Suman Saha's Key Ideas from The Happiness Advantage
by Shawn Achor

We think the happiness equation looks like this

Work Hard -> Success -> Happiness

But in reality:

Happiness + Positive Mindset -> Success

'Waiting to be happy limits our brain potential for success, whereas cultivating positive positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative & productive which drives performance upward. '

• Meditation: Studies show that after meditation you experience feelings of calm and contentment. 5 minutes of meditation is enough. 
• Find something to look forward to.
• Commit conscious acts of kindness.
• Infuse positivity into your surroundings.
• Exercise.
• Spend money (but not on stuff).
• Exercise a signature strength.

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." --Archimedes

The fulcrum is actually our mindset and the lever is the power or potential. This principle teaches us how to adjust our way of thinking in such a way that it offers us the power to be more fulfilled and successful.

We just need to get a long lever (the power) and a fulcrum (mindset) to place (at the right position), and then everything is possible! 

Just like the game of Tetris, you can think that every block that is falling makes your position better or worse than before. If you consider it to be 'Better' then it's The Positive Tetris Effect.

In life, if you go along with the 'Positive Tetris' mindset i.e, everything that is happening to you is making you better than before, then you will see more opportunities and become happier and the inverse is also true (The Negative Tetris Effect)

There are 3 types of reaction when we face failure -(1) No change, (2) More bad things happening - Worse than before, and -

(3) Falling Up: Accepting the failure, learning from the mistakes, the failure makes us stronger.

Falling Up is the way to respond to any failure which will make us stronger and happier in the long run. 

“The most successful people, in work and in life, are those who have what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control,’ the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes.”

By tackling one small challenge at a time—a narrow circle that slowly expands outward—we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes and that we are largely the masters of our own fates.

If you want to create a new habit, you have to make it easy to integrate by decreasing the activation energy for the habits you want to implement. In a nutshell: the less time it takes to get done (ideally 20 seconds or less), the more likely you’re going to do it!

The 20-second rule teaches us how to replace bad habits with good ones to create happiness in our lives.

When over a thousand highly successful professional men and women were interviewed as they approached retirement and asked what had motivated them the most, throughout their careers, overwhelmingly they placed work friendships above both financial gain and individual status.

The more social support you have, the happier you are.