The key ideas

The Happiness Advantage

Shawn Achor, 2010

We are used to thinking that happiness will come after success. Harvard researcher Shawn Achor shows that it works the other way round: a positive brain performs better, so happiness belongs at the start of the road. The book's seven principles explain how to train the way you see, get through failure and make good habits stick.

Who it is for

For anyone who keeps putting joy off until the next success and is worn out by the race. And for everyone who wants to work better without squeezing out their last drop of energy.

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

Who here likes doing homework?

South Africa, a school in Soweto, next to neighbourhoods with no electricity and hardly any running water. An American researcher, Shawn Achor, jokingly asks the children which of them likes doing homework. He expects laughter. Instead, nearly all of them raise their hands and smile. The guide explains: for these children, school is a privilege their parents never had.

Achor went back to Harvard and saw his students differently. Many of them had made it into one of the best places in the world, yet lived under constant stress from grades, competition and piles of assignments. The ones who coped best were those who still saw their studies as a gift, not a burden.

Achor spent years studying the wellbeing of Harvard students, and then began telling employees of large companies what positive psychology is about. That is how this book came about. Its central idea turns the usual formula upside down. We think: first I will succeed, then I will be happy. Achor argues that the order works the other way: happiness and a good mood help the brain work better, and success comes more easily.

What follows are seven principles he drew from research and from his own work. Each one explains how it works and what you can do this very week.

Happiness comes at the start, not at the end

Picture Olivia. She promises herself: once I get that promotion, I will finally relax. The promotion comes and the joy lasts a week. Then a new goal appears, and happiness slips over the horizon again. Achor says a great many people live like this: the bar for success keeps moving, and they never reach the happiness they were promised.

He suggests flipping the formula, and he points to an experiment with doctors. They were given a difficult patient case to work through, and half of them first received a small bag of candy. The doctors whose mood had been lifted reached the right diagnosis faster and clung less to their first guess.

Achor draws on the theory of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson. In her view, positive emotions are not just pleasant: they broaden the range of thoughts and actions a person can see. Stress does the opposite and narrows attention down to a single threat.

The practical lesson follows: there is no need to put joy off until you win. Achor suggests simple ways to add it. You can look forward to something nice, do someone a kindness or move your body. You can spend money on an experience rather than a thing. This is not wasted time. It is an investment in how well your mind will work.

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About the author

Shawn Achor is an American researcher of happiness and success who spent years working with Harvard students. He founded the consulting firm GoodThink and speaks to employees of companies around the world about positive psychology.

All books by this author: Shawn Achor

Terms from the book

  • Seligman
  • Post-traumatic growth
  • Vaillant
  • Fredrickson
  • Archimedes
  • Willpower
  • Calling
  • Soweto: A large township in the southwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Achor spoke at a school there, next to some of its poorest neighbourhoods.
  • Positive psychology: A branch of psychology that studies what helps people live well and act at their full strength, not only what breaks them.
  • Fulcrum: An image from the book: our view of the world. For Achor, where the fulcrum sits decides how much power the lever of our actions has. It is the author's metaphor, not a scientific term.
  • Langer: Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist. She is known for experiments on how mindsets and expectations shape health and behaviour.
  • Tetris: A video game in which falling shapes are fitted into neat rows. Achor uses the name Tetris effect for the brain's habit of looking everywhere for whatever it has been trained to find.
  • Wiseman: Richard Wiseman, a British psychologist. He studied how people who think of themselves as lucky differ from those who think of themselves as unlucky.
  • Counterfact: An imagined version of events that the brain compares with what really happened. It is the word Achor uses.
  • ABCDE: A way of working with your thoughts after a setback: the adversity, your belief about it, the consequences, disputing the belief and the energy that follows. Achor offers it as a way to find the path up.
  • Zorro: A masked swordsman hero of adventure books and films. Achor takes a scene from the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro.
  • Diego: Don Diego, the old Zorro in The Mask of Zorro. He is training his successor.
  • Alejandro: Don Diego's young pupil in The Mask of Zorro, the future new Zorro.
  • 20-second rule: A tool from the book: make a good habit twenty seconds easier to start, and a bad one twenty seconds harder to reach.
  • Path of least resistance: Choosing whatever takes the least effort. Achor argues that this is the path the brain picks most often.
  • Diener: Ed Diener, an American psychologist and one of the best known researchers of happiness.

All terms

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