The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
Shawn Achor
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0307591549
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.
Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:
• The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.
• The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.
• Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network
A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.
founded, John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Three hundred years later, I observed this principle come to life. Many of my students saw Harvard as a privilege, but others quickly lost sight of that reality and focused only on the workload, the competition, the stress. They fretted incessantly about their future, despite the fact that they were earning a degree that would open so many doors. They felt
there I stood, asking this room full of battleweary bankers to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” over and over again. (At least this time I remembered to specify that they sing it in their own heads, not out loud—a detail I once forgot on Wall Street, where I quickly learned the true definition of “tone deaf.”) My instructions were simple: “Close your eyes and start singing the song in your head. When you get to the end, start again. Keep going until I say ‘Stop.’ ” They did as they were told,
why I walked out onto Massachusetts Avenue and scanned my environment for a vulnerable car. To my brain’s momentary delight, the best car to steal—a police car—was serendipitously parked not five feet from me. Yes! Before the rational part of my brain had time to get a word in edgewise, I found myself acting on the pattern I had been practicing the evening before. Adrenaline shot through my body as I reached for the shiny handle of the Cambridge Police cruiser. The fact that there was a police
people recover and get back to normal. Valuable as such work is, it still only yields half the picture. You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. 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. You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.
are a set of seven tools you can use to achieve more every day. Here is what they will not do. They will not tell you to paint on a happy face, use “positive thinking” to wish away your problems, or worse, to pretend your problems don’t exist. I’m not here to tell you that everything always comes up roses. If there’s anything the past few years have taught me, it’s that this view is deluded. As I once heard a managing director at a large financial institution complain: “It’s one P.M., and six