Who is the author of The Happiness Advantage?

The author of The Happiness Advantage is Shawn Achor.

Psychology

The Happiness Advantage Book Summary - The Happiness Advantage Book explained in key points

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The Happiness Advantage summary

Name: The Happiness Advantage
Rating: 4.5 (301 reviews)
Author: Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor

The Seven Principles that Fuel Success and Performance at Work

4.5 (301 ratings)

24 mins

Brief summary

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor explains how happiness can fuel success, not the other way around. The book offers research-based practices to improve well-being and boost professional and personal achievements.

Topics

Success The Brain Routines & Habits Effectiveness Goals Happy

Table of Contents

The Happiness Advantage
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Discover the secret to happiness and success.

In today’s fast-paced world, you want to use every possible advantage available to you to get an edge over the competition. The hope is often that, by leveraging your success, you can eventually get to a point where your accomplishments and wealth award you a certain degree of happiness.

As you’ll soon discover, this isn’t exactly how it works. In fact, happiness – far from being the result of all your hard work – is actually one of the tools you can use to increase your performance, and thus your quality of life.

In these blinks, you’ll learn all about the seven basic principles that will help you increase your level of happiness and bring you closer to succeeding at your goals.

In these blinks, you’ll discover:

why Michael Jordan and Walt Disney are more alike than they are different;
how spending more time around the water cooler will improve the quality of your work; and
how acting like you’re 20 years younger can actually make you feel that way.

Traditional psychology focuses on the negatives without seeing the positives.

Traditional psychology looks at averages: are people less fulfilled than average? Less happy than average? If so, traditional psychology aims to bring people back up to what is considered the average level of happiness or fulfillment.

In addition, traditional psychology focuses on the negative, questioning what makes people fall below average rather than what lifts them above it.

However, the problem with this approach is that, in our obsession with averages, we ultimately can’t move beyond that point into excellence. By improving only in the areas where you are lacking, you miss out on opportunities to surpass the average.

Consider for a moment that four out of five Harvard students suffer from depression and consider their studies to be a source of stress.

Looking at this data, traditional psychology would consider our four Harvard students to exhibit an average level of happiness. After all, they represent the clear majority! However, in doing so, they completely miss the one anomaly: the fifth, non-depressed student!

This is important, because one student who isn’t depressed is also the one who’s most likely to succeed – both in school and later at work.

This realization that we should focus on positives gave birth to the field of positive psychology.

Positive psychology investigates what it is that makes people excel, with the ultimate goal of applying that knowledge and thereby raising the average.

So, what makes that one Harvard student succeed where the other four failed?

After living among Harvard students for 12 years and traveling all over the world trying to figure out what lifts people above average, the author found that successful people are successful because of their specific interpretation of reality.

For instance, his experience of students in Soweto, South Africa revealed the vast majority to be delighted with their studies as they saw schoolwork as a challenge and a privilege. Compare this with Harvard students, many of whom see school as a source of stress.

Success revolves around happiness, not the other way around.

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.

The “Happiness Advantage” will give you a performance edge.

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.

Enhance your performance by enhancing your mindset.

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?

Train your brain to look for the positive over the negative.

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.

Fall up by turning negative momentum into positive momentum.

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:

Gaining control and focusing on little changes is how you can make the greatest improvements.

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.

Willpower alone cannot affect change – instead, try to minimize barriers and form good habits.

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.

Social support is one of your greatest assets.

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.

You have the power to share your happiness with the world.

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!

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What is The Happiness Advantage about?

The Happiness Advantage looks into the origins of happiness and the positive effects that happiness has on our productivity. Based on extensive research in positive psychology, the book offers concrete tips on how to increase your own happiness and thus your chances for success.

The Happiness Advantage Review

The Happiness Advantage (2010) reveals the profound impact of positive psychology on our happiness and success. Here's why this book is a must-read:

Packed with research-backed strategies, it teaches practical ways to leverage positivity and improve our well-being.
By highlighting the link between happiness and performance, the book shows how cultivating a positive mindset can enhance productivity and resilience.
With its engaging anecdotes and relatable examples, the book ensures that the subject matter never becomes dull, making it an enjoyable and educational read.

Best quote from The Happiness Advantage

Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge.

—Shawn Achor

Who should read The Happiness Advantage?

Anyone who thinks happiness is the reward for hard work
Anyone who feels too stressed to cope
Anyone who could use just a little more happiness in his or her life

About the Author

Shawn Achor is an American author who spent 12 years at Harvard studying what makes people happy. He is a leading expert on the connection between happiness and success and has worked with successful leaders all over the world. In addition, he has written a number of New York Times best-selling books, including Before Happiness, Ripple’s Effect and The Orange Frog.

Categories with The Happiness Advantage

Psychology Productivity Mindfulness & Happiness

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