The Happiness Advantage

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

Shawn Achor | 4.44 | 26,333 ratings and reviews

Ranked #4 in Happiness, Ranked #11 in Positivity — see more rankings.

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken.

Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.

Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:

   • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.
   • The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.
   • Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network

A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Happiness Advantage from the world's leading experts.

Melanie Whelan CEO/SoulCycleThis book opened an ongoing conversation on our team around the relationship between employee happiness and productivity. Achor overturns the conventional belief that happiness is a natural outcome of success. Through practical research, experiences and anecdotes, he illustrates that happiness that will actually lead you to success. Happy people tend to work harder, collaborate better and be more productive. This in turn leads to better results. SoulCycle is and always has been an inherently positive experience and one of the things Achor's book validated for us is that a meaningful... (Source)

David Kramaley I’m reading The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. I expect it to reinforce some positive psychology principles I know and help me put them into practice. (Source)

Dr. Monali Y. Desai My favorite non-business book is The Happiness Advantage (Shawn Achor) because it reminds me of the importance of surrounding myself with positive people. (Source)

Tiphaine Guerout The Happiness Advantage gave me some life hacks that changed my perspective on things. With small exercise you can be less moody and see a bit more the positive things rather than the negative ones. (Source)

Rankings by Category

The Happiness Advantage is ranked in the following categories:

#97 in Coaching
#84 in Financial Management
#20 in Happy
#56 in Jobs
#52 in Mentoring
#63 in Mindset
#65 in Orange
#99 in Personal Development
#97 in Personal Growth
#58 in Rugby
#35 in SAP
#98 in Self-Improvement
#52 in Self-Love
#30 in Stress Management
#79 in Wattpad

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