By Manuel “Bobby” Orig, Director, Apo Agua

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

Our commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that once we succeed, we’ll be happy; that once we get that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But the science reveals this formula is backwards: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around.

Research shows that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and better problem solvers, than their unhappy peers. And positive people are significantly healthier and less stressed and enjoy deeper social interaction than the less positive people around them.

Drawing on original research – including one of the largest studies of happiness ever conducted – and work in boardrooms and classrooms across forty-two countries, Shaun Achor shows how to rewire our brains for positivity and optimism to reap the happiness advantage in our lives, our careers, and even our health.

Praise for the book:

"Powerful and charming … A book for just about anyone … The philosophies in this book are easily the best wire frames to build a happy and successful life."

- Medium

"Shawn Achor is the leading light in bringing the science of happiness to work."

- ADAM GRANT
Author, Think Again

About the author:

After spending twelve years at Harvard University, Shawn Achor has become one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. His research on mindset made the cover of Harvard Business Review, his TED talk is one of the most popular of all time with over 13 million views, and his lectures airing on PBS has been seen by millions.

Shawn has lectured or worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies. Shawn is the author of New York Times best-selling books The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential.  His Happiness Advantage is one of the largest and most successful positive psychology corporate training programs in the world.

Advantage and Big Potential. Shawn has worked in 50 countries with

INTRODUCTION

If you observe the people around you, you’ll find most individuals follow a formula that has been subtly or not so subtly taught to them at schools, their company, their parents, or society. That is: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy. This pattern of belief explains what most often motivates us in life. We think: If I just get that raise, or hit that next sales target, I’ll be happy. If I lose that five pounds, I’ll be happy. And so on. Success first, happiness second.

The only problem is that this formula is broken.

If success causes happiness, then every employee who gets a promotion, every student who receives an acceptance letter, everyone who has ever accomplished a goal of any kind should be happy. But with each victory, our goalposts of success keep getting pushed further and further out, so that happiness gets pushed over the horizon.

Even more important, the formula is broken because it is backward. More than a decade of groundbreaking research in the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience has proven in no uncertain terms that the relationship between success and happiness works the other way around.

Thanks to this cutting-edge science, we now know that happiness is the precursor of success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement – giving us the competitive edge that the author call the Happiness Advantage.

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 drive performance upward. This discovery has been confirmed in thousands of scientific studies and in the author’s own work and research on 1,600 Harvard students and dozens of Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

PARADISE LOST AND FOUND

Around the time that Harvard University was founded, John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost “The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Three hundred years later, the author observed this principle come to life. Many of his students saw Harvard as 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 overwhelmed by every small setback instead of energized by the possibilities in front of them. And after watching enough of those students struggle something dawned on him. Not only were these students the ones who seemed most susceptible to stress and depression, they were the ones whose grades and academic performance were suffering the most.

RESEARCHING HAPPINESS

In Milton’s time, Harvard had a motto that reflected the school’s religious roots: Veritas, Christo et Ecclesiae (Truth, for Christ and the Church). For many years now, that motto has been truncated to a single word: Veritas, or just truth. There are now many truths at Harvard, and one of them is despite all its magnificent facilities, a wonderful faculty, and a student body made up of some of Americas (and the world’s) best and brightest, it is home to many chronically unhappy young men and women. In 2004 a Harvard Crimson poll found that as many as 4 in 5 Harvard students suffer from depression so debilitating they can’t function.

So the author set out to find the students, those 1 in 5 who were truly flourishing – the individuals who were above the curve in terms of their happiness, performance, achievement, productivity, humor, energy, or resilience – to see what exactly was giving them such advantage over their peers. What was it that allowed these people to escape the gravitational pull of the norm? Could patterns be teased out of their lives and experience to help others in all walks of life to be more successful in an increasingly stressful and negative world? As it turns out, they could.

ESCAPING THE CULT OF THE AVERAGE

The typical approach to understanding human behavior has always been to look for the average behavior or outcome. But in the author’s view this misguided approach has created what he calls the “cult of the average” in the behavioral sciences. If someone asks a question such as “How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?” science changes that question to “How fast does the average child learn to read in the classroom. The researchers then ignore the children who read faster or slower, and tailor the classroom toward the “average” child. This is what Tal Ben-Shahar, foremost authority on positive psychology, calls “the error of the average.” That’s the first mistake traditional psychology makes.

If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.

Conventional psychology consciously ignores outliers because they don’t fit the pattern. The author sought to do the opposite: Instead of deleting these outliers, he wanted to learn from them.

TOO FOCUSED ON THE NEGATIVE

True, there are psychology researchers out there who don’t study what is average. They tend to focus on those who fall only on one side of the average – below it. According to Tal Ben-Shahar, this is the second mistake traditional psychology makes. Of course, the people who fall below normal are the ones who tend to need the most help – to be relieved of depression or alcohol abuse or chronic stress. As a result, psychologists understandably have spent considerable effort studying how they can help these people recover and get back to normal. Valuable as such work is, it only yields half the picture.

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

This pattern on focusing on the negative pervades not only our research and schools but our society. Turn on the news and the majority of airtime is spent on accidents, corruption, murders, abuse. This focus on the negative tricks our brains into believing that this sorry ratio is reality, that most of life is negative.

It is not healthy nor scientifically responsible only to study the negative half of human experience. In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, announced it was finally time to shift the traditional approach to psychology and start to focus on the positive side of the curve. That we needed to study what works, not just what is broken. Thus, “positive psychology” was born.

LISTENING TO POSITIVE OUTLIERS

The more the author studied the research emerging from the field of positive psychology, the more he learned how wrongheaded we are in our beliefs about personal and professional fulfillment. Studies conclusively showed that the quickest way to high achievement in not a single-minded concentration on work, and that the best way to motivate employees is not to bark orders and foster a stressed and fearful workforce.

Instead, radical new research on happiness and optimism were turning both the academic and corporate worlds upside down. The author immediately saw an opportunity – he could test these ideas on his students. He could design a study to see if these new ideas indeed explained why some students were thriving while others succumbed to stress and depression. By studying the patterns and habits of people above the curve, he could glean information about not just how to move us up to average, but how to move the entire average gap.

THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES

Based on his research, the author was able to isolate seven specific, actionable, and proven patterns that predict success and achievement.

The Happiness Advantage – Because positive brains have a biological advantage over brains that are neutral or negative, this principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to capitalize on positivity and improve our productivity and performance.

The Fulcrum and the Lever – how we experience the world, and our ability to succeed within it, constantly changes based on  our mindset. This principle teaches us how we can adjust our mindset (our fulcrum) in a way that gives us the power (the lever) to be more fulfilled and successful.

The Tetris Effect – When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. This principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see – and seize – opportunity whenever we look.

Falling Up – in the midst of defeat, stress, and crisis, our brains map different paths to help us cope. This principle is about finding the mental  path that not only leads us up out of failure or suffering, but teaches us to be happier and more successful because of it.

The Zorro Circle – when challenges loom and we get overwhelmed, our rational brains can get hijacked by emotions.  This principle teaches us how to regain control by focusing first on small, manageable goals, and then gradually expanding our circle to achieve bigger and bigger ones.

The 20-Second Rule – sustaining lasting change often feels impossible because our willpower is limited. And when willpower fails, we fall back on our old habits and succumb to the path of less resistance. This principle shows how, by making small  energy adjustments, we can reroute the path of least resistance. This principle shows how, by making small energy adjustments, we can reroute the path of least resistance and replace bad habits with good ones.

Social Investment – in the midst of challenges and stress, some people choose to hunker down and retreat within themselves. But the most successful people invest in their friends, peers, and family members to propel themselves forward. This principle teaches us how to invest more in one of the greatest predictors of success and excellence – our social support.

Together, these Seven Principles helped Harvard students overcome obstacles, reverse bad habits, become more efficient and productive,  and reach their fullest potential.

RAISING PERFORMANCE, NOT DELUSION

Grounded in two decades of research that has revolutionized the field of psychology, and further shaped by the author’s own study of the science of happiness and success, the principles that form the core of this book have also been field-tested and refined through the author’s work with everyone from global financiers to grade-schoolers, surgeons to attorneys, accountants to UN ambassadors.

In essence, they are a set of tools that anyone, no matter their profession or calling, can use to achieve more every day. The best part about them is that they don’t only work in a business setting. They can help you overcome obstacles, reverse bad habits, become more efficient and productive, make the most of opportunities, and help you to conquer your most ambitious goals – in life and work. In essence, they 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.

The Happiness Advantage starts at a different place. It asks us to be realistic about the present while maximizing our potential for the future. It is about learning how to cultivate the mindset and behaviors that have been empirically proven to fuel greater success and fulfillment. It is a work ethic.

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

FROM POSSIBLE TO PROBABLE

What is the longest sequence of numbers a person can remember? How tall can a human being grow?  How much money can one make? How long can a person live? The Guinness Book of World Records is a fossil record. It speaks only to what has been done, not how much can be done. That is why it has to be constantly updated – records are forever being broken, so it is forever out of date.

Take the fascinating case of the British middle distance runner Roger Bannister. In the 1950s, after rigorous training and mathematical computations of the physics of anatomy, experts concluded that the human body could not run a mile in under four minutes. A physical impossibility, the scientists said. Then along came Bannister, who in 1954 seemed to have no qualms proving that it could in fact be run in 3:59:4. And once Bannister broke the imaginary barrier, suddenly the floodgates opened; scores of runners started besting the four-minute mark every year, each one faster than the next. How fast does a human have the potential to run the mile – or swim the 100-meter, or complete the marathon – today? We honestly don’t know.

The point is, we do not know the limits of human potential. Just as we can’t know the limit of how fast a human can run or predict which student will grow to win a Nobel Prize, we still don’t know the limits of our brain’s enormous potential to grow and adapt to changing circumstances. All we know is that this kind of change is possible.

THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE

How Happiness Gives Your Brain – and Your Organization – the Competitive Edge

THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS

Not even the all-knowing Google has a definitive answer to the question: What is happiness? That’s because there is no single meaning: happiness is relative to the person experiencing it. That is why scientists refer to it as “subjective well-being” – because it is based on how we each feel about our own lives. In essence, the best judge of how happy you are is you.

So how do scientists define happiness? Essentially, as the experience of positive emotions – pleasure combined with deeper feelings of meaning and purpose. Happiness implies a positive mood in the present and a positive outlook for the future. Martin Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology, has broken it into three, measurable components:

• Pleasure
• Engagement
• Meaning

Seligman’s study confirmed that people who pursue only pleasure experience only part of the benefits happiness can bring, while those who pursue all three routs lead the fullest lives.

Perhaps, the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudamonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.” This definition really resonates with the author. For him, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.

The chief engine of happiness is positive emotions, since happiness, is above all else, a feeling. In fact, some researchers prefer the term “positive emotions” or “positivity” to “happiness” because while they are essentially synonymous, happiness is a far more vague and unwieldy term.

Barbara Fredirickson, perhaps the most leading expert on the subject, describes the ten most common positive emotions:

• “Joy, Gratitude, Serenity, Interest, Hope, Pride, Amusement, Inspiration, Awe, and Love.”

This paints a far richer picture of happiness.

THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG

At this point you might be thinking: Maybe people are happy because they are more productive and earn higher pay. As psychology graduate students are taught to repeat ad nauseam: “Correlation is not causation.” In other words, studies only tell us two things are related; to find out which causes which, we need to look at it more closely and find out which came first. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does happiness come before success or success before happiness?

If happiness were just the result of being successful, the prevailing creed at companies and schools would be correct: Focus on productivity and performance, even to the detriment of our emotional and physical well-being, and we will eventually become more successful, and therefore happier.

But thanks to strides in positive psychology, this myth has been debunked. As the authors of the survey were able to say conclusively, “study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.” In short, based on wealth of data they compiled, they found that happiness causes success and achievement, not the opposite.

THE ARCHIMEDEAN FORMULA

Archimedes, the greatest scientist and mathematician of ancient Greece, famously posited, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

The author found his own Eureka moment: Our brains, too, operate according to the Archimedean formula.

Take, for example, a seesaw. On a seesaw, the fulcrum is set at the exact center between the two seats. If two boys, each weighing 100 pounds, sit at the same distance from the fulcrum on opposing seesaw seats, they will balance each other. Now, imagine two boys, one weighing 100 pounds and the other 150 pounds, in the same situation. The smaller boy is going to hang in the air.

But what if we move the fulcrum? The closer we move the center point, the fulcrum, toward the heavier boy, the easier he is to lift. If we keep moving the fulcrum in that direction, eventually the lighter boy will effectively weigh more than his big-boned buddy. Move the fulcrum close enough to the heavier boy, and the lighter boy can climb off his seat and, with a single finger, use the seesaw lever to move his heavier friend up. In other words, by shifting the point around which energy is applied, we can effectively  turn the seesaw from a balancing scale into a powerful lever.

That was exactly Archimedes’ point. If we have a long enough lever and a good place to stand – the fulcrum point – we can move the entire world.

What the author realized is our brains work precisely in the same way. 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.

What this means in practical terms is that whether you are a student striving for better grades, a junior executive striving for better pay, or a teacher hoping to better inspire students, you don’t need to try so hard to generate and produce results.

Our potential is not fixed. The more we move our fulcrum or mindset, the more our lever lengthens and so the more power we generate. Move the fulcrum so that all the advantage goes to a negative mindset, and we never rise off the ground. Move the fulcrum to a positive mindset, and the lever’s power is magnified – ready to move everything up.

Simply put, by changing the fulcrum of our mindset and lengthening our lever of possibility, we change what is possible. It’s not the weight of the world that determines what we can accomplish. It is our fulcrum and lever.

INVESTING IN HIGH PERFORMANCE

Those of us who believe we have control over the outcome of our fates have a huge advantage in work and in life. This fact can’t be denied. But it also doesn’t mean we have to exist in a vacuum or that our success hinges on our effort alone. In a 70-year long Harvard Men Study, researchers found that social bonds weren’t just predictive of overall happiness, but also of eventual career achievement, occupational success, and income.

The truth is sometimes difficult for many of us to accept, given how deep the ethic of individualism runs in our culture. We are particularly independent-minded when it comes to assigning credit for achievements. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck likes to illustrate the folly of this belief by asking her students to describe how they picture history’s greatest minds at work. When you think of Thomas Edison, she asks them, what do you see?

“He’s standing in a white coat in a lab-type room,” comes the average reply. “He’s leaning over a light bulb. Suddenly, it works!”

“Is he alone?” Dweck asks.

“Yes. He’s kind of a reclusive guy who likes to tinker on his own.”

As Dweck relishes in pointing out, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Edison actually thrived in group settings, and when he invented the light bulb, he did so with the help of 30 assistants. Edison was actually a social creative, not a lone wolf! And when it comes to society’s most innovative thinkers, so often assumed to be eccentric, solitary geniuses, he was not the exception to the rule.

We all heard the popular maxim “two heads are better than one,” but the benefits of social interaction in the workplace go far beyond group brainstorming. Having people we can count on in the office actually fuels individual innovation, creativity, and productivity.

For instance, one study of 212 employees found that social connections at work predicted more individual learning behavior, which means that the more socially connected employees felt, the more they took the time to figure out ways to improve their own efficiency, or their own skill set.

Perhaps most important, social connections motivate. When over a thousand highly successful professional men and women were interviewed as they approached retirement and asked what had motivated them the most, throughout their careers, overwhelmingly they place work friendships above both  financial gain and individual status. In Good to Great, Jim Collins illuminated a similar truth: “The people we interviewed from good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did largely because they loved who they did it with.”

The better we feel about these workplace relationships, the more effective we will  be. For example, a study of over 350 employees in 60 business units at a financial service company found that the greatest predictor of a team’s achievement was how the members felt about one another. This is especially important for managers because, while they often have little control over the backgrounds or skill sets of employees placed on their teams, they do have control over the level of interaction and rapport.

Studies show the more team members are encouraged to socialize and interact face-to-face, the more engaged they feel, the more energy they have, and the longer they can stay focused on a task. In short, the more team members invest in social cohesion, the better the results of their work.

THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE

Once we start capitalizing on the Happiness Advantage in our own lives, the positive changes ripple out quickly. This is why positive psychology is so powerful. Using all the seven principles together sparks an upward spiral of happiness and success, so that the benefits quickly become multiplicative. Then the positive effects begin to ripple outward, increasing happiness of everyone around you, changing the way your colleagues work, and eventually shaping your entire organization.

RIPPLING OUTWARD

The benefits don’t stop there. The more we capitalize on the Happiness Advantage ourselves, the more we can impact the lives of those around us. Extraordinarily, recent research exploring the role of social networks in shaping human behavior has proven that much of our behavior is literally contagious; that our habits, attitudes, and actions spread through a complicated web of connections to infect those around us.

In their groundbreaking book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler draw on years of research to show how our actions are constantly cascading and bouncing off each other in every which way and direction.

This theory holds that our attitudes and behaviors don’t only infect the people we interact with directly – like our colleagues, friends, and families – but that each individual’s influence appears to extend to people within three degrees. So when you use these principles to make positive changes in your own life, you are unconsciously shaping the behavior of an incredible number of people.

SPREADING THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE

Luckily, positive emotions are also contagious, which makes them a powerful tool in  our quest for high performance in the workplace. Positive emotional contagion starts when people subconsciously mimic the body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions of those around them. Amazing as it might sound, once people mimic the physical behaviors tied to these emotions, it causes them to feel the emotion themselves. Smiling, for instance, tricks your brain into thinking you’re happy, so it starts producing the neurochemicals that actually make you happy.

So the happier people is around you, the happier you will become. That is why we laugh more at a funny movies when we’re in the theatre full of laughing people. Likewise, the happier we are at work, the more positivity we transmit to our colleagues, teammates, and clients, which can eventually tip the emotion of an entire work team.

The power to spark positive emotional contagion multiplies if you are in a leadership position. Studies found that when leaders are in a positive mood, their employees are more likely to be in a positive mood themselves, to exhibit prosocial helping behaviors toward one another, and to coordinate tasks more efficiently and with less effort.

Sit around an unsmiling and obnoxious boss for too long, and you will start to feel sad or stressed, regardless of how you felt originally. Whereas if your boss is using the seven principles to increase their own positivity, your mere proximity to him will allow you to start to feel the benefits. And not just of greater happiness, but of all the advantages that come cascading along with it. People in positive moods are better able to think creatively and logically, and to engage in complex problem solving, even be better negotiators.

It is no surprise then that CEOs who are rated high on scales of positive expression are more likely  to have employees who report being happy, and who describe their workplace as a climate conducive to performance.

EVERY BIG WAVE STARTS SMALL

It has been said that a single butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane halfway around the world. As this theory, known as the Butterfly Effect, goes, the flap of a butterfly’s wings may be one tiny motion, but it creates a slight gust of wind that eventually picks greater and greater speed and power. In other words, one very small change can trigger a cascade of bigger ones.

Each one of us is like that butterfly. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations, families, and our communities. We can never really know the true extent of our potential. The ripple effect is the perfect example of how there are no real discernable limits to our influence and power.

When you capitalize on the Happiness Advantage, you are doing far more than improving your own well-being and performance; the more the more everyone around you profits.

Recent advances in positive psychology and neuroscience have taught us that success actually revolves around happiness, not the other way around. This finding is even more revolutionary than we could have imagined. Because we also know that it’s not just our own individual success that orbits around our happiness. By making changes within ourselves, we can actually bring the benefits of the Happiness Advantage to our teams, our organizations, and everyone around us.

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