Weekly Reading #2: The Happiness Advantage

The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work by Shawn Achor

What is happiness?

Sometimes I find my mind filled with this question, especially when it is 7 or 8PM, everyone in the office has left and the horrendous rush-hour traffic of Dallas seems to be over.

I graduated from college the past May, and is currently working on my first ever job. The industry is a tough one — selling industrial boilers to a demographic (middle-age and very technical engineers) that I never ever paid attention to in school. But, I am enjoying the challenge because in my mind, working hard and moving up in my career will bring me happiness. That is the motivation that, at 8 PM, I am still in the office.

Then, my perspective is seemingly shifting because I stumble into this book — The Happiness Advantage. In the very beginning of the book, the author pointed me the other way: Be happy first, productivity (and success) will follow. Mr. Achor shows me that I should not feel guilty for not working in my free time. Instead, use it as a way to recharge and learn new skills. He shows me that if I train myself enough to spot opportunities, it will automatically pick up new chances. And most important, happiness is something we can create — that’s when the pursuit will become the creation of happiness. Yeah, let’s just be happy and appreciate what life brings us.

Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.

Below is my notes on the book. I hope you enjoy.

Principle 1: Happiness Gives your Brain — and Your Organization — a competitive edge.

• Data has shown that happier workers are more productive and happy CEOs deliver higher performance.
• Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel food, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. Positive emotions also provide a swift antidote to physical stress and anxiety, what psychologists call “the undoing effect”.
• Richard Branson once said, “more than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin’s happiness.”
• Some ways to improve our moods and raise our levels of happiness.
  1. Meditate: Regular meditation can rewire our brain to raise levels of happiness, lower stress, even improve immune function.
  2. Find something to look forward to: anticipating future rewards can actually light up the pleasure centers in your brains as much as the reward will.
  3. Commit conscious acts of kindness: individuals told to complete five acts of kindness over the course of the day report feeling much happier than control groups and that feeling lasts for many subsequent days.
  4. Infuse positivity into your surrounding: One study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broaden thinking and improve working memory.
  5. Exercise: physical activity can boost mood and enhance our work performance in a number of other ways as well, reducing stress and anxiety and helping us get into “flow”
  6. Spend money, but not on stuff: Money spent on activities — such as concerts and group dinners out — brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions or expensive watches.
  7. Exercise a signature strength: When 577 volunteers were encouraged to pick on of their signature strengths and use it in a new way each day for a week, they became significantly happier and less depressed than control groups.
• From a decade of research led by Marcial Losada, 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful. At 6-to-1, teams produce their very best work.

Principle 2: Changing Your Performance by Changing your Mindset

• Psychology has shown that mindset doesn’t just change how we feel about an experience — it actually changes the objective results of that experience. That is because the expectation of an event cause the same set of neurons in the brains to fire as though the event is actually taking place. The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, define our reality.
• Many people feel unproductive during free time. However, free time can also be seen as a chance to practice new skills, acquire new knowledge, recharge your battery so that you can return stronger than before.
• If you believe in your own abilities, you can improve those abilities.
• Instead of “pursuit of happiness”, we should think as “creation of happiness” because the reality is constructed by our mental models/
• As leaders, also beware that your belief about individual employee can show through your non-verbal interactions with them, and foster their own believes in their ability.
• Stop thinking of the world as fixed when it is, in truth, relative.

Principle 3: Train Your Brain to Capitalize on Possibility

• Your daily responsibilities at work can define the way you look at the world. It’s about pattern-recognizing. Some people aren’t trying to be difficult or grumpy. Their brains are just really outstanding at scanning their environment for negatives.
• We can retrain them to scan for the good things in life — to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels.
• The Positive Tetris Effect: Instead of creating a cognitive pattern that looks for negatives and blocks success, trains your brains to scan the world for the opportunities and ideas that allow our success rate to grow.
• The ideal mindset isn’t heedless of risk, but it does give priority to the good.

Principle 4: Capitalizing o the Downs to Build Upwards Momentum

• The human brains is constantly creating and revising mental maps to help us navigate our way through this complex and ever-changing world. When facing adversity, there are three mental paths: (1) keep circling around there you currently are, (2) going toward further negative consequences. The third path: Going to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fail.
• Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, “we are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history or our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices.”
• The people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what happen.
• Harvard Business Review points out that the smartest companies even commit errors on purpose, just to spurred the kind of creative problem solving that leads to innovative ideas and solutions.
• When people feel helpless in one area of life, they do not only give up in that area but also in other areas.The become convinced that one dead-end path must be proof that all possible paths are dead ends. When we choose a counterfact that makes us feel worse, we are actually altering our reality, allowing the obstacle to exert far greater influence over us than it otherwise should.
• One way to help ourselves see the path from adversity to opportunity is to practice ABCD model of interpretation: Adversity, Belief, Consequence, and Disputation.

Adversity is the event we can’t change; it is what it is. Belief is our reaction to the event; why we thought it happened and what we think it means for the future. Is it a problem that is only temporary and local in nature or do we think it is permanent and pervasive? Are there ready solutions, or do we think it is unsolvable? If we believe the former — that is, if we see the adversity as short-term or as an opportunity for growth or appropriately confined to only part of our life — then we maximize the chance of a positive Consequence. But if the Belief has led us down a more pessimistic path, helplessness and inaction can bring negative Consequences. That’s when it’s time to put the D to work.

Disputation involves first telling ourselves that our belief is just that — a belief, not fact — and then challenging (or disputing) it. Psychologists recommend that we externalize this voice (i.e., pretend it’s coming from someone else), so it’s like we’re actually arguing with another person. What is the evidence for this belief? Is it airtight? Would we let a friend get away with such reasoning? Or is the reasoning clearly specious once we step outside of ourselves and take a look? What are some other plausible interpretations of this event? What are some more adaptive reactions to it? Is there another counterfactual we can adopt instead?

Principle 5: Limiting your Focus to Small

• Don Diego wisely tells his protege, “This circle will be your world. Your whole life. Until I tell you otherwise, there is nothing outside of it.”
• “Internal locus of control” is the belief that their actions have a direct effect on the outcome. People with an external locus, on the other hand, are more likely to see daily events as dictated by external forces. Research has shown that people who believe that power lies within their circle have higher academic achievement, greater career achievement, and are much happier at work. Feeling control also increase health.

(The concept of “internal locus of control” was also mentioned by Pulitzer-wininng author Charles Duhigg in his new book “Smart Faster Better” )

Weekly Reading #1: Smarter Faster Better

• Brain scans show verbal information almost immediately diminished the power of these negative emotions, improve well-being and enhancing decision-marking skills. Verbalizing the stress and helplessness you are feeling the first step towards regaining control. Then, your next goal should be to identify which aspects of the situation you have control over and which you don’t. This time, let go the one you can’t control, and focus your effort into the ones you can. By tackling one small challenge at a time — a narrow circle that slowly expand outwards — we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes, that we are really the masters of our own fates.
• Psychologies who specialize in goal-setting theory advocate setting goals of moderate difficulty — not so easy that we don’t have to try, but not so difficult that we get discouraged and give up.
• “Don’t write a book, write a page… Don’t expect to be a great manager in your first six months, just try to set expectations well.” — Harvard Business School professor Peter Bregman
• The point: Small success can add up to major achievements. All it takes is drawing that first circle in the sand.

Principle 6: Turn bad habits into Good ones by minimizing Barriers to Change

• Common sense is not common action.
• As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.
• Habits form because our brain actually changes in response to frequent practice. “Practice make perfect”. Within our brains are billions upon billions of neurons, interconnected in very which way to form a complex set of neural pathways. The more we perform a particular action, the more connections form between the corresponding neuron. The stronger the link, the faster the message can travel down the path way. This is what makes the behavior seem second nature or automatic.
• Will power is ineffective. We face a steady stream of tasks that deplete our willpower everyday. (Why Mark Zucks wear the same outfit). Inactivity is the easiest option. We just don’t do anything.
• Lower the activation energy for the habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. Our best weapon in the battle against bad habits is simply to make it harder for ourselves to succumb to them.
• At the office, set rules to reduce the volume of choice can be incredibly effective. Rules are especially helpful during the first dew days of a behavior-changing venture, when it’s easier to stray off course.
• Identify the activation energy, then reduce it. If you can cut the activation energy for those habits that lead to success, even by as little as 20 seconds at a time, it won’t be long before you start reaping their benefits.

Principle 7: Social Support is your Single Greatest Asset

• Successful people know what even in an extraordinarily competitive environment, we are more equipped to handle challenges and obstacles when we pool the resources of those around us and capitalize on even the smallest moments we spend interacting with others.
• The innate need to affiliate and form social bonds has been literally wired into our body. The more connection we make over time, the better we function.
• Vertical couple is the most important social bond you can cultivate at work. Studies have found that the strength of the bond between manager and employee is the prime predictor of both daily productivity and the length of time people stay at their jobs. are the harmony between the boss and the employee. “It is a basic unit of organizational life, something akin to human molecules that interact to form the latticework of relationship that is the organization”, said Daniel Goleman — author of Emotional Intelligence.
• When someone tell you a good news, respond actively and constructively (“That’s wonderful! I’m glad your boss noticed how hard you’ve been working. When does your promotion go into effect?”). Meanwhile, passive responses (“That’s nice”) are as harmful as negative ones (“You got the promotion? Sally seems more suited for the job”). The worst kind of response is ignoring the news.

About Weekly Reading

Weekly Reading is a personal project to expand my knowledge by exposing myself to new ideas. Every Saturday, I lock myself in the neighborhood Barnes & Nobles and consume a book in one reading. Then, I share my note with the world.

If you find this post helpful. Please recommend it and share it with your friends. Feel free to leave me a note anytime.