Is Happiness the Key to Success at Work?

The other day, a colleague shared a video from TEDx. If you’re not familiar with TEDx, it’s a video site developed by TED, a nonprofit devoted to what it calls “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

Anyway, I found the video — which had been forwarded from another person inside our company — quite intriguing. The video is of a man named Shawn Achor. He is Harvard-educated and author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. In 2007, he founded Good Think Inc., a Cambridge-based consulting firm that researches positive outliers — people who are well above average — to understand where human potential, success, and happiness intersect.

The video is about positive psychology and its effect on human performance. In the video, I think Mr. Achor best sums up his philosophy when he says, “It is not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. If you can change the lens, not only can you change your happiness, we can change every educational and business outcome at the same time.”

According to Mr. Achor, most people believe their happiness is the result of their success. They believe external factors are the predictor of happiness, when in reality only 10 percent of our happiness can be predicted based on our external world. He argues that the opposite is actually true. It’s our happiness that drives our success. Mr. Achor says that 90 percent of our long-term happiness is determined NOT by our external world, but how our brain processes it.

Here’s why. Mr. Achor maintains that, “every time your brain recognizes a success, you change the goal post.” That is, if you are hired for a great job, you immediately begin thinking about the next promotion or a better job. If you meet your sales quota, the goal goes up. You get a big raise and you immediately begin looking for better pay. It’s what we’ve been trained to do. We think we have to be successful and then we will be happy.

According to Mr. Achor, our brains work in the opposite order. That is, raise your level of happiness and success will follow. His thesis is that brain performance is significantly better when we’re positive than when we’re negative, neutral, or stressed. You see, he believes that when we are positive, our energy rises, our creativity rises, and our intelligence rises.

That’s heady stuff and Mr. Achor backs it up with some stats that are intriguing — even though I’m uncertain of their sources. He says that when the brain is positive instead of negative, neutral, or stressed:

• the brain is 31 percent more productive;
• salespeople achieve 37 percent better results; and
• doctors are 19 percent more likely to produce faster, more accurate diagnoses.

Just as fascinating, according to Mr. Achor, you can train your brain to be more positive. He suggests five things that are proven to help make you more positive:

1. Write down three new things that you’re grateful for each day for 21 days;
2. Record in a journal one positive event from that day;
3. Exercise;
4. Meditate; and
5. Send one positive email each day to someone else — what he calls conscience acts of kindness.

I don’t know if Mr. Achor is right, but it makes sense to me intuitively. I don’t know if his statistics are accurate, but I’d like to think they are. I don’t know if the strategies he suggests will actually work, but I believe they’re worth a try.

Here’s my suggestion. Take the 12 minutes to watch his video. At the very least, it’s entertaining and engaging. Judge for yourself whether you think he might be on to something.

Then, if you’re like me, you might just decide to try one or two (or more) of his strategies to make you more positive. In the end, it may work or it may not. But writing down things that you’re grateful for, recording a positive event from each day, or sending an encouraging email to someone else just can’t do any harm.

And, who knows, you might just become more successful as a result!

(And thanks to Chip and Kim for sharing this!)