalyze a reaction.
It’s not the sheer number and volume of distractions that gets us into trouble; it’s the ease of access to them.
distraction, always just one click away, has become the path of least resistance.
was put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance, so it actually took less energy and effort to pick up and practice the guitar than to avoid it.
Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.
Our best weapon in the battle against bad habits—be they Slurpees, Seinfeld reruns, or distractions at work—is simply to make it harder for ourselves to succumb to them.
Limiting the choices we have to make can also help lower the barrier to positive change.
your brain, once it has tipped toward a habit, will naturally keep rolling in that direction, following the path of perceived least resistance.
The key to their use—to permanent, positive change—is to create habits that automatically pay dividends, without continued concerted effort or extensive reserves of willpower. The key to creating these habits is ritual, repeated practice, until the actions become ingrained in your brain’s neural chemistry. And the key to daily practice is to put your desired actions as close to the path of least resistance as humanly possible.
that when we encounter an unexpected challenge or threat, the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.
“like food and air, we seem to need social relationships to thrive.”
individuals who invest in their social support systems are simply better equipped to thrive in even the most difficult circumstances, while those who withdraw from the people around them effectively cut off every line of protection they have available, at the very moment they need them most.
The most successful people I’ve worked with know that even in an extraordinarily competitive environment, we are more equipped to handle challenges and obstacles when we pool the resources of those around us and capitalize on even the smallest moments we spend interacting with others.
“The people we interviewed from good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did largely because they loved who they did it with.”
“Ties do not extend outward in straight lines like spokes on a wheel,” they write. “Instead, these paths double back on themselves and spiral around like a tangled pile of spaghetti, weaving in and out of other paths that rarely ever leave the plate.”
“Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else’s toxic state.”
