The Happiness Advantage
Shawn Achor
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Thanks to this cutting-edge science, we now know that happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result.
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Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.
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“The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
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If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.
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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.
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This focus on the negative tricks our brains into believing that this sorry ratio is reality, that most of life is negative.
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social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being and lowered stress, both an antidote for depression and a prescription for high performance.
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they had been taught that if you work hard you will be successful—and only then, once you are successful, will you be happy.
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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.
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Yet in today’s world, we ironically sacrifice happiness for success only to lower our brains’ success rates.
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Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.
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The point is, we do not know the limits of human potential.
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How Happiness Gives Your Brain–and Your Organization–the Competitive Edge In 1543, Nicolas Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres). Until then, most of the world had believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around the planet. But Copernicus famously argued that precisely the opposite was true—Earth revolved around the sun—a revelation that eventually changed the way humans saw the entire universe. Today, a similar fundamental shift in the field of psychology is underway. For untold generations, we have been led to believe that happiness orbited around success. That if we work hard enough, we will be successful, and only if we are successful will we become happy. Success was thought to be the fixed point of the work universe, with happiness revolving around it. Now, thanks to breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of positive psychology, we are learning that the opposite is true. When we are happy—when our mindset and mood are positive—we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it. Unfortunately, despite the decades of research that tell us otherwise, many businesses and their leaders still cling stubbornly to their belief in this flawed order. The ruling powers continue to tell us that if we just put our nose to the grindstone and work hard now, we will be successful, and therefore happier, in some distant future. As we work toward our goals, happiness is either irrelevant or an easily dispensable luxury or a reward only to be won after a lifetime of toil. Some even treat it as a weakness, a sign that we’re not working hard enough. Every time we fall for this misguided creed, we undercut not only our mental and emotional well-being, but also our chances at success and achievement. The most successful people, the ones with the competitive edge, don’t look to happiness as some distant reward for their achievements, nor grind through their days on neutral or negative; they are the ones who capitalize on the positive and reap the rewards at every turn. This chapter will show you how they do it, why it works, and how you, too, can profit. In its own way, the Happiness Advantage, too, is a Copernican revolution—it shows us that success orbits around happiness, not the other way around. DEFINING HAPPINESS No one would talk to me. I was minutes away from speaking about the connection between happiness and performance at work to a group of executives from the Korean company Samsung, just waiting for the HR manager to introduce me to the room. I usually enjoy getting to know people during this brief interlude before a talk, but on this day all the managers were staring ahead blankly, ignoring my repeated attempts at conversation. So I dejectedly pretended to fix my PowerPoint presentation (a surefire tactic for avoiding social awkwardness in these situations, though it works less well at cocktail parties). Finally, someone entered the room and introduced himself as Brian, the leader of the group. That’s when I learned that the planners of the event had forgotten to mention one small detail: No one spoke any English. As it turns out, the translator Samsung usually hired for these occasions was out sick, so Brian offered to translate for me. As we began, he leaned over and confided, “I’m not great with languages.” For the next three hours, I spoke in one-minute bursts, turning after each one to my “translator,” who would proceed to either look very confused, or animatedly start speaking to the group, usually for about three minutes longer than I had. I have no idea how accurately he was translating, but I do know he got all the credit for my jokes. Given how bumpy this process was, I decided to stop talking and instead encourage the executives to talk to one another. “To study how happiness affects performance,” I said, “we need a definition. So that’s the question I pose to you: What is happiness?” Pleased with my little last-minute exercise, I waited for Brian to translate what I had just said. Instead, he looked confused and leaned toward me. “You don’t know what happiness means?” he asked nervously. My face froze. “No, I’m saying I’d like the group to come up with a definition of happiness.” He covered his microphone and leaned in again, clearly trying not to embarrass me. “I can Google it for you.” THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS While I was appreciative of the offer, not even the all-knowing Google has a definitive answer to this question. That’s because there is no single meaning; happiness is relative to the person experiencing it. This is why scientists often refer to it as “subjective well-being”—because it’s based on how we each feel about our own lives. In essence, the best judge of how happy you are is you. To empirically study happiness, then, scientists must rely on individual self-reports. Thankfully, after years of testing and honing survey q