The Happiness Advantage Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

You shouldn’t expect to become happier after you gain success. Become happier first in order to gain more success. Never underestimate how striving to achieve goals impacts happiness. If you’re sitting around complacent and not working to achieve the goals you set before, do not be surprised if you don’t have the best mood. The Happiness Advantage is about realizing that we can change the way we understand our relationship with the world around us so that we can change our mood. Approaching the world with optimism versus being consumed by negativity is one key to living more happily. Changing our language of “failure” to “growth potential moments” can impact our lives for the better.

About the Author

Shawn Achor, born March 9, 1978, is an American author and speaker widely known for his positive psychology advocacy. He spent twelve years at Harvard University where he graduated magna cum laude and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. Achor has become one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. He authored The Happiness Advantage (2010), Before Happiness (2013), and founded GoodThink, Inc. His research on mindset made the cover of Harvard Business Review. His TED talk is one of the most popular with over 13 million views. His Happiness Advantage training is one of the largest and most successful positive psychology corporate training programs in the world. In 2014, he did a two-hour interview with Oprah at her house to discuss the science of happiness. Achor has also worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies, and with places like the NFL, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Treasury.

Topics

Self Development

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Key Insights

You shouldn’t expect to become happier after you gain success. Become happier first in order to gain more success. If you’re sitting around complacent and not working to achieve your goals, do not be surprised if you don’t have the best mood. The Happiness Advantage is about approaching the world with optimism versus being consumed by ideas that situations will not work out in our favor. In the words of Achor, changing our language of “failure” to “growth potential moments” can impact our lives for the better.

PART ONE – POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AT WORK

The Happiness Advantage encourages readers to focus on small goals to control the amount of time and effort required to create positive change.
Happiness comes before success—one should not wait to become successful in order to become happier.
The happier and more positive a person is, the more motivated and efficient he or she can become.

PART TWO

Principle #1: The Happiness Advantage

Achor believes happiness is achieved when we strive after our goals, which makes happiness more than a mood but also a work ethic.
Positive emotions give us more options to handle difficult situations instead of simply fighting through the challenges or leaving.
Happiness offers a competitive advantage and can be achieved through meditation and exercise as well as encouragement from employers, colleagues, friends, and family members.

Principle #2: The Fulcrum and the Lever

The fulcrum and the lever is a seesaw metaphor. The lever is the bar that can be pulled up or down depending on the weight stacked on top of it. The fulcrum is below the lever and helps to stabilize or balance a seesaw.
Achor writes that our ability to make the most of our potential depends on the length of our lever (how much power we believe we have when faced with troubling circumstances) and the position of the fulcrum (our mindset to make positive changes to help balance out our efforts to face challenges).
Our brains often act on what we predict will happen next, which is called ‘Expectancy Theory.’ However, we must not expect the worst. Happiness requires that we reprogram our thinking from negativity to positivity.

Principle #3: The Tetris Effect

Expecting negative outcomes can result in higher stress levels and lowers the motivation to achieve goals.
If you expect positive outcomes, you can appreciate the work it will take to achieve those outcomes.
Creating a list of three good things that happened to you within a day can allow you to see more potentially positive situations.

Principle #4: Falling Up

Achor explains the idea of “falling up” so that failure can be seen as moments to spark progress.
“Falling up” can lead to adversarial growth which occurs when difficult situations are interpreted in a more positive light.
Overlearning occurs when the lesson learned from one situation is applied to all situations because a person has not developed more tools to handle challenges. Happiness can result in more creative solutions to handle difficult situations.

Principle #5: The Zorro Circle

Achieving smaller goals can allow us to work our way up to achieving bigger goals—Achors calls this “drawing circles...
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