Why Happiness is Elusive: We thought this article was interesting. Written by Press.co.nz in December 2010
“Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard, get the big promotion, meet the right person, win the lottery we’ll be successful and therefore happy.
Yet recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have found that’s not the case. Happiness itself is the precursor to success and fulfilment, not the other way around. Amanda Morrall talks to Harvard University’s Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage.
In the Western world most of us have been conditioned to believe that if we follow the well-worn path to success, we’ll end up happy. The steps in this formula are usually finishing school, landing a good job and working hard until we’ve climbed to the top rung of the ladder. The trouble is this recipe is flawed.
Psychology lecturer and author Shawn Achor, in his book, The Happiness Advantage, explains why.
“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, so that happiness gets pushed over the horizon.”
Our formula for success is “broken”, maintains Achor, a coach to many Fortune 500 companies.
Following one of the largest academic studies of its kind on happiness and human potential, Achor found that success comes most naturally to those individuals who consciously build a platform of personal happiness and as a springboard to success.
Achor, who will be lecturing in Australia in February, took some time to shares his ideas with Good Living.
In your book you claim a positive mind is a prerequisite to success and yet there are many examples of leaders whose success was driven more by pragmatism (even brutal bullying) than being cheery. Can you conclusively say that being positive leads to success?
We all know people who are brilliant, but not happy. And we know people who are successful, and not happy. So you can be smart and successful without being happy. We now know, based on a decade of research in positive psychology, that both of those individuals are underperforming their brain’s potential. They are less intelligent and successful than they would have been if their brain was positive because of something in positive psychology called “the happiness advantage”: nearly every business and educational outcome improves when our brains are positive. Our intelligence, creativity, productivity, and energy on tasks all improve when positive. The problem is we see unhappy people who are successful and think happiness is not important to success.
I start The Happiness Advantage by pointing out that happiness is elusive only because we follow a flawed formula for happiness and success. Society, schools, businesses and parents all teach us the following formula: if I work harder now, I will be more successful, and then I will be happy. That formula is scientifically flawed for two reasons. Every time our brain has a victory, it merely changes the goalpost of success. If happiness is on the other side of success, it will remain forever elusive. Second, and more importantly, our brains work in the opposite order. The research I did at Harvard and at Fortune 500 companies reveals that if your brain is positive first in the midst of work, then our success rates rise as we are able to work faster and more intelligently. Depression is merely a symptom of the diseased formula for success in our world.
How long does it take to transform a negative mind and is it possible to convert everyone?
That’s a tricky question. It only takes milliseconds to get someone who is negative into a positive mindset. All it requires is changing what the brain is attending to. What we attend to becomes our reality. If your brain is stuck on a neural track scanning the world for all the problems, hassles and complaints, you will be negative. If you get someone to focus their attention on something they are grateful for, that negative mind becomes positive immediately. Research coming out of Harvard recently proves that short boosts of happiness can drive long-term optimism.
Critics might suggest this recipe for success is overly simplistic, that opportunity and hard work play just as big a role in success.
The critics would only be proving my research correct. Yes, I believe opportunity and hard work play a significant role in predicting success. But the greatest predictor of being able to work hard and capitalise upon opportunities is a positive brain. And positive employees work harder, faster, and more intelligently and are able to work longer without burnout.
How does one “fall up”?
Positive psychology is not about rose- coloured glasses. It would never say things like being unemployed is good or you should feel happy that something traumatic is happening. Rather, my research is about rational optimism: where an individual takes a realistic assessment of the present but maintains an optimistic belief that our behaviour will matter. So in the Falling Up Principle in The Happiness Advantage, I describe how we can take whatever failures we are dealing with and find a way to create post-traumatic growth.
Can you elaborate on the importance of “social support” in building happiness?
In my research there is a 0.7 correlation between social support and happiness as well as success. That’s a greater correlation than between smoking and cancer. Social support (your family, friends, peers, boss, co- workers, etc) is actually scientifically the greatest predictor of your success and happiness during a time of challenge. Which is why it is crazy that we pull away from our social support networks when we get stressed and have a lot of work to do. We should do the opposite, what I call “social investment”.
What is “vertical coupling” and why is it so important?
A 15-year study found that employees who had a difficult relationship with their boss were 30 per cent more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease. A bad relationship with your boss can be as bad for you as a steady diet of fried foods . . . and not nearly as much fun. Daniel Goleman called the boss-employee relationship a “vertical couple”. The strength of the bond between manager and employee is a large predictor of daily productivity. Just look at the boss in The Office and you’ll see what I mean.
If your boss isn’t the happiest most engaged person in the world what does that mean for your prospects of success?
Your boss has a significant effect upon your happiness, but like all externals, our happiness is not about the external world but based upon how we process the external world. Try smiling for three seconds after a negative interaction with a boss, being grateful for the boss, increasing the praise you give to your co-workers, and create a positive habit like mediation, exercise or keeping a journal and you can short-circuit much of that negativity.
There’s some evidence that disposition is genetically pre- determined. That being the case, what chance do naturally negative people stand to succeed?
I’ve never met a person who cannot change. Genes do set an initial baseline of happiness, but that baseline can be moved through our conscious actions and mindset changes. The problem is the average person does not fight their genes, which is why many of us mistakenly believe that genes make someone happy or unhappy. If you have genes for alcoholism, you’ll be an alcoholic unless you consciously push against it. The same is true with pessimism. What’s the ripple effect and why is this significant?
Our brains are hardwired for empathy because of their mirror neurons, which make us smile when others smile, and yawn when they yawn. It also means positivity and negativity spread very quickly because of this mirror neuron network.”
