MC Jarratt's Key Ideas from The Happiness Advantage
by Shawn Achor

The chief engine of happiness is positive emotion. The ten most common of these are: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love.

• Meditate
• Find Something to Look Forward To: think about or create a future reward. Often the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation.
• Commit Concious Acts of Kindness: these must be intentional, not retrospective.
• Infuse Positivity in to Your Surroundings: by decorating the space or spending some time outside.
• Exercise
• Spend Money (on Experiences): especially with other people, rather than stuff.
• Exercise a Signature Strength: something embedded in your personality, like a love of learning, humour, honesty, creativity or gratitude (viacharacter.org).

Based on Losada’s mathematical modeling, 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful. 

It takes three positive comments, experiences, or expressions to fend off the languishing effects of one negative. 

Dip below this tipping point and performance quickly suffers. Rise above it - ideally, the research shows, to a ratio of 6 to 1 - and teams produce their very best work.

Archimedes' quote about the fulcrum and the lever inspires us to move our own fulcrum (the mindset we have) and lengthen our levers (how much possibility and power we believe we have) to lift our world and maximise our potential.

Our brains are processors with finite resources. We can spend those on looking at pain, negativity, stress and uncertainty, or to look through a lens of hope, gratitude, resilience and optimism. We can't change reality, but we can change how we perceive the world.

People with a "job" see work as a chore, and the paycheck is the reward. People with a "calling" view work as an end in itself. Their work is fulfilling, because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose. These are the people who are more likely to succeed.

The more we can align our tasks to a personal vision, the more likely we are to view work as a calling.

Write down the tasks at work that feel devoid of meaning and ask yourself "what is the purpose of this task?" If the answer still seems unimportant, ask again, and keep going until you get a result that is meaningful to you.

Even a rote or routine task can be made meaningful if you find a good reason to be invested; you felt productive, you improved your skillset, you showed you were smart and efficient, you learnt from a mistake, you made life easier for a customer or client.

The tetris effect is named after the phenomenon experienced by tetris players who begin to see tetris-like patterns in every day life after playing for long periods of time.

With a negative tetris effect, we always spot the annoyances, stresses and hassles. With a positive tetris effect, we can condition our minds to always look for opportunities and ideas that allow our success rate to grow.

When you write down a list of “three good things” that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives; small or large laughs, a feeling of accomplishment, a strengthened connection with family, or a glimmer of hope for the future.

In just five minutes a day, this trains the brain to become more skilled at noticing and focusing on possibilities for personal and professional growth, and seizing opportunities to act on them.

On every mental map after crisis or adversity, there are three mental paths:

1.  You keep circling around where you currently are.
2. You are led to further negative consequences.
3. You are led to a place where you are stronger and more capable than before.

Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth. In this way, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them.

Imagine that you walk into a bank. There are 50 other people in the bank. A robber walks in and fires his weapon once. You are shot in the arm.

Is this fortunate or unfortunate?

• 70% say unfortunate: "how unlucky I happened to be there at that time and I was the one who was shot."
• 30% say fortunate: "I could have been shot somewhere worse," or "a child could have been shot instead."

The situation is objectively bad. But, both counterfacts are invented by us. This shows we actually have the power in any given situation to consciously select a counterfact that makes us feel fortunate, not helpless.

Sustaining change is difficult to do with willpower alone, because willpower becomes more worn out the more we use it. A better way is to decrease the willpower required by decreasing the "activation energy" (time, choices, mental and physical effort) for habits we want to adopt, and alternatively, increasing it for habits we want to avoid.

• Decrease activation energy by reducing the time it takes to do something by 20 seconds, e.g sleeping in your gym clothes.
• Increase activation energy by increasing the time by 20 seconds, e.g. putting the TV remote batteries in a cupboard.