Rethinking Happiness and Success

• According to researcher Shawn Achor, the ways that many professionals pursue personal success and happiness are not productive or realistic.
• Happiness should be seen as a means to success rather than a result of it.
• When individuals master optimism, they not only thrive in various aspects of life but also become better business leaders.

Transcript

Shawn Achor: [00:15] We have a traditional view of happiness and success that I think limits both. We think if we work harder, we’re going to have higher levels of success, and once we have higher levels of success, then we can finally be happier: work harder, be more successful, then I’ll be happier.

[00:31] We think, as soon as I get that degree, think how happy I’ll automatically be. If I get into that school, think how happy I’ll be. If I get a job, think how happy I’ll be. Or when I hit this sales target, or when I have this amount of savings, or when I have a home, or when I get married, think how happy I’ll be.

[00:45] But in each one of those cases, what we find is the brain does something very simple.

[00:48] Back in the 1950s, there was a series of studies done where they found that every time your brain has a success, your brain changes the goalpost of what success looks like and moves it up. It’s designed to do this so that you can actually see more of your potential.

[01:02] Otherwise, the very first time you kicked a ball or put Legos together as a four-year-old, you would’ve been done. We want to see human potential. We want those targets to keep rising.

[01:11] So if a child can learn addition, we want to see if they can learn multiplication. Can they create a product? Can they sell a product? Can they heal 110 people if they were healing 100 people the year before?

Every time your brain has a success, your brain changes the goalpost of what success looks like and moves it up.

[01:20] That’s not the problem. The problem is if our mental health or happiness is on the opposite side of a moving target.

[01:28] We push it over what we call the “cognitive horizon.” Our brain never gets there, which is why we see so many people in successful positions feeling jaded, because they were assured that, beforehand, if they got to this stage in life, then they’d definitely be happier.

[01:43] I see this at every level of the socioeconomic system, and I see that all the way up to the most successful business leaders across the entire globe.

[01:51] I’ve worked with nearly half of the Fortune 100 companies, and this is a persistent frustration that they have, is that the success that they experienced didn’t guarantee levels of happiness. So then we start to think, well, success and happiness are just separate.

[02:05] In my very first book, The Happiness Advantage, I outlined a research case about why the formula is actually just backwards.

[02:12] We found that, in the midst of a challenge, if you’re able to raise levels of optimism, social connection, meaning, or purpose, every single success rate rises dramatically over your genetic threshold and environment.

[02:23] What that meant was that, when our brains were positive, we actually reap this unique advantage. When our brains become more positive than our brains—our own brains—at negative, neutral, or stress, our productivity rises by 31 percent, and cross-industry our sales rise by 37 percent.

Stress was inevitable, but its effects on us were not.

[02:39] We found at UBS, in the middle of the banking crisis, that if you could identify the meaning involved with your stress, we saw a 23 percent drop in the negative health outcomes of the same level of stress.

[02:50] What that meant was, stress was inevitable, but its effects on us were not. And it was all being changed by this lens through which we were viewing the world.

[02:57] In fact, to summarize about two decades worth of research, we found that when your brain is in a positive state, every single business and educational outcome we know how to test for rises dramatically.

[03:09] Intelligence rises. Creativity nearly triples. We live longer, our social bonds become deeper, we become more altruistic, we find healthcare costs drop. Dramatic changes. Which means that the formula was backward.

[03:21] Instead of thinking, if I work harder, I’ll be more successful, then I’ll be happier; what we need to understand is how the brain works.

[03:27] And what we find is when our brain is in a positive state first, it becomes a precursor to seeing more of our potential. And so what that means is, happiness isn’t just the end; happiness is the means.

When your brain is in a positive state, every single business and educational outcome we know how to test for rises dramatically.

[03:36] There’s research that’s been done on homeless populations that were trying to find jobs. And they found that if those people believed that they were not going to find a job, if they had low levels of optimism about the case that they would find a job, it turns out that when they got into the interviews, it was a predictor of whether or not they were actually going to get the job.

[03:54] If you were hiring somebody, would you hire somebody who seemed optimistic about the future, or would you hire somebody who was pessimistic and could outline all the reasons why this was not going to work out?

[04:04] If you were playing on a sports team, if you had a coach, if the coach at the end of the game, when you’re down by eight points said, let’s stop for a second and let’s read some articles about why most teams in this case actually lose, that would not be a very good coach.

[04:18] You know one of the teams has to win. We know maybe 5 percent of the time, or 1 percent of the time somebody’s gonna win, even though they’re down by eight points. The question is, how do we become that person if we’re in the down position?

[04:30] So if we assume that negative things are gonna befall us, we believe our behavior doesn’t matter. That’s the definition of pessimism. Optimism doesn’t turn rose-colored glasses on the world.

[04:41] It takes a realistic assessment of the present but maintains the belief that, eventually, my behavior will matter if linked to the right people.

[04:48] Which is why we go to business school. It’s why we connect with our family and friends, and it’s why when we are optimistic about what could be done or look at what behaviors we could do that could raise the outcomes that we wanted, what we’re doing is we’re shifting that lens.

[05:02] And what we found is it dramatically increases our chances not only of finding a job, but being successful in life.