The Happiness Advantage summary

What exactly is happiness? Formally, we defined happiness as “the experience of positive emotions,” but the truth is that happiness is highly subjective, relative to the individual experiencing it.

Positive psychology shows that when we feel good and have a positive mindset, we are smarter, feel more motivated and enjoy more success.

If you’ve ever felt work was easier when you’re in a good mood, then it was more than just a coincidence. Indeed, our brains perform best when we feel positive.

Consider this study, in which the initial level of positive emotions of 272 employees at the same company were measured and compared with their performance over an eighteen-month period. Researchers found that those who started out happier also ended up receiving better evaluations and higher pay later on.

If you have children or siblings, you’ve surely seen how, when the older one “accidentally” hits the younger one, he’ll often try to do something so the younger sibling won’t go crying to mom and dad. Usually, this means cracking a joke or saying something nice.

But why does this work at all? How is it that our words can alter the experience of pain and suffering?

At this point, you should be convinced of the power of a positive mindset, and probably want to know what you can do right now to become more happy.

For starters, understand that your mind adopts patterns of viewing the world.

A single situation can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, and these perspectives are of the utmost importance when it comes to your happiness and success.

After a crisis or adversity, your mind follows one of three paths:

One of the main drivers of success is the belief that we have control over our future, and is in fact one of the strongest drivers of well-being and performance. Those who believe they have power over their outcomes enjoy higher academic achievement, career accomplishment and are happier at work.

Think of a successful athlete, for example: she doesn’t blame the referees or the weather when she loses, and certainly doesn’t attribute her wins to strokes of fortune.

It should be obvious that exercise is good for you, while smoking is not, right? Yet, despite this knowledge, so many people fail when they try to adopt good habits or abandon bad ones.

The problem is that they often rely on their willpower, but willpower is a limited resource, meaning the well can run dry. In fact, studies have shown that willpower is ineffective at maintaining lifestyle changes because willpower becomes depleted with overuse.  

Imagine your boss hands you a new project and you immediately immerse yourself in it, cutting yourself off from the rest of the world entirely. No socializing, no friends, nothing. There are only two outcomes in this scenario: either you sink and fail or you completely exhaust yourself trying to push through.

Successful people, however, know that their social relationships are valuable investment. Social interactions fill us with positivity, and as we strengthen our relationships over time, we raise our happiness baseline.

Surely you’ve seen someone yawn only to have the irresistible urge to yawn yourself. The same phenomenon occurs with happiness.

Although the ideas presented in the blinks start at an individual level, that doesn’t mean they end there. When we start exploiting the Happiness Advantage, its benefits multiply, spreading throughout our communities and societies. In other words, they’re not just for us!