😁#31: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
What comes first - Success or Happiness? What are the 7 Principles of Happiness and Success? How can we apply them to our everyday lives?
Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 31.
So quick question before we jump into the book - I’ve had some amazing honest feedback from people about this newsletter that they are sometimes reluctant to share it with people because of the name, which 1. I compleeeetely understand and 2. thank you to everyone who took the time to let me know that!! I appreciate it so much. 🙏 In light of that I’ve been working on coming up with a new name.
How would you all feel if it we renamed this publication to 📕Read Your Mind? I feel like the Read Your Mind Newsletter has a nice ring to it but I’d never change anything without asking you guys first. Would love to hear any and all opinions or feedback!
Now, onto the real reason we are all here! This week, we are reading 📚 The Happiness Advantage 🖋 by Shawn Achor.
This one falls into the Positive Psychology realm and I have learnt sooooo much by reading it. I can’t wait to share it with you.
So let’s jump in! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
🥚What comes first, the chicken or the egg? That is, Success or Happiness
This entire book is centred on the premise of flipping the usual narrative on its head:
“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 to be backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around.”
Wait, what?!
If you are anything like me, reading this feels like a bit of a kick in the guts. Or like we have been cheated somehow.
“As a society we know very well how to be unwell and miserable and so little about how to thrive.
As late as 1998, there was a 17-to-1 negative to positive ratio of research in the field of psychology.” - page 11
The fact of the matter is, there just hasn’t been as much effort and research put into what really helps us be truly happy.
So Shawn joined the cause - a researcher trying to get to the bottom of why 4 in 5 Harvard students were depressed versus the 1 in 5 who were truly thriving. (Also, take that in as an alarming and surprising statistic for Harvard students, right?!)
What did those 1 in 5 do differently? How did they cope? How did they manage? What strategies were working for them that weren’t working for the others?
He found out, and then some.
🤩The Seven Principles of Happiness and Success
“Once I’d finished gathering and analyzing this massive amount of research, I was able to isolate seven specific, actionable, and proven patterns that predict success and achievement.” - page 17
Those are:
😁 The Happiness Advantage
🤸♀️ The Fulcrum and the Lever
😵💫 The Tetris Effect
📈 Falling Up
🦹 The Zorro Circle
⏰ The 20 Second Rule
👯♀️ Social Investment
Let’s break each one down.
1️⃣😁 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.” - page 17
In short, the more frequently we can feel happiness, the more successful we will be.
But what even is happiness, anyway?
It’s easier to break it down into the ten most common positive emotions, a body of work by Barbara Fredrickson:
Joy
Gratitude
Serenity
Interest
Hope
Pride
Amusement
Inspiration
Awe
Love
The more frequently we can feel any of those emotions, the better positioned we are in our lives. And they become a lot more accessible as well in terms of trying to engineer the experience of a certain emotion.
For example, it is easier to chase after amusement or gratitude specifically rather than the vague “happiness”.
2️⃣🤸♀️ 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.” - page 17
Our brains only have a certain amount of processing power to devote to how we experience the world. We can use that processing power to see and focus on negativity, or we can change the lens through which we are looking.
“Happiness is not about lying to ourselves, or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brain so that we can see the ways to rise above our circumstances.” - page 63
A Job vs A Career vs A Calling
One example of how we can shift our mindset (fulcrum) to increase our power (the lever) is in the way we view our work day to day.
Yale psychologist and researcher Amy Wrzesniewski has found that employees have one of three mindsets about their work:
“People with a “job” see work as a chore and their paycheck as the reward.
People who view their work as a “career” work not only out of necessity, but also to advance and succeed. They are invested in their work and want to do well.
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.” - page 78
The most interesting thing about this research was that they found out it was nothing to do with the job itself. There are just as many doctors who see their work as a job as cleaners who see their work as a calling.
The good news is, people who are unhappy in “jobs” can improve their lives without quitting or retraining.
It can start with a simple exercise to turn their job description into a calling description. Here’s how:
“Turn a piece of paper horizontally, and on the left hand side write down a task you a forced to perform at work that feels devoid of meaning.
Then ask yourself: What is the purpose of this task? What will it accomplish?
Draw an arrow to the right and write this answer down. If what you wrote still seems unimportant ask yourself again: What does this result lead to?
Draw another arrow and write this down.
Keep going until you get to a result that is meaningful to you.
In this way you can connect every small thing you do to the larger picture, to a goal that keeps you motivated and energized.” - page 80
Change the fulcrum, and we end up with a longer lever. Mindset = power.
3️⃣😵💫 The Tetris Effect
This principle is named after something that happens to our brains after playing Tetris for an extended period of time: people start to see those Tetris shapes everywhere - from cereal boxes in the supermarket aisle to the shapes of skyscrapers.
Why does this happen?
Even after the game isn’t being played anymore, our vision and the neural pathways continue to fire in the same patterns because they got used to doing so.
Here’s the kicker though, it doesn’t only happen when playing Tetris!
The more we scan our surrounding environments for negatives, problems and errors, the more we will continue to see the negatives, problems and errors.
For example, Shawn took a break from work one day and walked outside to get some fresh air, ending up next to two other employees.
“One glanced up at the sky and said, “It’s nice that it’s sunny today.”
The other one said, “I wish it wasn’t so hot today.”
Both statements are based on reality. It was sunny and it was hot.
But the second person was giving into a habit that would prove debilitating to his productivity and performance the second he walked back into his office. He literally couldn’t see the positives in his life and in his work—the opportunities, the possibilities, the chances for growth—and as as result, he diddn’t have even a fighting chance of capitalizing on them.” - page 91
Whether we train for seeing the negatives or train for seeing the positives in our lives, we are guaranteed to succeed.
4️⃣📈 Falling Up
When we are in the middle of defeat, stress or crisis our brains have three potential mental paths it can follow:
“One that keeps circling around where you currently are (ie. the negative event creates no change; you end where you start.)
Another mental path leads you toward further negative consequences (ie. you are far worse off after the negative event; this path is why we are afraid of conflict and challenge).
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.” - page 108
As human beings, we frequently overlook this Third Path.
For example, soldiers are (sadly) often told that they have only two options for how they’ll feel when they come home from war. They’ll either be the same, or that they’ll have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
They are rarely told that they could come back and be better than before. This is the third path as mentioned, and is also referred to as Post Traumatic Growth (😉) or sometimes Adversarial Growth.
“Thanks to this study [on Post Traumatic Growth] today we can say for certain, not just anecdotally, that great suffering or trauma can actually lead to great positive change across a wide range of experiences.
After the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid, psychologists found many residents experienced positive psychological growth. So too do the majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer.” - page 110
What kinds of positive changes?
increased spirituality
more compassion for others
deeper relationships
increased overall life satisfaction
increased personal strength
improved self confidence
5️⃣🦹 The Zorro Circle
The name of this principle comes from The Mask of Zorro, and the way he was forced to initially train only inside a small circle, until his sword master told him he was ready to widen the circle and expand his attempts and feats.
When our stress levels and workloads are getting out of control, we can lose our feeling of control and competence quite quickly, and all of a sudden we can feel like we are in free fall. But,
“If we first concentrate our efforts on small, manageable goals, we regain the feeling of control so crucial to performance. By first limiting the scope of our efforts, then watching those efforts have the intended effect, we accumulate the resources, knowledge, and confidence to expand the circle, gradually conquering a larger and larger area.” - page 129
Take home message: when we get overwhelmed, make the task smaller. If it’s still overwhelming, make it smaller again. That was we can reclaim our power.
6️⃣⏰ 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 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.” - page 17
In order to bring more happiness and success into our lives, it will require changing some of our habits. But habits are notoriously difficult to change.
So Shawn recommends the 20 Second Rule. Basically, if we can make the new behaviour very easy or decrease the barrier to entry by 20 seconds, we are more likely to succeed.
(If you want my honest opinion of this section, it has a sound basis but James Clear covers the concept in far more compelling and direct language in his book Atomic Habits, which you can read the summary of here. Basically, make the new habit obvious, make it easy, make it attractive and make it satisfying. )
7️⃣👯♀️ Social Investment
“Our need for social support isn’t just in our heads. Evolutionary psychologists explain that the innate need to affiliate and form social bonds has been literally wired into our biology. Each social connection also bolsters our cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune systems, so that the more connections we make over time, the better we function.
We have such a biological need for social support, our bodies can literally malfunction without it.” - page 177
But often, when we are stressed or in crisis we can have the tendency to shy away from people. To try and be alone. When what we need is exactly the opposite of that - we need healing connection.
In order to maximise our success and happiness, we must prioritise our relationships and connection every step of the way.
They are not a “nice to have”, they are a “must have”.
Well there we have it! Another week, another book, another set of learnings to implement. I know I’m going to try extra hard this week to bring happiness to the forefront of my life and I hope you will be able to do the same! Thank you for reading!
Until next week my friends,
Eleanor ❤️🙏
🧠 Resources & Links
🤝 Human Rights list of Mental Health Support Services
🎥 Shawn’s Episode of Super Soul Sessions with Oprah
📸 Follow Shawn Achor on Instagram - 36.7k followers
📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Wednesday 7th September 2022 is #32:
📚 Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide To Reclaiming Yourself
🖋 by Nedra Glover Tawwab
“Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them in order to achieve work/life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do "healthy boundaries" really mean - and how can we successfully express our needs, say "no," and be assertive without offending others?”