It can! Shawn says that we need at least 3 opportunities for each threat we perceive. “Instead of narrowing our actions down to fight or flight as negative emotions do, positive ones broaden the amount of possibilities we process, making us more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas.”, “Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel good but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. A study asked children to do a series of tasks. Exercise releases endorphins, but it’s not just a short-term fix. If what you wrote still seems unimportant, ask yourself again: What does this result lead to? Physical activity has a strong impact on our mood. The second mistake traditional psychology makes is focusing on those who fall only on one side of average—below it. In The Happiness Advantage author Shawn Achor says that happiness is not the consequence of success, but more like the cause of success. “Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.”. Not because science must be “serious”, but because “serious-sounding” increases authority, and people are more likely to be swayed by sources that they perceive as being authoritative. What if happier people were happier because they were healthier and stronger? Finally, people with a calling view work as an end in itself; their work is fulfilling not because of external rewards but because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose.”, “People with a calling orientation not only find their work more rewarding but work harder and longer because of it. Gradually, as the desired action becomes more habitual, we can become more flexible.”. In the midst of defeat, stress, and crisis, our brains map different paths to help us cope. Because remember: with your happiness, you have the power to make others feel happier too. Martin Seligman, the pioneer in positive psychology, has broken happiness down into three, measurable components: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.”. How to exercise our happiness advantage and become happier? Then focus on micro-tasks you can execute. There is really a ton of incredible life-improving wisdom here. Make your environment a positive and uplifting one, take a break during the day, spend 20 minutes outside in good weather. Move into a flat with smoke detectors where you can’t smoke inside and it’s freezing cold outside. The originality of this book is that it explains why and how we can be happy from a business point of view. Here are six smart ways of spending your money to maximize happiness: Doing things you are good at and leveraging your strengths and skills will also make you feel happier. Because the information was so powerful, I actually won first place in the tournament. “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.”, “Countless studies have found that social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being and lowered stress, both an antidote for depression and a prescription for high performance.”, “We become more successful when we are happier and more positive.”, “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.”. The more social support you have, the happier you are. To quote the author (I edit for brevity): Our brains are hardwired to perform at their when they are positive. The author holds a master's degree from La Sapienza, department of communication and sociological research, and is a member of the American Psychology Association (APA). How we experience the world, and our ability to succeed within it, constantly changes based on our mindset. And one, which I call the Third Path, that leads us from failure or setback to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fall.”, “Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth.”, “By scanning our mental map for positive opportunities, and by rejecting the belief that every down in life leads us only further downward, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them.”, “People’s ability to find the path up rests largely on how they conceive of the cards they have been dealt, so the strategies that most often lead to Adversarial Growth include positive reinterpretation of the situation or event, optimism, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on (rather than trying to avoid or deny it).”, “The people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened.”, “Things do not necessarily happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best out of things that happen.”—Tal Ben-Shahar, “When people feel helpless in one area of life, they not only give up in that one area; they often ‘overlearn’ the lesson and apply it to other situations. Read in: 3 minutes Favorite quote from the author: His talk “The happy secret to better work” is one the most popular TED talk ever with more than seven millions views. Monks who spend years of meditating grow their prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain most responsible for the feeling of happiness. Below 3 we might focus on threats too much and pick up more on the negatives of life. TED's editors chose to feature it for you. But if you think you don’t have time, there is a summary below. One answer is that the brain is organized to act on what we predict will happen next, something psychologists call ‘Expectancy Theory.’”, “The expectation of an event causes the same complex set of neurons to fire as though the event were actually taking place, triggering a cascade of events in the nervous system that leads to a whole host of real physical consequences.”, “The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality.”, “When we reconnect ourselves with the pleasure of the ‘means,’ as opposed to only focusing on the ‘ends,’ we adopt a mindset more conducive not only to enjoyment but to better results.”, “When faced with a difficult task or challenge, give yourself an immediate competitive advantage by focusing on all the reasons you will succeed, rather than fail. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things.”, “People who put their heads down and wait for work to bring eventual happiness put themselves at a huge disadvantage, while those who capitalize on positivity every chance they get come out ahead.”, “Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge.”, “Happiness is not just a mood—it’s a work ethic.”, “Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for feeling happy.”, “Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And the inverse is true for habits you want to stop: make it hard to keep them up! When we’re very stressed and can’t keep up it can be difficult to feel like we’re on top of things. Happiness makes someone more successful. Chasing after success in the hopes of becoming happy once we’ve “made it” doesn’t work. If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy is a broken formula. Organizational psychologists call this ‘job crafting,’ but in essence, it involves simply adjusting one’s mindset.”, “if you can’t make actual changes to your daily work, ask yourself what potential meaning and pleasure already exist in what you do.”, “Researchers have found that even the smallest tasks can be imbued with greater meaning when they are connected to personal goals and values.”, “Turn a piece of paper horizontally, and on the left-hand side write down a task you’re forced to perform at work that feels devoid of meaning. The Happiness Advantage teaches us how to control our brains in order to capitalize on positivity and improve our productivity and performance. It’s not much different than forming habits and the respective neural pathways in our brains. Home; Course Info. And worry not about the ones you can’t control. My notes from a TED Talk by Shawn Achor, titled “The Happy Secret to Better Work” Thesis: Happier, positive brains work better: When we become “positive in the present”, our brains work better “Happiness advantage”: brain “at positive” performs much better than at negative, neutral, or stressed Get My Searchable Collection of 100+ Book Notes, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink, The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do by Jeff Goins, We become more successful when we are happier and more positive, not the other way around, Happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential, The Happiness Advantage is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can, Happiness is not just a mood—it’s a work ethic, We can use our brain to change how we process the world, and that in turn changes how we react to it, Constantly scanning the world for the positive, allows us to experience happiness, gratitude, and optimism, When we reframe failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth (see: post-traumatic growth), The most successful people, in work and in life, believe that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes. Another study linking happiness levels and lifespan of a group of nuns showed that there was a seven-year difference between the happiest and saddest nuns. And from then on, he deepened his passion and expertise in the topic of happiness and mental well-being. And watch less TV. “The typical approach to understanding human behavior has always been to look for the average behavior or outcome.” Again, yes you can become happier. But this is the best one I have read so far. But correlation is causation. “We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling. Across the world. Today, when I checked my inbox, I found an e-mail from one of my readers. They become convinced that one dead-end path must be proof that all possible paths are dead ends.”, “A counterfact is an alternate scenario our brains create to help us evaluate and make sense of what really happened.”. And as a result, these are the people who are generally more likely to get ahead.”, “Wrzesniewski’s most interesting finding is not just that people see their work in one of these three ways, but that it fundamentally doesn’t matter what type of job one has.”, “A calling orientation can have just as much to do with mindset as it does with the actual work being done.”, “Unhappy employees can find ways to improve their work life that doesn’t involve quitting, changing jobs or careers, or going off to find themselves. “We’ve got to cut the extraneous out of … When challenges loom and we get overwhelmed, our rational brains can get hijacked by emotions. I believe The Happiness Advantage could have enjoyed a better structure. Think of a time you have been in a similar circumstance in the past and performed well.”, “When we believe there will be a positive payoff for our effort, we work harder instead of succumbing to helplessness.”, “By changing the way we perceive ourselves and our work, we can dramatically improve our results.”. Even just thinking of watching our favorite movie can raise our endorphin levels by 27%. They work because they have to and constantly look forward to the time they can spend away from their job. Above 6:1 is too much and we might have too Rosy an outlook. Until we started seeing the new level of cutting edge tech: the “bleeding edge tech”. Here is an idea on how to do just that: every evening write down three positives things that happened to you during the day. Not only does he answer these questions (and more), but he also provides the science to back up these answers. “Inattentional blindness”: our frequent inability to see what is often right in front of us if we’re not focusing directly on it. It seems like the happier you are, the stronger your immune system. Spending money on other people is called ‘prosocial spending,’ and also boosts happiness. Because counterfacts are invented, we actually have the power in any given situation to consciously select a counterfact that makes us feel fortunate rather than helpless. He received his master of arts in Christian and Buddhist Ethics, then was teaching assistant to Tal Ben-Shahar’s popular “Happiness” course. Take a look at Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, “The Happy Secret to Better Work”, and you’ll know why the happiness advantage is so important… *Fasten your seat belts and turn off every distraction. Psychologists call these kinds of rules ‘second-order decisions,’ because they are essentially decisions about when to make decisions, like deciding ahead of time when, where, and how I was going to work out in the morning.”, “Rules are especially helpful during the first few days of a behavior-changing venture when it’s easier to stray off course. Shawn is not a psychologist himself, which lowered a bit my expectations before I started reading “The Happiness Advantage”. Shawn Achor is one of the world’s leading experts on happiness, success, and potential. People who watch videos that induce joy recover from stress more quickly than those who watch neutral or sad videos. “We tend to miss what we’re not looking for.”, “When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.”, “Psychologists call this “predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise.”, “The best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life.”, “When you write down a list of ‘three good things’ that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future.”, “A variation on the Three Good Things exercise is to write a short journal entry about a positive experience.”, “It’s not your age, or what you do for a living; it’s the training and consistency that count.”, “On every mental map after crisis or adversity, there are three mental paths. They are invested in their work and want to do well. I have read several positive psychology books. Studies show that watching less TV can make us happier. The Fulcrum and the Lever teach 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. For Shawn Achor, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential. Disputation involves first telling ourselves that our belief is just that—a belief, not fact—and then challenging (or disputing) it.”, “Psychologists recommend that we externalize this voice (i.e., pretend it’s coming from someone else), so it’s like we’re actually arguing with another person.”, “When faced with a terrible prospect—for example, the end of a love affair or of a job—we overestimate how unhappy it will make us and for how long.”, “We fall victim to ‘immune neglect,’ which means we consistently forget how good our psychological immune system is at helping us get over adversity.”, “Adversities, no matter what they are, simply don’t hit us as hard as we think they will.”. Exercise a trait, value or strength of character that is part of who you are: even better than a skill, Use your signature strengths daily: the more you use it, the happier you become.”, Use adversity and failure to become even stronger, Don’t consider happiness just mood: it’s your new work and life ethic, Force yourself to scan the world for positives and write them down every day, Reframe failures as opportunities for growth, Believe that your action directly affect outcomes and you can reach the goals you want (internal locus of control). Falling Up 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. Tests show that happy individuals are better off at fighting cold viruses. The problem is, the more we use our willpower, the more worn-out it gets. Our environment and surroundings can have a huge impact on our mindsets and well being. You can start with just ten or fifteen minutes a day. The Happiness Advantage Summary 4 min read. But if the Belief has led us down a more pessimistic path, helplessness and inaction can bring negative Consequences. The reason so many of us have trouble sustaining change is because we try to rely on willpower. My Thoughts Social Investment teaches us how to invest more in one of the greatest predictors of success and excellence—our social support network. 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 lecture airing on … Achor expanded on his original research in The Happiness Advantage in his second book, Before Happiness, which was published by Crown in September 2013. “Gable’s studies have shown that active-constructive responding enhances relationship commitment and satisfaction, and fuels the degree to which people feel understood, validated, and cared for during a discussion—all of which contribute to the Happiness Advantage.”. Keep going until you get to a result that is meaningful to you. When you’re in need of a happiness shot, revisit a talent of yours and use it. Indeed a study shows that movement is more effective in curing depression than anti-depressant medications. In my opinion, that type of language on a book that wants to be grounded on science is out of place. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. Another mental path leads you toward further negative consequences (i.e., you are far worse off after the negative event; this path is why we are afraid of conflict and challenge). “Psychologists have found that these kinds of gains in productivity, happiness, and health have less to do with how much control we actually have and more with how much control we think we have.”, “The most successful people, in work and in life, are those who have what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control,’ the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes.”, “Experiments show that when people are primed to feel high levels of distress, the quickest to recover are those who can identify how they are feeling and put those feelings into words.”, “By tackling one small challenge at a time—a narrow circle that slowly expands outward—we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes, that we are largely the masters of our own fates.”, “Small successes can add up to major achievements. A study showed that 45 minutes of activity three times per week increased the mental health of depressed patients for more than six months. People with an internal locus of control are also more productive at work and in life. Tal Ben-Shahar calls this “the error of the average.”, “If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.”. Shawn suggests writing down 3 things you are grateful for, perform random acts of kindness, meditate to clear your mind. Many small pleasures instead of a big one, 9 Ways to Handle A Girl Hitting On Your Boyfriend, Men Who Hate Women: Relationships & Psychology of Misogynists, How to Learn: The Three Pillars of Mastery, Feminine AND Powerful: 9 Tips For Women Bosses, How to Present With Confidence: 7 Winning Tips, Social Relativity: From Nobody to Superstar, Don’t wait to be successful to be happy: be happy to be successful, Shawn says that happiness is the joy of striving after our potential, We can raise our baseline level of happiness. All it takes is drawing that first circle in the sand.”, William James called creating good habits “daily strokes of effort.”. She grew up in Kansas and was not afraid to be seen as odd, but when she realised she was ‘different’ she worked harder to conform. In The Happiness Advantage summary, we’ll give an overview of these 7 proven principles: 1) Tap on the Happiness Advantage 2) Change outcomes … “ Presenting online with prezi is crucial to the success of our trainings. If you like The Happiness Advantage, you may also enjoy the following books: ...and I’ll show you how to live better and work smarter—faster than you ever thought possible. One that keeps circling around where you currently are (i.e., the negative event creates no change; you end where you start). That’s the case because happiness and positive states of mind are powerful performance-boosters. How can that be? The Tetris Effect teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunity wherever we look. Actually in psychology for many years attention was paid to the outliers, but to the negative ones. When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. What the cult of the average does is, in simple terms, ignore the outliers in our data. As a guy who’s been working in tech a bit we always had to laugh at the buzzword “cutting edge technology”. “In physics, activation energy is the initial spark needed to catalyze a reaction. The Zorro Circle 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. 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