The Happiness Advantage

Day 16 / 365

This is one Ted Talk everyone should check out. It’s by Shawn Achor, the author of the book “The Happiness Advantage”. In this talk, he proposes a new way to look at happiness and success.

We’re finding it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.

Shawn comes from a small town in Texas. He applied to Harvard on a dare, but he had no expectations of getting selected, and his family had no money to send him to college anyways. Miraculously he got selected to Harvard on a military scholarship.

To Shawn, Harvard was a dream come true. The other students, however, didn’t all share this view. Most of them have been top performers their whole lives. They didn’t see being in Harvard as a privilege, and within weeks they were stressing about the competition, the workload and what not. They weren’t happy.

Does Success cause Happiness?

That’s the widespread belief anyways. We think we will be happy once we are successful. When Shawn went back to Harvard as a researcher to study happiness amongst students, he was often asked the question- “Why are you wasting time studying happiness at Harvard? what does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?”

The idea that success leads to happiness is broken. Every time your brain reaches a goal, it just moves the goalpost further. The meaning of success for you is ever changing. If happiness was on the other side of success, you will never get there.

Studies in Positive Psychology has found the reverse to be true. It’s happiness that leads to success, not the other way round. Increased positivity in your brain reduces stress and increases your intelligence, creativity and energy levels. This, in turn, helps you perform better. The reason behind this is dopamine, which flushes in our systems when we are positive. Not only does it make us feel happier, it significantly increases our brain's ability to learn and adapt.

So how do we be happier?

Most of us are looking desperately for an answer to this question, and I don’t think any of us have figured it out yet. The best we can do is to try and stay more positive. This has become increasingly difficult in today’s world, where we are constantly surrounded by negativity. Shawn suggests a simple daily exercise that can help.

At a fixed time on each day, set aside 5 minutes to write three things that you are thankful for that happened in the past 24 hours. If you do this daily you can slowly rewire your brain to focus on the positives and weed out the negative.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here