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.

Three Good Things

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.

Defining Happiness As Positive Emotioms

Our fear of consequences is always worse than the consequences themselves.

If success causes happiness, then every employee who gets a promotion, every student who receives an acceptance letter, everyone who has ever accomplished a goal of any kind should be happy. But with each victory, our goalposts of success keep getting pushed further and further out.The formula is broken because it is backward. The relationship between success and happiness works the other way around; happiness is the precursor to success. Happiness, optimism and a positive mindset makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.

The Happiness Advantage

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.

From a Job to a Calling

The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.

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

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

Change Your Counterfact

The most successful people, the ones with the competitive edge, don’t look to happiness as some distant reward for their achievements; they are the ones who capitalize on the positive and reap the rewards at every turn.

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.

"A Job" vs "A Calling"

Happiness implies a positive mood in the present and a positive outlook for the future.

In the midst of challenges and stress, nothing is more crucial to our happiness and success than holding on to the people around us.

Common sense is not common action.

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.

The Fulcrum and The Lever

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.

The Tetris Effect

On every mental map after crisis or adversity, there are three mental paths:<ol><li> You keep circling around where you currently are.</li><li>You are led to further negative consequences.</li><li>You are led to a place where you are stronger and more capable than before.</li></ol>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.

Mental Maps to Success

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

The 20 Second Rule

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

Getting in to a Positive Mindset

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.

The Losada Line

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The happy secret to greater success and fulfillment in work and life—a must-read for everyone trying to flourish in a world of increasing stress and negativity “Thoughtfully lays out the steps to increasing workplace positivity.”—Forbes In the book that inspired one of the most popular TED Talks of all time, New York Times bestselling author Shawn Achor reveals how rewiring our brain for happiness helps us achieve more in our careers and our relationships and as students, leaders, and parents. Conventional wisdom holds that once we succeed, we’ll be happy; that once we get that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But the science reveals this formula to be backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. Research shows that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and better problem solvers than their unhappy peers. And positive people are significantly healthier and less stressed and enjoy deeper social interaction than the less positive people around them. Drawing on his original research—including one of the largest studies of happiness ever conducted—and work in boardrooms and classrooms across forty-two countries, Achor shows us how to rewire our brains for positivity and optimism to reap the happiness advantage in our lives, our careers, and even our health. His strategies include: • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility so we can see and seize opportunities all around us • Social Investment: how to earn the dividends of a strong social support network • The Ripple Effect: how to spread positive change within our teams, companies, and families By turns fascinating, hopeful, and timely, The Happiness Advantage reveals how small shifts in our mind-set and habits can produce big gains at work, at home, and elsewhere.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An engaging, deeply researched guide to flourishing in a world of increasing stress and negativity—the inspiration for one of the most popular TED Talks of all time “Powerful [and] charming . . . A book for just about anyone . . . The philosophies in this book are easily the best wire frames to build a happy and successful life.”—Medium Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can. Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that once we succeed, we’ll be happy; that once we get that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But the science reveals this formula to be backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around.   Research shows that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and better problem solvers than their unhappy peers. And positive people are significantly healthier and less stressed and enjoy deeper social interaction than the less positive people around them.   Drawing on original research—including one of the largest studies of happiness ever conducted—and work in boardrooms and classrooms across forty-two countries, Shawn Achor shows us how to rewire our brains for positivity and optimism to reap the happiness advantage in our lives, our careers, and even our health. His strategies include:   • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility so we can see and seize opportunities all around us • Social Investment: how to earn the dividends of a strong social support network • The Ripple Effect: how to spread positive change within our teams, companies, and families   By turns fascinating, hopeful, and timely, The Happiness Advantage reveals how small shifts in our mind-set and habits can produce big gains at work, at home, and elsewhere.

Shawn Achor is an American educator, author, and speaker known for his advocacy of positive psychology. He is best known for his research reversing the formula of success leading to happiness—his research shows that happiness in fact leads to success. Achor spent 12 years studying what makes people happy at Harvard University. He later authored The Happiness Advantage and founded the Institute of Positive Research and GoodThinkInc. His TEDx talk "The Happy Secret to Better Work" is one of the 20-most viewed TED talks.

SHAWN ACHOR

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