Most people think that happiness comes after success, and that success comes after hard work. But we’ve had the equation all wrong: Happiness isn’t the result of success—it’s the cause of it. The Happiness Advantage, published in 2010, is an introduction to this formula for success, based on research in neuroscience and the relatively new field of positive psychology. Author Shawn Achor offers insight as a leading expert on the connection between happiness and performance, an author of multiple books on the topic, and the founder of a research and consulting firm that optimizes people’s achievement through positive psychology.
Using research and personal anecdotes, Achor covers the following seven principles in this book:
The Happiness Advantage really encompasses many advantages, including:
These benefits raise the quality of your personal life, and they also optimize your success at work. The principles of the Happiness Advantage have brought positive results even in the most stressful environments, including among big bank employees in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Whether your circumstances make it hard to be happy or you naturally have a lower happiness baseline, the seven principles explain how to be more positive and why it’s so essential to your success.
The benefits of being happy are deeper than feeling good—happiness has measurable, lasting effects on your mind and body:
Your happiness fluctuates all the time, but you can actually take steps to permanently raise your happiness baseline. Consider incorporating some of these happiness-building activities into your day-to-day routine:
The cognitive, emotional, and physical benefits of positivity mean that it also promotes productivity and success at work: Happy employees are more focused and innovative, suffer from less stress, and call out for fewer sick days. Managers and executives are in the best position to promote happiness because they can influence company policies and culture, they interact with many people, and they set an example for their employees. Company leaders can make their employees happier and more productive by:
Sometimes, the biggest obstacles to happiness and success are your own persistent, negative thoughts. Your mindset strongly impacts your perceptions, efforts, and actions, and you can leverage it to achieve happiness and success. You can’t be sad and happy at the same time: Your brain has a limited capacity to process the many aspects of your experiences and surroundings, so it filters your awareness through a positive or negative lens. This choice dictates your perception of the world, and perception defines your reality.
Your mindset also impacts your work performance—for example, you can alter your perspective of tedious, daily tasks to increase your engagement and motivation. If you’re dreading a meeting that you perceive as a waste of time, find something you can gain from the experience: Maybe it’s an opportunity to observe your manager’s leadership style or to practice your active listening skills.
Let’s examine three ways in which you can improve your mindset to raise your performance:
Not only can your mindset impact your own outcome, but believing in someone else’s potential can actually help manifest that success. This phenomenon—known as the Pygmalion Effect—is evident in workspaces: Research shows that if a manager believes employees are internally motivated (and not just in it for the paycheck), the workers’ outcomes improve. Managers and other leaders who understand this power invest in the company’s success when they can look at every interaction with colleagues and employees as an opportunity to recognize their skills, encourage them, and promote positivity.
In order to reap the wide-ranging benefits of happiness and a positive mindset, how do you train your brain to focus on the positive instead of the negative? Your brain’s filter works as well as your email’s spam filter: Sometimes it tosses aside important information, and you have to reprogram it. When you develop a negative thought pattern, not only are you focusing on the negative, but you’re actively not seeing the positive. By contrast, when you implement a positive thinking pattern, you’ll be more likely to notice and capitalize on opportunities, which will contribute to your success, reinforcing your positivity and creating a virtuous cycle. A positive thinking pattern raises your:
Mental exercises can reprogram your brain to notice positive scenarios and opportunities. In order to train your brain to see the positive, try one of these strategies:
The goal of a positive thinking pattern is not to have irrational optimism or turn a blind eye to problems that need improvement. Rather, by adding a positive tint to your view of the world, you can maintain awareness of problems and concerns, while choosing to prioritize a positive perspective. In other words, recognizing and having gratitude for the good in your life is actually the best mechanism for creating more positive outcomes.
As much as you may be able to improve your positive mindset, it can be particularly difficult to be optimistic in the face of adversity. When you confront a challenge, you have three options:
Adversity is inevitable, but, if you stay positive during challenging times, you will not only carry on, but also learn and grow through the process. Instead of seeing failure as something to avoid or endure, when you learn to fall up, failure becomes an invaluable opportunity for growth. Many companies and organizations highly value failing early and often because those failures provide opportunities to learn before investing too heavily in a particular model, project, or approach.
In order to find a way to fall up, look at adversity as a building block for your personal growth, rather than an obstacle in your path. To change your mindset, examine it:
Practice is key in learning how to find and follow the Third Path to success. When you are faced with a challenge, follow the ABCD model:
In order to fall up, you have to feel that you have some control over your fate—but control can seem elusive when you’re stressed and overwhelmed. Regain a feeling of control by tackling one small, manageable goal at a time.
There are two lenses through which you can interpret your control:
Feeling a sense of control is one of the biggest factors in both happiness and success. However, your sense of control can fly out the window when you feel overwhelmed. When you experience stress or fear, your emotional brain—which is responsible for survival reflexes like the fight-or-flight response—takes over. This emotional hijacking is problematic when the trigger is not life-threatening, but rather something more mundane, like a stressful project at work. Emotional hijacking impedes your decision-making, problem-solving, and communication skills, which makes it more difficult to tackle the task at hand and exacerbates stress and anxiety, creating a vicious cycle.
When you’re on the verge or in the grip of an emotional hijacking, take an incremental approach to your problem. By tackling small, manageable goals, you not only make incremental progress, but you also gain confidence, knowledge, and resources along the way that help you continue your effort. For example, if you have a backlogged email inbox, start by responding only to new emails. Then, address emails from the day before, and then the day before that. Limit the time you allot to this project each day in order to break the large task into bite-sized chunks. This process helps to calm the emotional brain’s panic and instead tap into your problem-solving abilities.
The key is to start small. Follow these steps:
Whether it’s thinking positively or exercising daily, there’s no use in knowing that you should do something if you don’t actually do it—but having the knowledge doesn’t make it any easier to carry out. People have limited willpower, and even small acts like avoiding a donut in the break room tax your willpower, so you may not have any left at the end of the day when you get home, and you have to choose between jogging and watching TV. When your willpower wears thin, your behavior naturally returns to the easiest and most familiar patterns: your habits.
Habits are actions that you perform so often that you don’t have to consciously think about them, and they don’t tap your willpower. For example, when you brush your teeth each morning, you don’t have to consciously remember that you’re supposed to brush daily, or think about the steps you have to take (such as grabbing the toothbrush and squeezing the toothpaste). Brushing your teeth is such a strong habit that it requires no thought or willpower. Since you can’t always rely on willpower to help you to make good choices, turn healthy behaviors into habits.
When you’ve chosen a behavior that you want to turn into a habit, do it regularly and frequently. The early stages require the most diligence and willpower, because you’re still in the process of ingraining the action to make it a habit. Try these strategies to increase your chance of successfully creating a habit:
When you have a daunting, stressful project on your plate, you may be inclined to hunker down and isolate yourself from seemingly superfluous social interactions—eating lunch at your desk, working nights and weekends, and canceling social time with friends and family. However, people need social connection for their productivity and personal well-being, so when you avoid social interaction in order to focus on your project, you’re unwittingly creating a bigger obstacle between you and the finish line. Social bonds increase your:
Furthermore, the positive effects of social interactions are twofold:
The benefits of social support are crucial at work, where chronic stress and pressure can have insidious effects. Employees who reap the benefits of social support perform better, even when they have to work longer hours and maintain focus under difficult conditions. Social bonds:
Companies can take actions big and small to foster environments that increase social connection—for example, Google keeps its cafeterias open past business hours to make it easier for employees to eat and socialize together. Managers and executives can use simple strategies to forge a culture in which social bonds can flourish organically. These tactics include:
The principles of the Happiness Advantage work in concert, meaning a little positivity snowballs to create even greater benefits. For example, when you train your brain to see the positive (Principle #3), you’ll see more opportunity for growth when faced with adversity, thus you’ll be better positioned to fall up, or find the Third Path (Principle #4). The more you implement the principles of the Happiness Advantage, the more your efforts will reinforce each other and create a virtuous cycle of positivity and success.
Additionally, your happiness creates ripple effects that benefit the people around you. Just one positive person on a team unwittingly infects her colleagues with positivity, which increases their individual performances as well as the collaboration and success of the group as a whole. In fact, emotional contagion is so strong that each workplace develops a distinct group emotion, or “group affective tone,” which creates emotion norms that are reflected in the office culture and behavior. For example, a company with an optimistic emotion norm will likely greet challenges with more confidence and enthusiasm than an office with a more negative norm.
From entry-level employees to C-suite executives, anyone can use the principles we’ve described to raise their happiness baseline, and the positive effects will inevitably spread to the people around them. You have the power to be happier and more successful, and to make the people around you happier and more successful, as well.
Most people strive to be happy—and yet, for so many, happiness always seems to be just out of reach, or just around the next corner. Have you told yourself too many times that, once you reach the next benchmark, then you will be happy? This common approach to life is predicated on the idea that happiness comes after success, and that success comes after hard work. But we’ve had the equation all wrong.
The Happiness Advantage, published in 2010, is an introduction to a relatively new formula for success, based on research in positive psychology and neuroscience. Under this paradigm, not only can you put your happiness first, but you can actually achieve greater success as a result. Author Shawn Achor offers insight as a leading expert on the connection between happiness and performance. In addition to studying under several pioneers of positive psychology, Achor helped create and teach a popular Harvard course on happiness, he has written multiple books about happiness and success, and he founded a research and consulting firm that optimizes people’s achievement through positive psychology.
The field of psychology has historically been uninterested in studying happiness. Instead, it’s focused on unhappiness and mental health challenges, in an effort to help people with below-average happiness ascend to average happiness levels. While that is an important goal, it strives to reach average, instead of seeking above-average happiness. The relatively new field of positive psychology inverts the lens: Instead of focusing on why unhappy people are suffering, positive psychology asks why happy people are thriving.
Positive psychology suggests that happiness isn’t the result of success—it’s the cause of it. Research supports this:
If it’s true that happiness begets success, how can you become happier? Using research and personal anecdotes, Achor covers the following seven principles in this book:
Thousands of people have used these seven principles to become happier, and you can too.
If happiness correlates with success, what does that mean for people who simply are not wired to be happy? It turns out, anyone can change their thinking and behavior with some practice, despite the fact that people tend to overestimate the extent to which biology is fixed. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, the scientific community broadly believed that human brains only grow from birth through adolescence, after which the brain’s capacity is fixed. But over time, new studies started to challenge that assumption.
During the last several decades, scientists have discovered a concept called neuroplasticity, which means that your brain continues to grow and change throughout life. One experiment revealed that the brains of London cab drivers actually grew in a way that reflected their special skill sets. London’s streets are difficult to navigate because they’re not based on a grid system, as other big cities are, so cab drivers develop an intricate mental map of the city. Researchers discovered that the part of the brain in charge of this mental map—the hippocampus, which manages spatial memory—was significantly larger among cabbies than average people.
In another experiment, a man who had become blind as a teenager developed greater sensitivity and sophistication in his braille-reading finger than the average person would have in her index finger. As evidence of this, when scientists probed his braille-reading finger, it activated a much larger area of the brain than when they did the same on another finger.
As we’ll discuss further in upcoming sections, the Happiness Advantage really encompasses many advantages, including:
These benefits raise the quality of your personal life, and they also optimize your success at work. Studies show that positive psychology can help managers increase customer satisfaction by 42 percent and CEOs increase their productivity by 15 percent. Even in the most stressful environments, the principles of the Happiness Advantage have brought positive results to a wide range of businesses across 40 countries and five continents, including:
The managers at the tax auditing firm felt less stressed and more satisfied with life after three hours of positive psychology training than managers who had not attended the training. Furthermore, those higher scores held up four months later, at the height of tax season.
The human brain has the capacity to adapt and grow to an extent that is still unknown. The seven principles will help you to make the most of this potential and enjoy the vast benefits of the Happiness Advantage. However, this requires more than a positive attitude—it calls for you to take actions to change your thinking and behavior. Rather than donning rose-colored glasses and ignoring your problems, these principles empower you to:
(Shortform note: For more information about positive psychology and the nature of happiness, read our summary of The Happiness Hypothesis. And find out how small changes can have big impacts on your emotional well-being in our summary of The Happiness Project.)
As a result of the last few decades of positive psychology research, we now know that the long-standing belief that happiness results from success is wrong—in reality, happiness begets success. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how happiness promotes productivity and success, how you can raise your personal happiness baseline, and how employers and managers can use these principles to achieve results in the workplace.
First, let’s define happiness. One of the best known positive psychologists, Martin Seligman, breaks down happiness into three components:
Pursuing pleasure alone may make you happy, but incorporating engagement and personal meaning in that pursuit will maximize the benefits of happiness (we’ll go into more detail about those benefits later in this chapter). This sentiment is reflected in Aristotle’s term “eudaimonia,” which translates to “human flourishing.” Throughout the book and summary, “happiness” is used as a shorthand to encompass all of these elements.
The benefits of being happy are deeper than feeling good—happiness has measurable, lasting effects on your mind and body.
First, positive emotions release dopamine and serotonin, which make you feel good while also activating your brain’s learning centers. This effect improves your ability to:
A number of studies have illustrated the cognitive benefits of happiness:
Additionally, positive emotions reduce stress and anxiety in a phenomenon psychologists call “the undoing effect.” Some amount of stress in life or in work is inevitable, but when a stressful event or situation is imminent—for example, you have to make a presentation at an important meeting this afternoon—you may be able to mitigate that stress by focusing on happy memories or watching a funny video.
Happiness doesn’t just make you feel better emotionally, it also makes you feel better physically. In one experiment, researchers surveyed participants about their levels of happiness, and then injected them with the cold virus. The following week, researchers found that the happier participants fought off the virus more quickly and had fewer objective symptoms than their less happy peers. Additionally, research revealed that unhappy workers take 15 more sick days each year than their happy coworkers—this means that companies can increase productivity and decrease absenteeism and healthcare costs by creating a happy work environment.
Given the cognitive and physical benefits of happiness, it should be no surprise that research shows that positivity increases productivity at work. One study followed 275 employees over 18 months and found that those who were happiest at the beginning received better pay and evaluations by the end of the period, even when controlling for other factors. In another study, researchers found that happier undergraduates earned higher incomes 19 years later than their unhappy classmates, regardless of initial wealth levels.
Your happiness fluctuates all the time, but everyone has a distinct baseline of happiness. In order to reap more benefits of the Happiness Advantage, you can actually take steps to permanently raise your happiness baseline. Consider incorporating some of these happiness-building activities into your day-to-day routine:
Some companies have already caught onto the benefits of cultivating positive emotions in the workplace. This can take many forms—for example, Google reportedly stocks video games in the break room and encourages engineers to bring their dogs to the office. Additionally, at one Toyota location, the company started using a training program focused on employees’ strengths, and productivity increased.
Managers and executives are in the best position to promote happiness because:
There are a number of ways that company leaders can make their employees happier and, thus, more productive, including:
Scientists have actually quantified the ideal ratio of positive and negative comments in interactions within groups to create success in the workplace. This ratio, which is referred to as the Losada Line, is 2.9013 positive-to-negative interactions. In other words, employees must hear about three positive comments to counteract one negative comment. Furthermore, a 6-to-1 ratio optimizes productivity and success. One mining company was experiencing substantial losses, but when it increased its ratio from 1.15 to 3.56 (about three-and-a-half positive comments for each negative one), production improved by more than 40 percent.
(Shortform note: Three scientists—Nicholas J.L. Brown, Alan D. Sokal, and Harris L. Friedman—criticized the Losada Line in their paper, “The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio.” The mathematical equations used to calculate the Losada Line are used to calculate the flow of liquids and gases in physics and engineering. The critical scientists insist that equations that calculate the boiling temperature of water do not apply to human behavior.)
Whether you’re focused on improving your individual performance or raising the achievement of your entire team of employees, prioritizing happiness as a vehicle for attaining greater success pays dividends.
You have the power to be happier.
Which happiness-building activities from the chapter (such as meditation, exercising, and giving back) will you try today?
How will you incorporate these activities into your daily routine?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the happiness of your team at work? What do you do presently to contribute to a happy workplace?
Name three ways you can regularly give more positive feedback at work.
We’ve discussed the benefits of positivity and some strategies to raise your happiness, but sometimes the biggest obstacles are your own persistent, negative thoughts. Think of your mind as a seesaw. If a light person sits on one end and a heavy person sits on the other, the heavy person will be on the ground while the light person will be suspended in the air. However, if you place the fulcrum (the center point on which the lever balances) closer to the heavy person, that person will be easier to lift. When it comes to being happier, if your mind is entrenched in negative thought, it’s like moving the fulcrum away from the heavy object—it becomes very difficult to lift. On the other hand, if you focus on more positive thoughts, you leverage the power of your fulcrum by moving it closer to the heavy object, and your power for positivity is unbounded.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss how your mindset affects your efforts and your actions, and how to leverage this power to achieve success.
If you’ve ever distracted an upset child with a joke, you know that you can’t be sad and happy at the same time. Your brain has a limited capacity to process the many aspects of your experiences and surroundings, so it filters your awareness through a positive or negative lens. This choice dictates your perception of the world, and perception defines your reality. In other words, your mindset determines your reality—mentally and physically.
In one experiment, a group of 75-year-old men spent a week at a retreat, where they were asked to act as they did when they were 55. Additionally, they were surrounded by newspapers, food, decor, and other environmental elements from the year when they were 55. Both before and after the retreat, each individual was tested on physical strength, cognition, short-term memory, and other metrics of health—and, by the end of the week, they had all improved in almost every category, including an almost 10% improvement in eyesight and memory. Just a week of living as if they were 55 again made their physical condition resemble that of a younger man.
The power of perception is also responsible for the Placebo Effect, in which a sugar pill alleviates a patient’s symptoms just as well as an actual drug. One striking experiment illustrates this by using an allergen instead of a drug: Thirteen students who were highly allergic to poison ivy were told the plant was being rubbed on their left arms—however, although researchers were actually using a harmless shrub, every participant reacted with redness, itching, and boils. Furthermore, the students were told that their right arms were being rubbed with a harmless plant, when it was really poison ivy. Despite the students’ allergies, only two had any reaction whatsoever.
The power of your mindset to impact reality is also at play in Expectancy Theory. This theory explains that your expectation of an event can create brain patterns and reactions that are as real as the actual event. For example, in one study, researchers told half of the cleaning staffs at seven different hotels that housecleaning constituted significant cardiovascular exercise and burned calories, while the other half received no such information. Several weeks later, the first group had lost weight and lowered their cholesterol level, while the second group had no such results. Both groups had performed the same work, but the workers who expected that their jobs would contribute to better health outcomes were actually able to manifest the results they had expected.
If it’s true that your mental approach to an experience actually impacts the outcome, how can you use that to your benefit? First, alter your perspective of tedious, daily tasks to increase your engagement and motivation. If you’re dreading a meeting that you perceive as a waste of time, find something you can gain from the experience: Maybe it’s an opportunity to observe your manager’s leadership style or to practice your active listening skills. Similarly, when you prepare for a task that makes you feel nervous or inept, prime yourself beforehand to focus on your strengths or recall other times when you performed well.
This mindset shift affects not only your work productivity, but also your leisure time. When you consider spending time with family or doing a crossword puzzle as valuable opportunities to unwind and recharge, you will more readily reap the rewards of those breaks. By contrast, when you perceive such activities as distractions and inefficiencies, you’re more likely to squander the benefits and fail to feel refueled afterward.
Since your expectations affect your experiences, let’s examine three ways in which you can improve your mindset to raise your performance.
Research shows that an employee’s confidence in her own ability to perform her job well is a better predictor of her actual job performance than her training or skill level. Be confident in your skills and talents—within reason. Don’t overlook your weaknesses or overcommit to things you can’t accomplish, but do focus on your strengths as you approach the tasks in front of you. You can only accomplish something if you first have the audacity to dream it and the confidence to try it.
(Shortform note: To read more about the power of mindset and the importance of dreaming big, check out our summary of As A Man Thinketh.)
Whether you think you can improve your skills and knowledge is a major determinant of whether you actually improve. Psychologist Carol Dweck proposes that people have one of two mindsets about their intelligence and abilities:
In one of Dweck’s experiments, she and her colleagues determined the mindsets of 373 7th-grade students and then tracked their academic performances over the following two years. Students who had exhibited a growth mindset steadily raised their GPAs, whereas the students with a fixed mindset stagnated. (Shortform note: To learn more about the benefits of having a growth mindset and how to develop one, read our summary of Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.)
Since your mindset dictates your experience, it can have a significant impact on your professional success. Scientists have defined three ways that people approach work:
These distinct attitudes towards work cut across professions: A doctor can view her work as a job and a janitor can approach her work as a calling. The job itself does not define the experience—the perspective brought to it does. Try these strategies to reframe your view of work:
Not only can your mindset impact your own outcome, but it can also contribute to the outcomes of others. This phenomenon is captured in what scientists have deemed “the Pygmalion Effect,” which reveals that believing in someone else’s potential can actually help manifest that success.
In one study, researchers tested elementary school students and then told their teachers that three of the students had demonstrated extraordinary potential. Despite the fact that researchers told the teachers to treat those three students exactly the same as the rest of the students, the three students’ test scores skyrocketed by the end of the year. The twist, however, was that those students’ original scores had been average; the experimenters had deliberately misrepresented their abilities to the teachers. Although the teachers had not consciously given the students any special attention or encouragement, the teachers had unknowingly and nonverbally communicated their heightened expectations—and the three students had picked up on their teachers’ subtle messages and risen to their expectations.
This phenomenon can also be seen in workspaces: Research shows that if a manager believes employees are only motivated by money, the workers will behave accordingly—but if the manager believes the workers are internally motivated, the workers’ outcomes will improve. When you understand the power of the Pygmalion Effect, you can look at every interaction with colleagues and employees as an opportunity to recognize their skills, encourage them, and promote positivity. Because of the power of a leader’s perspective on her team’s success, leaders should ask themselves three questions at the start of each week:
Reframe how you think about your most loathsome tasks, and reap the rewards of greater positivity.
Describe one task (at work or at home) that you typically dread.
What is the inherent value of this task? Or, what is one thing you can learn or gain from this activity?
Which of your skills make you particularly adept at this task?
Rewrite the description of this task to reflect its inherent worth.
Write your job description in a way that emphasizes the value of your work.
We’ve discussed the wide-ranging benefits of happiness as well as the power of a positive mindset. In this chapter, we’ll explore how to train your brain to focus on the positive instead of the negative. The more you engage in any pattern of thinking, the more your brain will use the same formula to evaluate other things in life. In gaming, this phenomenon has been dubbed the Tetris Effect: After playing hours of the tile-matching video game, gamers saw objects in their everyday lives as shapes that they needed to fit into gaps, as if they were still playing the game.
Similarly, professions that hinge on finding problems and errors—such as tax auditors and lawyers—create similar mental patterns. While such training might be beneficial for work, it can cause them to habitually seek out problems in their personal lives, as well. For example, a tax auditor actually created an Excel spreadsheet to track the mistakes his wife made. Similarly, athletes often have a hard time switching off their competitive drive. If your brain is in the habit of recognizing negatives, then that’s all you see, but if you train your brain to look for positives, you can reset your mental filter to focus on the positive.
In any given moment, you’re exposed to far more stimuli than you could possibly process. In a single moment, you can hear the hum of an air vent, see someone walking by in your peripheral vision, and think about what you’ll make for dinner tonight. In order to get anything done, your brain must constantly filter out most of your experiences so that you can focus on pertinent information.
However, your brain’s filter is so powerful that you can entirely miss something that seems obvious. In one experiment, participants watched a video of a basketball game and counted the number of passes between players in white jerseys. Twenty five seconds into the video, a person in a full gorilla suit walks through the scene—but 46 percent of participants didn’t notice it. This phenomenon, called inattentional blindness, illustrates how effectively your focus shapes your experience.
Your brain’s filter works as well as your email’s spam filter: Sometimes it tosses aside important information, and you have to reprogram it. When you develop a negative thought pattern, you can experience inattentional blindness toward positive things—in other words, not only are you focusing on the negative, but you’re actively not seeing the positive.
While a negative thinking pattern—the Negative Tetris Effect—primes you to look for problems, to miss key pieces of information, and to overemphasize certain perspectives, you can train your brain to create a Positive Tetris Effect. When you implement a positive thinking pattern, you’ll be more likely to notice and capitalize on opportunities, which will contribute to your success, reinforcing your positivity and creating a virtuous cycle.
Specifically, creating a Positive Tetris Effect raises your:
The effects of the Positive Tetris Effect were illustrated in a study of two groups of people who self-identified as either lucky or unlucky. Both groups were told to skim a newspaper and count the number of photos it contained. Within the newspaper were two large messages, one telling the participants to stop reading because there were 43 photos and another stating that the reader had won $250. The people who considered themselves lucky generally noticed the messages, enabling them to complete the exercise in mere seconds and also win the reward. By contrast, the self-identified unlucky group missed the messages (and the reward) and took longer to scour the entire paper.
In the same way that playing hours of Tetris can rewire your brain, other mental exercises can reprogram your brain to notice positive scenarios and opportunities. In order to train your brain to see the positive, try one of these strategies:
Make the habit easier to maintain in order to increase your chances of success:
Studies show that these strategies have lasting benefits, including:
Additionally, developing a positive thought pattern makes it easier to practice the habits and achieve the benefits we discussed in earlier sections, such as:
The goal of the Positive Tetris Effect is not to have irrational optimism or turn a blind eye to problems that need improvement. Rather, by adding a positive tint to your view of the world, you can maintain awareness of problems and concerns, while choosing to prioritize a positive perspective. In other words, recognizing and having gratitude for the good in your life is actually the best mechanism for creating more positive outcomes.
Developing a positive thought pattern takes practice.
List three things that you’re grateful for today.
If you were to make a daily habit of writing this gratitude list, how would you incorporate it into your routine?
How could you involve other people in this ritual, either at home or at work (for example, by having each person recite their list at the dinner table or the meeting room)?
Think about your schedule for the day and week ahead. Identify one opportunity you hadn’t previously recognized. (For example, attending a work conference may be an opportunity to get to know a new coworker better.)
As much as you may be able to improve your positive mindset, it can be particularly difficult to be optimistic in the face of adversity. When you confront a challenge, you have three options:
Adversity is inevitable, but, if you stay positive during challenging times, you will not only carry on, but also learn and grow through the process. In fact, the most traumatic and heart-wrenching experiences can also be the most positive and transformative when people remain optimistic and find ways to rise above their hardships. People who choose to fall up in the face of traumas—such as chronic and life-threatening illnesses, natural disasters, and military combat—experience Post-Traumatic Growth or Adversarial Growth, which results in increased:
Instead of seeing failure as something to avoid or endure, when you learn to fall up, failure becomes an invaluable opportunity for growth. When you fall down, don’t simply get back up and return to the status quo—take a deliberate approach to your challenge and fall up to greater heights. Successful people and organizations frame failure as a stepping stone to greatness, and one that forces them to:
Many companies and organizations highly value failing early and often because those failures provide opportunities to learn before investing too heavily in a particular model, project, or approach. For example, the CEO of Coca-Cola is known for beginning each of his annual investor meetings by talking about all of the products the company created that year but never launched. Rather than a parade of the company’s failures, the presentation serves as an opportunity to highlight lessons learned and to reflect on how those lessons will position Coca-Cola to grow to greater heights.
Even without knowing the big-picture benefits of the Third Path, anyone could see that moving past an obstacle is better than letting it defeat you. So, why doesn’t everyone choose to fall up? Simply put, when you get knocked down, it’s hard to pick yourself up and carry on. Generally, when faced with the stress of a crisis, most people get so caught up in their misfortune they forget that a Third Path exists.
When you’re defeated by failures often enough, giving up becomes habitual. This phenomenon, called learned helplessness, explains why some people don’t even bother trying to improve their circumstances. This effect was first discovered in the 1960s, when scientists put dogs into a compartment and delivered a small shock every time they rang a bell. After the dogs had learned to expect the shock, the researchers moved the dogs into a box with two compartments—one with shocks, and one without. Although the dogs could have easily jumped over the divider into the safe compartment, when they heard the bell, they simply stayed put and endured the shock. The dogs’ conditioning had taught them to be helpless.
A similar experiment showed that the same is true of humans: Two groups of people were put into rooms with panels of buttons that would supposedly turn off a blaring noise. However, the first group was given a trick panel, and, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t turn off the noise. By contrast, the second group’s buttons worked, and they quickly and easily silenced the loud noise. Afterward, both groups entered a new room with panels that turned off the noise with a simple hand movement—but, while the second group quickly shut off the noise, the first group had been conditioned to give up, and they didn’t even bother trying.
Learned helplessness prevents people from even considering a Third Path. Making matters worse, learned helplessness tends to spread to all areas of life. In other words, if you develop learned helplessness at work, you’re likely to also give up when you face personal challenges. Once you submit to helplessness in all areas of your life, you’re on the path to pessimism and depression, which also impede your ability to see opportunities to rise above defeat, creating a vicious cycle.
In order to find a way to fall up, look at adversity as a building block for your personal growth, rather than an obstacle in your path. People who find and follow the Third Path tend to do so through:
To change your mindset, examine it. Consider this hypothetical scenario: You walk into a bank where there are 50 other people, and a robber walks in, shoots his gun once, and the bullet gets you in the arm. Were you lucky or unlucky? People who call it unlucky point to the bad fortune of walking into a bank as it’s being robbed, and that, out of 50 people, they were the ones to get hit. By contrast, people who call it lucky say that they could have been shot fatally, or that the bullet could have hit a child.
Both groups base their answer on a counterfact, which is a hypothetical alternative scenario that they use to frame the reality: People who deem the bank shooting unlucky imagine a far better outcome and are therefore disappointed in the results, while the lucky group imagines a far worse scenario and are thus content with the outcome. You have the power to create your counterfact—a counterfact that encourages positivity brings the motivation and performance benefits that we’ve discussed, while a negative one distorts your perspective to make obstacles seem greater than they actually are.
In addition to examining your counterfacts, assess your explanatory style, or the way in which you make sense of a challenging event:
Explanatory style impacts success in all areas of life—including academic success, athletic performance, physical recovery from medical procedures, and productivity at work. A study at one insurance company revealed that salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style sold 37 percent more than those with a pessimistic style, and the most optimistic sellers sold 88 percent more than the most pessimistic. Following the study, that company began basing its hiring on explanatory styles more than industry knowledge; as a result, turnover dropped and market share soared.
Practice is key in learning how to find and follow the Third Path to success. When you are faced with a challenge, follow the ABCD model:
1) A is for adversity, which is the challenging event or situation. Accept that you can’t change it.
2) B is for belief, which is how you interpret the event. How do you explain why this happened and how it will impact your future? Do you use a positive or negative explanatory style?
3) C is for the consequences you’ll face as a result of the challenging situation. Your consequences actually depend more on your belief than the adversity: Positive explanatory style (believing that the problem is short-term and a learning opportunity) increases the likelihood of positive consequences, while pessimistic framing (believing that the problem is permanent and disastrous) leads to negative consequences.
4) D is for disputation. When you catch yourself facing pessimistic beliefs and negative consequences, dispute them. Remind yourself that your belief is dictating this outcome, and that you can change your belief to a more optimistic one. Pretend that you’re disputing a friend’s pessimistic belief—challenge the basis for the belief, and consider other possible interpretations.
In a phenomenon called immune neglect, people often underestimate how effective their psychological immune system is at helping them bounce back from difficulties. As a result, when facing adversity, people typically overestimate how unhappy they will be and for how long. However, if you’re confronting a truly significant problem, try decatastrophizing, or acknowledging that you’re facing a real challenge while reassessing whether it’s as bad as you first thought. Things might be bad, but they are rarely as bad as your mind makes them out to be.
Reflect on your typical reaction when facing adversity, and practice falling up.
Describe a challenge you’ve recently dealt with or are currently confronting (such as tensions with your boss or financial issues at home).
How could you frame this challenge with a positive explanatory style, in which you view the problem as local and temporary (instead of widespread and permanent)?
Consider the three paths you could follow in how you react to this obstacle. What would the First Path look like (in which you circle the problem and ultimately create no change)?
What would the Second Path look like (in which you create more negative consequences and put yourself in a worse position)?
What would the Third Path look like (in which you learn and grow from the situation, so that you end up in a better position)?
In the last chapter, we talked about the benefits of finding a way to rise above challenges by learning and growing from them. In order to fall up, you have to feel that you have some control over your fate—but control can seem elusive when you’re stressed and overwhelmed. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the benefits of feeling in control, the reasons you sometimes lose that feeling, and strategies for getting it back a little at a time.
Since your perception shapes your reality, the actual amount of control you have matters less than how much control you think you have. That doesn’t mean that you should falsely and foolishly claim control over things like the weather—rather, it has to do with how you interpret situations, similarly to the way your explanatory style determines how you make sense of challenges. There are two lenses through which you can interpret your control:
Feeling a sense of control is one of the biggest factors in both happiness and success, and it contributes to:
Despite all the benefits of feeling in control, your sense of self-efficacy can fly out the window when you feel overwhelmed. The reason for this is embedded in the evolutionary wiring of your brain. Your brain has two dueling influences:
When you experience stress or fear and your emotional brain takes over, this is called emotional hijacking. While that response is helpful when confronting a life-threatening danger, it becomes problematic when the trigger is something more mundane, like a stressful project at work. Emotional hijacking impedes your decision-making, problem-solving, and communication skills, which makes it more difficult to tackle the task at hand and exacerbates stress and anxiety, creating a vicious cycle.
Furthermore, you don’t have to be facing a single, daunting challenge to experience emotional hijacking. When small, daily stresses can accumulate with time, a minor problem can become the straw that broke the camel’s back and lead to an emotional hijacking. When you’re on the verge or in the grips of an emotional hijacking, the effects of that hijacking can make it even more difficult to regain control.
(Shortform note: For a deeper explanation of emotional hijacking and tips on how to overcome it, read our summary of Emotional Intelligence. And, to learn more about how the dueling emotional and rational systems affect our decision-making, read our summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
Your emotional system hijacks your rational brain when you start to feel overwhelmed, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed when social and cultural norms push people to achieve big goals quickly: For example, new CEOs are expected to make the companies profitable within the first quarter, and new coaches are pressured to win games immediately. Lofty, often unrealistic goals become daunting, and, when you fall short, you may wonder whether you have any control at all. From there, it’s a short slide into a cycle of learned helplessness.
Instead of trying to win big right away, take an incremental approach to achieve steady, continuous improvement. By tackling small, manageable goals, you not only make incremental progress, but you also gain confidence, knowledge, and resources that help you continue your effort. For example, apply this to something as simple as a backlogged email inbox, which can cause consistent anxiety. Start by responding only to new emails. Then, address emails from the day before, and then the day before that. Limit the time you allot to this project each day—perhaps cap it at an hour—in order to break the large task into bite-sized chunks. This process helps to calm the emotional brain’s panic and instead tap into your problem-solving abilities.
The key is to start small. Follow these steps:
Regain your sense of control over a daunting task or situation.
Describe something that’s currently causing you to feel stressed or overwhelmed (such as a project at work or an issue among your family members).
Explain why it makes you feel stressed.
List two or three things about this situation over which you have control, and two or three that are beyond your control.
Based on the things you can control, what is one goal you can accomplish today?
There’s no use in knowing that you should do something if you don’t actually do it—but having the knowledge doesn’t make it any easier to carry out. For example, you probably know that you should eat fruits and vegetables every day, and that you should get eight hours of sleep each night, but do you always follow that advice? In this chapter, we’ll explain why you don’t always do the things you should, how to stop your unhealthy habits, and how to implement healthy ones.
A major factor preventing you from doing all the things you should do is willpower—or lack thereof. People have limited willpower, and they only have one source of it, meaning that you don’t have a bucket of work-related willpower as well as a bucket of personal willpower. Throughout the day, small acts like avoiding a donut in the break room and staying focused during a long, tedious work meeting tax your willpower, so you may not have any left at the end of the day when you get home and you have to choose between a burger and a salad for dinner.
One study highlighted people’s finite willpower by telling participants not to eat for three hours before the experiment began, then putting both cookies and radishes in front of them. The first group was told to eat only the radishes and the second group was told to eat whatever they wanted (a third control group was given no food). Afterwards, the groups were asked to complete an unsolvable geometric puzzle that they were told was supposed to be simple. The second and control groups toiled over the puzzle substantially longer than members of the first group, who had already used all of their willpower and mental energy resisting the cookies—they had no will to persist on a tricky puzzle.
Marketing campaigns exploit people’s limited willpower with opt-outs. For example, when you’re placed on a mailing list by default or offered the first month of a subscription service free—all you have to do is unsubscribe, but these tactics assume that most people will never get around to making that effort. This is also why companies push to get their products placed at hand level in grocery and clothing stores, because customers are far more inclined to buy something if they don’t have to reach up or bend down to get it. The barrier doesn’t have to be large to be effective.
Willpower is like a pump pushing water uphill—but the pump has a limited power supply, and when it runs out, the water begins to flow downstream along the path of least resistance. Similarly, when your willpower wears thin, your behavior naturally returns to the easiest and most familiar patterns: your habits.
Habits are actions that you perform so often that they become almost automatic. Every time you perform an activity, it sparks a connection between certain brain cells, called neurons. The more frequently you do that action, the stronger the connection becomes, and the more quickly information flows between those neurons. Eventually, certain activities become so ingrained in your neural networks that you don’t have to consciously think about them, and they don’t tap your willpower; these are habits. For example, when you brush your teeth each morning, you don’t have to consciously remember that you’re supposed to brush daily, or think about the steps you have to take (such as grabbing the toothbrush and squeezing the toothpaste) and in what order. Brushing your teeth is such a strong habit that it requires no thought or willpower.
Since you can’t always rely on willpower to help you to make good choices, turn healthy behaviors into habits. When you’ve chosen a behavior that you want to turn into a habit, do it regularly and frequently. The early stages require the most diligence and willpower, because you’re still in the process of ingraining the action to make it a habit. Try these strategies to increase your chance of successfully creating a habit:
1) Minimize the activation energy required to do the action. Activation energy is the motivation and momentum required to actually do an activity. For example, if you’re trying to make a habit of playing the guitar daily, minimize the effort required to get the guitar out and ready to play. Instead of storing the guitar in the closet, keep it on a stand in the middle of the room, where it’s both in plain view and within reach.
2) Implement a 20-second rule to lower the barriers to good habits. If the activation energy takes 20 seconds or more in order to do your new habit, change something (like relocating the guitar). Although 20 seconds is not much, when your willpower is low, even minimal activation energy can be enough to deter you and derail your habit formation. You can adjust the time for your own rule—perhaps a 10-second rule or a 30-second rule is better for you. Regardless of the details, look for ways to eliminate as many barriers as possible.
3) Increase the activation energy required to do bad habits—you can even flip the 20-second rule to increase the barriers to doing undesirable behaviors. For example, if you want to cut down on the amount of TV you watch, take the batteries out of your remote and put them in a drawer that’s at least a 20-second walk from the couch.
One businessman sought Achor’s help because he felt was working long hours but accomplishing very little. It became apparent that he was spending a surprising amount of time checking emails, the stock ticker, and news headlines and doing little work in between. To resolve this, he made it more difficult to access these distractions: He placed the app icons for email, stocks, and news in folders within folders within folders, preventing him from frequently and mindlessly tapping the apps. He also changed his settings so that he had to sign in every time he checked his email. Now his environment was primed for productivity rather than for distraction—he could still check the apps, but he would have to opt in.
4) Create rules that support your habit formation. These rules will determine your second-order decisions, which are the decisions you make regarding the details of the action. For example, if you’re trying to create a habit of exercising first thing in the morning, make rules about what time you’ll get up, whether you’ll run or go to the gym, and how long you’ll exercise. Every decision you make throughout the day—including minor decisions like these—wear down your willpower, physical stamina, ability to focus, tenacity, and mental agility. Setting rules saves you from having to make secondary decisions, which preserves your willpower and gives you less wiggle room to stray from your commitment.
Turn healthy behaviors into habits for long-term benefits.
What is one positive habit you want to start (for example, writing in your journal every day)?
How can you reduce the activation energy to less than 20 seconds (for example, keep your journal and a pen on your bedside table)?
List one or two rules you can implement to support your habit.
What is the counterproductive bad habit that impedes you from doing this positive habit? Or what is a different bad habit that you want to stop doing?
How can you increase the activation to that habit to be more than 20 seconds?
When you have a daunting, stressful project on your plate, you may be inclined to hunker down and isolate yourself from seemingly superfluous social interactions—eating lunch at your desk, working nights and weekends, and canceling social time with friends and family. However, this approach actually hurts your productivity, instead of helping it, because people need social connection for their productivity and personal well-being. In other words, when you avoid social interaction in order to focus on your project, you’re unwittingly creating a bigger obstacle between you and the finish line—and, by the time you get there, you’ll have no energy left for the next project.
By contrast, successful people know that they need social support to get through challenging times. When you’re dealing with a big project at work or a challenging situation at home, the most important thing you can do is to maintain your social connections. Social bonds increase your:
Furthermore, the positive effects of social interactions are twofold:
In short, increased social support raises happiness, which brings the array of physical, mental, and emotional benefits discussed throughout this book. One study that followed 268 male Harvard students for nearly 80 years revealed that strong relationships were the biggest factor in long-term health and well-being. Furthermore, those with robust social ties also saw higher levels of career success and income than those without.
Social bonds also have critical health benefits:
The benefits of social support are crucial at work, where chronic stress and pressure can have insidious effects. Relatively small social sparks—like working on a close-knit team and having casual conversations in the hallway—can insulate employees from many of the harmful effects of stress:
Not only does social connection prevent employees from being impeded by stress, but it also expands their mental capacity and productivity. Social bonds:
Think of your social network like the offensive line in football: It simultaneously insulates you from threats of stress while also enabling you to flourish in the activities you set out to do.
Companies can take actions big and small to foster environments that increase social connection. For example, Google keeps its cafeterias open past business hours to make it easier for employees to eat and socialize together. Additionally, UPS encourages its drivers to meet for lunch, because the benefits of the social interactions outweigh the time that these social gatherings delay drivers’ routes.
Company leaders have a dual opportunity to improve their own workplace relationships while also creating environments that help employees do the same. While forcing connection through bonding activities and icebreakers actually inhibits trust and connection, managers and executives can use simple strategies to forge a culture in which social bonds can flourish organically. These tactics include:
Reflect on how you can reap the benefits of social support when you’re facing daunting tasks.
Describe one big, stressful project that you recently worked on.
How did you lean on your social support system, either for help with the project or to help you unwind?
How did you feel about the project on days when you had social time versus days when you didn’t?
Next time you’re working on a project and you’re on a deadline, name one way you can still incorporate some social time.
The principles of the Happiness Advantage work in concert, meaning a little positivity snowballs to create even greater benefits. For example, when you train your brain to see the positive (Principle #3), you’ll see more opportunity for growth when faced with adversity, thus you’ll be better positioned to fall up, or find the Third Path (Principle #4). Additionally, if you invest in your social connections (Principle #7), the community support you develop can keep you accountable and help you form new, healthy habits (Principle #6). The more you implement the principles of the Happiness Advantage, the more your efforts will reinforce each other and create a virtuous cycle of positivity and success.
And the cycle doesn’t end with you—your happiness creates ripple effects that benefit the people around you. Your brain has cells called mirror neurons, which read and mimic the emotions, reactions, and behaviors of other people. In one study, researchers found that when you watch a needle prick someone else’s finger, your brain lights up as if your own finger had been pricked. Mirror neurons have the same effect on emotional responses: In one experiment, researchers grouped participants and discreetly asked one volunteer to be overtly positive. The other members of the group quickly began mirroring that person’s positive energy, and the entire group became more productive and successful as a result.
(Shortform note: Some researchers doubt that mirror neurons have much—if any—impact on physical and emotional mimicry.)
While everyone’s emotions are contagious, people who are very expressive and who have strong social connections wield even greater influence on the emotions of the people around them. Just one positive person on a team unwittingly infects her colleagues with positivity, which increases their individual performances as well as the collaboration and success of the group as a whole. In fact, emotional contagion is so strong that each workplace develops a distinct group emotion, or “group affective tone,” which creates emotion norms that are reflected in the office culture and behavior. For example, a company with an optimistic emotion norm will likely greet challenges with more confidence and enthusiasm than an office with a more negative norm.
From entry-level employees to C-suite executives, everyone can use the principles we’ve described to raise her happiness baseline, and the positive effects will inevitably spread to the people around her. You have the power to be happier and more successful, and to make the people around you happier and more successful, as well.