The Happiness Advantage – Book Summary

Some alarming facts:

• Depression rates are 10x higher than they were in 1960. The average age of depression has halved since and now stands at 14.5.
• Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%.
• Students primed to feel happy before a test outperform their peers.
• Happy people are more productive, take fewer sick days, perform better in leadership positions, and get paid more.

If you believe you will be happy once you reach a certain milestone, you’re probably lying to yourself. If you’re ambitious like most people, once you reach a certain level of success, you simply push the goalposts out further, with an extravagant new goal to attain. And once you hit that, then you’ll finally be happy. You tell yourself.

This is counterproductive — you’re just grinding through the journey, telling yourself that once you reach your next goal then you’ll finally satisfied, while not enjoying the journey itself. The process is not just a means to an end, but an adventure to derive enjoyment from. The difference is your mindset.

Despite the fact they were earning a hugely valuable degree, they only saw the process as stressful, fretted about results, and hid away from their support systems, like family and friends, believing it to be an inefficiency when not studying. These students scored worse on average and were the most susceptible to stress and depression.

They may have fared better if they remained present, appreciating the honour and enjoying while they could — and the resulting positive mental health effects. The difference was mindset.

The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor makes the convincing case that happier people not only enjoy themselves more, but they’re also more productive. The data shows that “happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance ratings and higher pay. They also enjoy more job security and are less likely to take sick days, quit, or become burned out. …The list of the benefits of happiness in the workplace goes on and on.”

The Happiness Advantage aims to teach us how to control our brains to capitalise on positivity and improve our productivity and performance. It addresses important topics and concepts, all related to performance, success, and productivity.

Key take away’s include…

• Seven practical strategies for how to become happier, so you can live a more meaningful life and become more productive
• A no-fluff look at the scientific research surrounding happiness and productivity
• A lot of entertaining and engaging stories make the book fun to read

Below you can find things proven to create happiness include:

• Meditation: meditation practice grows your prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for feelings of happiness. Studies show after meditation we feel more calm and content and have more empathy. Regular meditation rewires the brain to raise happiness levels, lower stress, and improve immune system function.
• Having something to look forward to: we’re wired to derive more excitement from anticipating something than from experiencing it. People thinking about their favourite movie increased endorphin levels by 27%.
• Doing nice things for people: giving to friends and strangers, and other acts of kindness, decreases stress and improves mental health.
• Designing your environment for you: does your office inspire positive feelings? Having pictures of your loved ones creates positive emotions every time you see them. Going outside for even just a few minutes boosts mood, broadens thinking and improves working memory. Also try to cut down TV time, with studies showing watching more negative TV reduces happiness.
• Exercise: improves mood and increases energy, but also enhances motivation and feelings of mastery, reducing stress and anxiety, and helps us into a flow state.
• Experiences: Robert Frank’s book Luxury Fever explains that while positive feels derived from material purchases are short and fleeting, spending on experiences — especially with our favourite people — creates long-lasting and meaningful positive emotions.
• Do something you’re good at: Some people give great advice, are great at cooking, or are great storytellers. When you use these skills, you get a burst of positivity.

Make the most of bad situations, and you’ll enjoy even the worst things

Having a positive view of time makes you more productive and efficient. If you’re stuck in a boring meeting you know is a waste of time, you can choose to try to get something from it, rather than internally complaining and being disgruntled. This doesn’t even mean from the actual meeting’s content itself, but rather paying attention to the speaker and how you could improve your speaking and learn from them, or the best design for the presentation. Turn this waste of time into an opportunity to improve and learn — seeing it as a challenge.

Get a growth mindset

If you believe you, and people in general, can change and improve into adulthood by applying themselves and gaining experience, you have a growth mindset. Some instead have a fixed mindset, believing them to be capped at their current level and their brains fully evolved. The highest achievers, academically, athletically and financially, have growth mindsets.

Find the positives and you’ll see opportunities — and become lucky

In being the effective problem solvers that allow us to succeed at work by putting out fires, we are trained to find the negatives — the problems — and miss out on life’s positives. Need to retrain our brains to instead see the positives in life.

Searching for three things is shown to bring the most positivity to your life: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. Grateful people have higher EQs, are more forgiving, energetic, and are less likely to be depressed or anxious, while optimistic people are more likely to hit higher goals and stick with them.

But how to notice opportunity? A good thing to do is make a daily list of all the good things in your job, career, and life. Even if it’s just three things. Writing the things you enjoyed forces your brain to look for good things, such as times you laughed or achieved something at work, reducing time spent searching for negatives. Even doing this for a week has shown to make people feel less depressed.

This doesn’t mean delusion, AKA ignoring the bad when it needs to be examined critically and constructively. Irrational optimism can be just as toxic as irrational negativity. It’s important not to shut out everything bad, but be realistic, and retain your healthy dose of optimism.

Fall Upwards

When something bad happens, you can respond in one of three ways. You can keep doing what you were doing before, changing nothing and continuing on the path you were on, or worse, keep going down that negative path. Or, you can become stronger, more resilient and capable than before the event.

People who can conceive of failure as an opportunity for growth, and see the lessons in the failure, are most likely to grow from it. By scanning the event for opportunities to learn, and rejecting the belief that this failure leads us to further failures, you gain the ability to move forwards in the face of failure, becoming even more powerful for them.

This is known as post-traumatic growth — sort of the inverse of PTSD. However, your ability to fall upwards, rather than downwards, rests on how you perceive the cards you’ve been dealt. Asking yourself questions like “What have I learned from this failure?”, or feeling like you “get to do this”, rather than “I have to do this”.

Post-traumatic growth requires facing the experience head-on, not tiptoeing around it. The experience itself has nothing to do with the growth, but your subjective experience of it. Those who can pick themselves back up and not define themselves by what happened to them, but by what they can take from it, improve themselves based on what happened.

The premise that I enjoyed is that positive psychology investigates what it is that makes people excel, with the ultimate goal of applying that knowledge and thereby raising the average. Positive psychology shows that when we feel good and have a positive mindset, we are smarter, feel more motivated and enjoy more success.

Psychologists have known for a long time that negative emotions constrict our ability to think and act. You’ve probably experienced this first hand if you’ve ever felt too down in the dumps to leave the house. Success revolves around happiness, not the other way around.