The Happiness Track Quotes

“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. —Alan Watts1 When”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“1. Live (or work) in the moment. Instead of always thinking about what’s next on your to-do list, focus on the task or conversation at hand. You will become not only more productive but also more charismatic. 2. Tap into your resilience. Instead of living in overdrive, train your nervous system to bounce back from setbacks. You will naturally reduce stress and thrive in the face of difficulties and challenges. 3. Manage your energy. Instead of engaging in exhausting thoughts and emotions, learn to manage your stamina by remaining calm and centered. You’ll be able to save precious mental energy for the tasks that need it most. 4. Do nothing. Instead of spending all your time focused intently on your field, make time for idleness, fun, and irrelevant interests. You will become more creative and innovative and will be more likely to come up with breakthrough ideas. 5. Be good to yourself. Instead of only playing to your strengths and being self-critical, be compassionate with yourself and understand that your brain is built to learn new things. You will improve your ability to excel in the face of challenge and learn from mistakes. 6. Show compassion to others. Instead of remaining focused on yourself, express compassion to and show interest in those around you and maintain supportive relationships with your co-workers, boss, and employees. You will dramatically increase the loyalty and commitment of your colleagues and employees, thereby improving productivity, performance, and influence. These”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Research shows that, for some, the idea of helping a person who is suffering or in need can feel daunting. One may feel overwhelmed by the situation and wish to get away from it. In her books and TED talk, Brené Brown52 encapsulates this experience with one term: vulnerability. Being faced with another person’s pain is difficult. Being compassionate toward that person may make you feel uncomfortable. It will require you to display deep authenticity, and we’re not used to displaying vulnerability at work. Yet it’s worth it.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Every day, we have a choice about how we interpret our lives. We have the choice to either focus on what we want and don’t yet have (say, better work habits), thereby feeling down. Or we can focus on what we do have (say, loyalty and integrity). Every one of us has at least one aspect of ourselves (and probably many more!) for which we can be grateful. When we take note of our positive qualities and are grateful for them, we become more self-compassionate—not to mention that we start to see ourselves in a much more realistic and positive light.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“self-compassion is one of the most fundamental determinants of resilience and success. Where excessive self-criticism can leave us weak and distraught, self-compassion is at the heart of empowerment.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Perhaps more importantly, when you believe in strengths alone and you aren’t successful—not getting into your first choice university, not getting that job you wanted, not getting the promotion you thought you deserved, not being in a good relationship—you are devastated. You become hopeless because you assume you can’t progress in those areas. Unsurprisingly, research shows that subscribing to the idea of strengths is linked to higher levels of depression,1 probably in part because it leads to excessive self-criticism.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“He turned to music—Mozart in particular—when he was grappling with complex problems and needed inspiration.8 He is quoted as saying, “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration. . . . Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Some of the most inventive people in our society have claimed that their game-changing insights arose out of daydreaming or irrelevant and mindless tasks.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“The happiest people don’t have the best of everything, but they make the best of everything they have”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Many people go to their graves harboring anger from an event that happened decades ago! Many”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“When your mind is caught up in the past or future, chances are you experience negative emotions. Anxiety and fear, for example, arise when your mind is focused on the future. In particular, when you are focused on how much you still need to accomplish, you typically experience anxiety and stress. As for negative states like anger or frustration, you’ll notice that they arise when your mind is caught in the past; whatever happened to make you angry is over, yet your mind is still dwelling on that event. Regret also has to do with the past. It’s a new day, a new hour, and a new circumstance, but you’re still wallowing in a situation you wish you had handled differently.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“On the other hand, research23 shows that when we are completely in tune with what we are doing, we more fully enjoy that activity. Moreover, being completely present allows us to enter a state of complete absorption that is extremely productive. Think of a time when you were faced with a project you were dreading. You knew it would involve a lot of effort; maybe you kept putting it off. However, once you started—perhaps finally egged on by an impending deadline—you became engaged and the project just flowed. You found that you actually enjoyed the process. You became highly productive because you focused completely on the task at hand. Instead of being stressed about the future and having your attention pulled in different directions, you got the work done and done well, and you were happy to boot.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“In other words, multitasking may mean doing more things but doing them less well. A manager at a communications firm told me that many of her employees are so focused on multitasking that they end up handing in subpar work. She finds herself telling her employees to slow down—an unusual request from a manager—because she knows that if they are present and deliberately thinking through each task, they would not only perform better but also learn from each task and thereby improve future performance as well.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“In a sense, we’ve trained our brain to process several things at once, but the result is that nothing is processed well. One study showed that if you are driving and listening to someone speak at the same time, the brain activation otherwise devoted to driving decreases by 37 percent.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Multitasking, instead of helping us accomplish more things faster, actually keeps us from doing anything well. When you are performing any individual task, if you are able to give it your undivided attention, you will accomplish it far more efficiently and quickly while also enjoying the process.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“For example, we take our children to the park after work while fitting in a call to a colleague; we attend a meeting while working on our to-do list for the following day; or we post a LinkedIn update as we are having lunch with a friend. When multitasking, we are never fully attentive to what is going on right now—and we lose out on what is happening in that precise moment.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“BEING PRESENT MAKES YOU MORE PRODUCTIVE AND HAPPIER Most of us have lost the simple ability to stay in the present. We maintain a packed schedule with hardly any breaks and fill every moment of down time with multitasking.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Paradoxically, slowing down and focusing on what is happening in front of you right now—being present instead of always having your mind on the next thing—will make you much more successful. Expressions like “live in the moment” or “carpe diem” sound like clichés, yet science backs them up robustly. Research shows that remaining present—rather than constantly focusing on what you have to do next—will make you more productive and happier and, moreover, will give you that elusive quality we attribute to the most successful people: charisma.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“•  Relationships. At work, constantly focusing on achievement can increase negative interactions with co-workers, leading to competitiveness, rivalry, and distrust, which further lead to counterproductive work behaviors.17 In personal relationships, it is linked to higher levels of work-life conflict, reduced family satisfaction and functioning, and relationship problems with spouses.18 If you are always thinking about the next thing you want to accomplish, you likely are not as present for your family and loved ones. They inevitably sense that they are not as important as whatever task you are worried about tackling next.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“However, there are major problems with constantly trying to get things done and focusing on the next thing: doing so ironically prevents you from being as successful as you want to be and wreaks havoc on body and mind. Many studies13 show that the workaholic or successaholic chase can be detrimental on a number of levels:         •  Health. It is linked to lower levels of physical and psychological health. In particular, it is associated with burnout, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and depersonalization (a disturbing sense of dissociation from yourself that accompanies prolonged stress or trauma). It is also linked to lower overall life satisfaction.14         •  Work. It can—counterintuitively perhaps—damage productivity and performance. It has been linked to lower job satisfaction and increased job stress, which reduce productivity15 by, for example, reducing attention span.16 This should come as no surprise. If you are continuously focused on the next thing you need to accomplish, only part of your attention is directed toward your present activity.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“WHY CHASING THE FUTURE DOES NOT LEAD TO SUCCESS The reason we are so hooked on getting things done is that we believe the payoff that comes from achievements—an award or a larger savings account—will ultimately lead to the biggest payoff of all: happiness. We have the illusion that the success, fame, money—fill in the blank—that we are chasing will bring us some kind of lasting fulfillment. We often expect that we’ll be happy when we get this or that project over with.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Research6 by Michael Treadway has shown that people who work hard release greater amounts of dopamine (neurotransmitters that are markers of pleasure) in reward areas of the brain. Overachievers live off the fleeting high that comes from responding to that one extra e-mail, getting that additional project out of the way, or checking one last thing off the to-do list. Work addiction—unlike addictions involving alcohol or other substances—is rewarded by our culture (with promotions, bonuses, praise, awards, and so on) and therefore considered a good thing despite its long-term negative impact on well-being.7”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“You’re caught up in the compulsion to constantly achieve, always adding meat to your bio and feathers to your cap. You haven’t finished one task before your mind is on to the next one. You work hard to clear things off your to-do list, and then immediately fill it up again. You might be working on a presentation or article, but your mind is already on the topic you will cover in the next one. Even at home you might be doing dishes, but your mind is making a mental list of other chores you need to tackle.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“Why? Because you live by the faulty theory that, if you want to succeed, you need to continually be getting things done and moving on to the next goal as quickly as possible. Your mind is always on the next task, the next accomplishment, the next person you need to talk to. In the process, you sacrifice the present—forgoing personal happiness, enduring negative feelings and tremendous stress—because you believe the eventual payoff is worth it. As a consequence, you get caught up in frantic and anxious workaholism.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“This rat race does not just take place at Stanford or in Silicon Valley. It’s everywhere. Whether you’re a web designer, teacher, firefighter, or army officer, you are encouraged to keep checking things off the to-do list, amassing accomplishments, and focusing your efforts on the future. There’s always something more you can do to further yourself at work: an extra project or responsibility you can take on, more schooling you can complete to ensure a promotion, or an additional investment to wager on just in case! There’s always that co-worker who is putting in longer hours, showing you that you too can and should do more. And so you strive nonstop to exceed your goals, constantly playing catch-up with your ambitious to-do list.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“These six strategies will greatly improve your psychological and physical well-being. They will help you be happier and live a life of meaning and purpose, and—as I show throughout the book—enhance success. The strategies are not complicated; applying them to your daily life does not require complex training or huge lifestyle changes. In fact, these strategies tap into resources you already have.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“6. Show compassion to others. Instead of remaining focused on yourself, express compassion to and show interest in those around you and maintain supportive relationships with your co-workers, boss, and employees. You will dramatically increase the loyalty and commitment of your colleagues and employees, thereby improving productivity, performance, and influence.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“5. Be good to yourself. Instead of only playing to your strengths and being self-critical, be compassionate with yourself and understand that your brain is built to learn new things. You will improve your ability to excel in the face of challenge and learn from mistakes.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“4. Do nothing. Instead of spending all your time focused intently on your field, make time for idleness, fun, and irrelevant interests. You will become more creative and innovative and will be more likely to come up with breakthrough ideas.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

“3. Manage your energy. Instead of engaging in exhausting thoughts and emotions, learn to manage your stamina by remaining calm and centered. You’ll be able to save precious mental energy for the tasks that need it most.”
― Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success