[EP15] The Science of Happiness with Jack Canfield & Shawn Achor

Foreign.

And welcome to another episode of the Jack Canfield Podcast. And today I am really excited because I have a truly special guest joining us, Sean Achor. Now, I first became aware of Sean and his work when I saw his TED Talk. And you need to know his TED Talk, which is one of the most powerful, popular of all time, TED talks with more than 25 million views. And I then began reading his books. I watched him on Oprah Super Soul Sunday and I'm a really big fan. So before we begin, let me give you a little more information about him than that. After spending 12 years at Harvard University, where I also spent four years as an undergraduate, Sean has become one of the world's leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. And his research on the mind on Mindset made the COVID of the Harvard Business Review. He's lectured or work with nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as NASA, the NFL, the NBA, the Pentagon and the White House. He's the author of several books, two of the New York Times best selling books, the Happiness Advantage, which I'll hold up here for you all to see. I recommend you get that and also the Big Potential. We're going to talk about both of these a little bit today. And he's now lectured in more than 50 countries, speaking to CEOs in China, doctors in Dubai, school children in South Africa, and farmers in Zimbabwe and mar many, many other diverse audiences. And his Happiness Advantage training is one of the largest and most successful positive psychology corporate training programs in the world. And as I already mentioned, he recently did a two hour interview with Oprah for her Super Soul Sunday show, which you can watch on YouTube, which I did. And also where he discusses his mission to bring positive psychology to the world. Welcome Sean.

Thank you so much for having me. I was looking forward to this.

Oh, me too. Now I'd like to divide our conversation into two parts, if it's okay with you. First, we'll cover what some of what you wrote about in the Happiness Advantage and how to cultivate it. And then second, your insights and suggestions from your latest book, Big Potential. Does that work for you?

That sounds great.

You say that we all have the power to become happier people and that greater happiness is a choice. Let's start by talking about that.

I do believe that. I think it's easy, it's more complex than I originally took it to be. Jack, when I first got into doing this, I would sign the Happiness Advantage. You know, you have to find something very quick that you can sign in books And I'd write happiness as a choice. And then I stopped doing it after a while because I kept hearing so many stories of people who came up afterwards after a talk that were going through bereavement or going through depression or they had just been debilitated at their work. And I got scared of thinking about happiness as a choice because I think that it has an onus to it, right? That it's easy to say, well, I can't be happy because of my genes or my environment, but as soon as we actually offer it as a choice, for some people it offers hope, but for others it is a burden, right? That it must be something I'm not doing, right? Because if I'm not happy now, I must be choosing the wrong things. My thinking on it has actually evolved because I do actually believe happiness eventually becomes a choice. And the reason I believe that is I keep meeting all these people who, who are going through these difficult circumstances and yet we find them in places where I can't imagine happiness blooming and then they still feel it. And they turn trauma, inherently negative things, into life giving and positive and optimistic takes on the world in ways that, that humble me when I get frustrated that a plane is delayed and they're dealing with the loss of a child. So the reason I believe that happiness is, is a choice is because I think the genes and environment set the initial baseline. When people talk about why they don't feel happy, they'll revert to a genetic predisposition or something that's going on in their environment. Usually the latter. But if you think about it, we, we all brush our teeth. We brush our teeth knowing that we have genes for teeth that should rot out in a high sugar environment. If what it is to be human is to be our genes plus environment, then one, we shouldn't be brushing our teeth. But two, as soon as we start brushing our teeth, we realized that 45 second behavioral habit actually broke the tyranny of genes, environment over what happens next to somebody. So now what I realize is while happiness might be an easier choice for some people based upon their genetic predisposition, some people are just born predispositioned to optimism that the rest of us don't have. But when we make these mindset and behavioral changes, what I got so fascinated by in positive psychology was that change was radically possible from almost any environment we measured and from any genetic set point. So as we were seeing this, we were finding the change was radically possible if we were doing it the right way and with other people.

So let's talk about what is the right way. You talk about these disciplines of happiness. They're two minute things you can do every day, talk about those.

We looked at behavioral patterns that would be akin to brushing our teeth. So we were looking at things that could take less than two minutes a day. So we know, you know, I know you have a background and an interest in Buddhism and meditation. And I, you know, we know if somebody goes and meditates on a mountainside for 80 days, we can see changes to the neural pathways in their brain. But to get somebody to go from zero to meditating for 80 days in a mountainside is a very high, steep order, especially after a one hour talk. Right? And so what we're looking at is what were the small changes we could make in people's lives that would have the biggest impact on the backside of it. So we looked at all the things that we had heard about from every major religious tradition. As you know, I got started back at Harvard Divinity School. I was studying Christian ethics and comparing it to Buddhist ethics, looking at how your belief systems about the world change the way you act in it. And as I was studying Buddhism, I kept learning about how important the practical side was, the habit side, the rituals of actually doing these things on a daily basis. Like we brush our teeth and that, that maintains that mindset that we want when the world doesn't look like it should. So we took something like gratitude, which we assume is something inherent, and we tried practicing it. So during the initial banking Crisis Back in 2007, I went out to American Express and for 21 days in a row, I had them write down three things that they were grateful for every day. Before the markets open, we could show them how much they were losing, tens of millions of dollars by their teams being negative throughout that whole. The banking crisis, not getting paid. So they let us do this and we kept testing it over and over again and then nothing happened. This is why we research it, right? Because I thought that that would work and it didn't. The reason I misunderstood gratitude was explained by two other researchers. Emmett McCullough explained that, uh, it doesn't matter what you're grateful for. What matters is the scanning, that there's a part of the brain that scans the world anew for things you're grateful for. That never activates when I ask you what you're grateful for. And we immediately wrote, say, my work, my family and my health, completely separate part of the brain. The part of the brain that matters is the part of the brain that's scanning that world anew. So we got people for just 21 days in a row. A simple change is we just got them for 21 days in a row to write down three new things that they were grateful for and they couldn't repeat. So I can't say I'm grateful for my son Leo. I already know that I have to say I'm grateful for my son Leo because we both listened to an audiobook last night while going on a walk around the neighborhood. And he kept me walking because he wanted to keep hearing more about the book. So I have to scan for what happened over the past 24 hours. And you do that. What happens is that simple activity that takes 45 seconds to do has profound implications. If you test as a pessimist, you always test as a pessimist. That's how we know our metrics work. Because if people are changing all the time, we have no idea if you're a pessimist or an optimist. But if somebody tests a low level pessimist and for 21 days in a row, they scan for three new things that they're grateful for. 21 days later, on average, they're testing as low level optimists. We thought that they would return back to their genetic threshold, but Columbia found if you keep going, you test as a low to moderate level of optimist. Six months later, what we were finding was your brain was building a background neural app that was passively scanning the environment for the positives. So instead of. And it was passive, that was the exciting part. Instead of it being something you have to actively do the 45 seconds, train your brain to look at the inputs that were coming that were positive instead of sending it to a spam filter. And what we found was it has huge implications. 4 year olds around a dinner table, they're predisposed towards pessimism. The parent models this saying three new things that they're grateful for and the child tries to respond. The four year olds are not very good at it. Five and six get better. But even at four year old, if they do it for six weeks in a row, six months later, before and after school, they're testing as low level optimist. So what we're seeing is breaking the tyranny of genes and environment with a 45 second intervention. And something that we thought was fixed, like their genetic predisposition to disposition to the world was actually changing. I mean, this was, this was life changing. Instead of this is my pessimistic kid, that's my Optimistic kid. That was their genes. And if we have genes that are challenging, that's why we brush our teeth. So we started looking at all these habits. We looked at meditation out at Google. We had leaders take their hands off their keyboard for two minutes a day and just watch their breath go in and out. They were already breathing. We made them watch it. They said that at the end of the experiment they felt like they were two minutes behind where they would have been had they not been part of the experiment. So these are go getters, very frustrated that they're having to watch their breath go in and out. But they were wrong. Their accuracy rates improved by 10%. Levels of stress drop, levels of happiness rise. But the coolest part, the part I love the best, was they were actually measuring the cortisol levels of the people on their team, the stress hormone. And what they found was that when leaders took this time to do this, the people on their team, their stress levels dropped, their neurochemical patterns changed. But was even more exciting is only the managers were doing it. They thought everyone was doing, but only the manager was. So what the manager was doing as a habit, in silence and secret that they thought was paltry and small was changing the neurochemical patterns of the people they met in life. Which means that those things we do, the meditation, the attention training, yoga, prayer, those things might feel like they're not having an impact, but that practice is actually has an impact upon the neurochemical patterns around us. There's a lot of them. So I don't want to just go on and on. But one last one that was really powerful is at LinkedIn. I had them for 21 days in a row write a 2 minute text message or email praising or thanking someone else. So it's taking a gratitude and making it external. And what we found was if they did it for three days in a row, they get addicted to it. They literally spend all day long thinking about how amazing they were for writing that email in the morning. They're like, I'm the kind of person who does this stuff and they get great emails back. So they. And they don't. The people writing back don't know about the two minute maximum rules. They keep writing about how great they think you are, but 21 days later is the real value that actually we learned this, the pandemic. The real value was day eight. Day eight is when everyone stops this experiment. That's the day you realize you're not a crazy extrovert. You're like, I don't have 21 people to write to. I wrote to everyone in my favorites list and my mom twice. That's everyone. Then you have to scan and you scan for who's that mentor who got you into this? Who is that great professor you used to have? Who is your kid's first grade teacher that changed your kid's life. But you don't talk to them anymore because your kid's in sixth grade. You start realizing there's all these weak ties. But it takes two minutes of writing this note for your brain to create a node of meaning on your mental map of social connection. And what we found is if people did it for 21 days in a row, their social connection score goes on average to the top 15% of people worldwide. And as you know, social connection is one of the greatest predictors of long term levels of happiness. Social connection is as predictive of how long we end up living as obesity, high blood pressure, or smoking. So what we kept finding was we were fighting so hard against the negative. But these small positive changes in the midst of a world that doesn't look like it should actually had profound implications for what happens next for that person.

That's cool. I want to respond to two things you said. One of the things, I was a teacher for many years and I wrote a book called 100 Ways to Enhance Self concept in a Classroom and a self esteem curriculum and so forth. And one of the things we talked about when we. I used to do trainings for parents, you know, after I trained the teachers, was something called dinner table learning. And this idea of asking your kids at dinner, what's a meaningful experience you had today? Who is someone that contributed to you today that you could thank tomorrow for doing that? What's one thing you learned, you know, et cetera. And if you come up with the same five or six questions, what happens? They start scanning the day because they know they're gonna have to talk about it at dinner. So I love this scanning idea that you talked about. And the other thing about appreciating someone you talked about, your first grade teacher. I had a person in a workshop and we always said, I want you to appreciate someone you normally would, wouldn't appreciate. And then come back. This was an ongoing workshop and talk about what happened. And this guy who had been cut from the basketball team at ucla, he'd gone out for the basketball team. John Wooden, the famous coach at ucla, he didn't make the team, but he said what happened is normally if you don't make the team, you just go down to the field house. These are the guys that made the team. You look at it, you're not on that list. You feel terrible and you go back to your room and you drink bourbon.

Or something, you know.

And he said, what happens is he break. He brought everyone in for a private meeting and said to them, look, you didn't make the team, but I want to tell you what I think your skills are. And here's some other sports at ucla, like maybe you'd be good at volleyball or maybe you'd be good, you know, whatever. So he had not been at UCLA for like 30 years or whatever, a long time ago. And he writes to me and he says, I want to thank you for the way you treated me when I was a student at ucla. And he wrote, he got a letter back from John Wooden that said, you know, I've been teaching, been coaching the basketball team for years. Many of my players went on to the NBA. Many of them became millionaires. It's the first letter I ever received from anybody thanking me. When you think about that, that's amazing. So, you know, spreading the joy, if you will, just from doing that work, it's not only the social networking, but also the, I think just like you feel better as a result of your vibration goes up, you know, you're in a higher state.

I love that. What a beautiful story. You know, at LinkedIn and just to build on that, we found that if somebody received three touch points of praise, someone praised them three times. We just assumed it was naturally happening, but we had a peer to peer praise platform so we could actually measure it. And what we found is somebody received three touch points of praise. Same pay, same building, same environment and economy, same. The retention rate went from 80% to 94%. 14% increase. And it literally took six minutes. It took two minutes times three. They got super excited about that. Reason I got excited. If someone receives three touch points of praise, they double the amount of praise that they start giving back out into the system. So they see the effect of praise and they double that praise. So they become these praise prisms within the environment. It's just, it's incredible and we, we overlook it and we underestimate it.

Right. So what is your definition of happiness?

Great question. Everyone has a different one. For me, the one that's been helpful, I stole from the ancient Greeks, but they're not around, so it's okay. So it's that happiness. Exactly. Very few survived to sue me. Happiness is the. For me, happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your Potential. And I love this definition for a couple reasons. First of all, joy is something you can experience even when life is not pleasurable. If you go on a long run, your legs might be burning, but you still might be feeling joy as you see what your body's capable of or in the midst of childbirth. I've heard it's not high levels of pleasure all the time, but moments of joy can correspond to some of the highest levels of fear and pain we can experience. I think that that's important because I think sometimes, especially in psychology, we conflated happiness and pleasure. But joy is something we can experience even when life is not pleasurable, which we experience a lot of the other side of it is the joy is not complacency, that happiness has a directionality to it so that it's not just an emotion you feel. It actually takes the cap off your potential, that it's the joy you feel moving towards your potential. We feel this joy as we're growing. And that potential doesn't have to be defined as a business outcome as, you know, it could be. You know, your potential as a parent, your potential as a spouse, your potential as a poet, your potential as. As a basketball coach. And what we're finding in each of those moments is if you combine those two together, you get a something that could happen even when the world doesn't look like it should. And that doesn't stop you. It allows you to take what you're feeling and actually make this a better world for people that are suffering.

I'd like to address this for a moment for people like I. I think most people think that they'll be happier when they achieve a success. You know, get into college, graduate from college, get married, get a job, et cetera. But you're saying the opposite of that. Explain that a little bit.

Relates back to what I was doing back at the Divinity School. But also it. Once I started applying this research out at companies, I started realizing something that I should have realized much earlier. So I grew up in Waco, Texas. I lived there for 18 years. This is before Chip and Joanna Gaines fixed it up. This is Waco, the 80s and 90s, where dancing wasn't allowed on campus. I thrived in this environment. I applied to Harvard on a dare. I didn't expect to get in. We couldn't afford it. And then I got a military scholarship that paid for it. So something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. I found myself in this environment at this educational institution that was full of opulence. And opportunity and just getting there was supposed to be a success. And I thought that anyone who got to go there must be happy the rest of their life. Just so grateful. Their life just changed. When I graduated, I realized if I leave, they're not letting me back in. So I just stayed. I took my broken futon and my halogen lamp and moved right back into the first year dorms and lived in the first year dorms until I was 30. So my mom was incredibly proud. But in exchange for room and board, which I needed to stay there, as you know, I was a proctor, freshman proctor, living in the dorms, counseling them during that first year of being there. And what we realized as we were measuring them is that 80% of the students were going through work, debilitating depression at some time during their four years at this institution full of opulence and opportunity. And there was already supposed to be a success. We were told in high school, you get there, think how happy you'll be. You see it in movies. When I graduated and then left Harvard and traveled to 51 countries trying to do this research, I learned very quickly that what I was seeing there wasn't about Harvard. It was about how the human brain works. We think if we work harder and achieve this goal, then I'll be happier, work harder, achieve this goal, then I'll be happy. We think that all throughout our lives. We think, if I get this degree, think how happy I'll be. You know, when I write a book, think how happy I'll be, right? When I get to meet this person, think how happy I'll be when I have a house. Think how happy I'll be when I have this nest egg. Think how happy I'll be when I get married. Think how happy I'll be. Which for a lot of people are like, remember that one? But what happens is you sometimes get married and then you have kids and you want them happy too. And what you find is that the very things we were told was going to create happiness, winning a football game, winning a basketball game, making it onto a team or getting married or getting this job or getting the promotion, didn't guarantee levels of happiness. And the reason for that, back in the 50s, there was a series of studies done where they found that every time your brain has a success, your brain changes the goalpost, what success looks like. So you didn't need to know that. Everyone already thinks they know that because they think. Well, you know, because otherwise, the very first time you kick a ball or you put Legos together as A five year old people would have been done otherwise, right? If you ask somebody if they're successful, they'd be like, yeah, I put those Legos together when I was five. What we got fascinated by is if you like learn addition, then we want to see can you learn multiplication, then calculus? Can you create a product or heal people or write a book or teach a class? And what we kept finding was if you're healing 100 people, what would happen if you healed 110? We want those targets to keep rising. The increase in the targets wasn't the problem. The problem was it was never generating the happiness we thought it was. Because the brain is designed to make sure the successes in your life don't guarantee happiness because it pushes you further out to see what you're capable of. So if that's the case, then success wasn't leading to happiness. Then we thought that they were just separate. But as we started doing this work in positive psychology, we saw if you take four year old children and split them into two different groups, give neutral instructions to one group and to the other group you have them do neutral instructions. But they also are asked to think of their happiest memory, which I'm told is a terrible emotional prime for the four year olds. Because they say stuff like, I had jello for lunch today. That was my happiest memory ever. Those parents pounding on that mirror you can't see through going like, no, it was Disney. I spent $300 for your birthday, say it was Disney. But whatever it is that caused the child to be happy, not the parent, it turns out in every replication the study, the spatial memory scores in the positive condition were 60% higher than with just neutral instructions. They concluded that four year olds are just not that complex. That was their scientific conclusion. Because they had no idea why this was happening. Because happiness and spatial memory were separate structures in the brain, we thought at the time. But then in 1998 at the Yale School of Medicine, they found if you prime doctors to become more positive, they're 19% faster and more accurate than their own brain. And negative, neutral or stressed, which should have been healthcare industry transforming. But like only seven people read these studies and then we found out that it was affecting everything. Productivity rose by 31% from neutral to an optimistic brain. We found that sales rise cross industry by 37% at UBS. I came in, we got them to identify the meaning involved with their stress. 23% drop in the negative health impacts of stress upon the body. When you perceive meaning, that's headaches Backaches, fatigue, lower job effectiveness, burnout. SAT and ACT scores rise dramatically. Memory improves, intelligence rises, creativity triples. At animation studios, we become more altruistic and more compassionate. I'm summarizing an entire body of academic literature here, but what we were finding was that every single business and educational outcome we kept testing for improves dramatically when the human brain is positive first. Which, to come back to your question, what it meant was that it wasn't, if I work harder, I'll be more successful, then I'll be happier. The brain doesn't work that way. It's designed not to work that way. But flip it around in the present while you're pursuing a goal and in the midst of a world that doesn't look like it should, if you raise levels of optimism, social connection, meaning or purpose, all the things you write about, we find that the success rates rise dramatically across the board. We see more potential, which means, and this is a part, if people are listening to this, I would, I would love for them to wrestle with this with, you know, a family member with their friends over at a dinner party. Is what I think we're arguing for, is that not only is the formula backwards, but what we're saying is that happiness isn't the end. Happiness is the means. Happiness is the means to seeing more of our potential, not only as a human being, but our ability to create positive change in other people as well.

That's very good. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's the predecessor, it's the base and foundation upon which you build that. And we talked about those daily disciplines as just one of the ways to do that. I want to share, I want you to share one last thing. And then I want to turn to big potential, which is like the next thing you discovered was that had to do with relationships, not just self. I love when you said in that book, this is not a self help book, can't do it by yourself, we'll get there. But it's such an interesting thing. You talked about social media and you talked about when you first started doing social media, you were trying to impress everyone with how smart, handsome, successful, amazing you were. But then you did something different. Talk about that, its effect.

Yeah, it backfired because I kept, I wanted everyone to like me. I wanted to be perceived as handsome and smart and successful. And so social media was a great platform to try that out and it's required. You know, I'm told if you write books you have to do this right. And you know, it's hard to get publishers to notice you. So I started doing it, and I would go on social media and almost never get the result that I wanted to. Occasionally I would get a hit of dopamine, and I keep doing it. But most of the time, If I got 600 people that watched a video, I get very excited about it. Then I look over at my kid's iPad and see that, you know, there's 40 million people that have watched that YouTube video of a truck moving back and forth, right? Or a cat falling into a bathtub. And I'd be like, well, I guess I'm not as important as I thought I was. Or I got, you know, I did an audiobook for the Happiness Advantage. And one of the very first comments that came out was, well, this is why you have professionals read the book, not the author. So I was like, okay. So I wrote another book that you didn't mention today, but no one talks about, called Before Happiness. And I let somebody else read the book for me, which a British accent, so that they'd sound smarter. And that didn't work either. So you immediately start comparing yourself. And as soon as you start that comparison, what you're doing is you're doing upward social comparison, which makes you feel terrible about whatever position you're in currently. And what we found was that, you know, we'd heard all these quotes about how comparison is the thief of Joy. And, like, 20 people claim credit for where that came from. So I'm not sure where it is, but I think they're absolutely right whoever said it, because what they found was what I kept finding over and over was when I was waiting for someone else to provide social connection to me, to provide meaning in my life, I would find myself immediately comparing. And as soon as I was comparing, there's easy comparison points that make you feel worse about the current situation you're in. So it always backfired. So what I did was I didn't fully get off of social media. What I did for a while was I would just go on and I would just like other people's posts and comment about how great their kids looked and about their vacations and, you know, congratulations on getting that new job. I spent a little bit less time on social media, but the return on it was phenomenal because I wasn't focusing on what I was getting out of it. I was focusing on what I was putting into it. And I was feeling like I had created this meaningful effect upon other people. It's the same thing we saw with the LinkedIn study that the two minute positive email was for somebody else, but it benefits the person sending it. And so that little shift in the way that I perceive things was so helpful because the comparison game immediately robs us of happiness when we're constantly trying to decide where our happiness should be, even when we compare our. Our current happiness to previous mountaintop experiences. And of course, our happiness will be lower in those moments. So as soon as we start the comparison thing, or even comparison praise like, I saw this with my kids, I would be like, oh, you are the best Pokemon player in your entire class. I'm trying to build up my son, but I'm also denigrating the rest of the classroom. Right. And at the same time, you know, I've had. I'm sure you've experienced this as well. One time I had a talk and somebody came up to me. And this rarely happens on this version side of it, but somebody come up to me and said, you were the best speaker we had at the conference. And I'm standing next to my friend who was another speaker at the conference, and I felt good for a little bit, but I immediately felt bad for them. And I realized this happens to all of us all the time. And while that person was just trying to lift me up and make me feel good, he was doing so at the cost of somebody else. So eliminating the comparison point of our praise allows us to feel meaning in something regardless of what those comparison points are. Which was really helpful for me in terms of being able to sustain happiness so I could get back to caring about other people.

That's great. In my seminars, I'll ask people, how many of you have ever compared yourself to somebody else? Everyone raises their hands. I say, keep your hand up. If you came out better than them, all the hands go down.

Right. That's great.

I love that they're calling it upward comparison. Exactly. I even read an article once where Robert Redford was quoted as saying that he went out to dinner with Paul Newman and he's driving back in the car with him and he's thinking, my God, here's this guy. He looks 20, even though he's 60. He drives his race cars, he raises a lot of money, he gives to charity. So married to this amazing woman, he said, by the time we got home, I wanted to kill myself. This is arguably one of the most handsome men in the world. You know, that's amazing.

Exactly. A movie star that people compare themselves to. Right? Exactly.

Have you ever heard the phrase genetic celebrities?

No.

So what happens is, if you look at attractiveness, you know, what we call physically beautiful, handsome, it's a bell shaped curve. And those people that are the really extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily ugly are on the extremes of that curve. And there's a very short. And we call those the outliers, but are genetically mutants really. The fact is, majority of us look normal, but they're genetic celebrities because of how they look. And then we compare ourselves to them and invariably we feel bad and then we start, you know, doing photoshopping our pictures and all the stuff that people do on social media because they're rejecting their own own self. It's a, it's a bad situation, as you know. Let's shift our focus to your latest book and the insights for now, which is big potential. And I want you to share, if you would. You start out your keyNote talks with two stories and could you share those stories? Because I think they're really profoundly cool.

The two studies like the, the Hill study or.

Yeah, looking at the Hill and also Professor Smith.

Sure. So I got very excited about the happiness advantage because we could see how much change was possible for individuals because we didn't know change was really possible. We thought, you know, some people are just optimistic and celebrities and, you know, great football players and you know, we wish we could be like them and it must be great. But what we kept seeing in this research was how much change was radically possible when people create these habits. So I got focused on that. If you make changes and you can make change, your life gets better. What I got fascinated by as soon as we got big data was what happens when somebody like that goes back to their family or goes back into work and they're more creative or they're more positive. What happens to the rest of the team? So I started measuring this and we kept seeing that there was this interplay that was hidden between the ecosystem and the individual. That the way that we had been doing science was just masking because we were just asking questions about the individual. So we started looking more and more at the ripple effect. So I was working with all the public schools in Flint, Michigan. We were bringing in these positive psychology interventions, much like you and I had talked about, about working with the teachers because we didn't have money to work with the students and the community. But we were measuring them and what we found was in the teacher, in the classrooms where the teachers levels of happiness rose. We were trying to get them to stay for more than two years. Right. In the classrooms where the teachers levels of happiness rose. The teachers, students, parents or guardians well being scores started improving dramatically. But we weren't working with them. The students test scores were rising only in those classrooms. We weren't working with them. What we were finding was the mindset shifts of a few people were creating changes to people 2, 3, 4 degrees separate that they had never even met before. And we could quantify it. That was the exciting part is you could actually measure your effect on somebody you never even met before doing things you thought wouldn't have an effect. So I wrote this book called Big Potential. It's my favorite book I've written. It's the least read of my books. I love speaking not sure how to get books out into people's hands. Part of the reason for that was because when you have a book come out you have one week basically to get onto the bestseller list because all your pre orders count. My wife was pregnant. We had the book come out in February, first week of February because my wife is pregnant. We were going to have a baby at the end of April. The day before Big Book tension came out. This whole book on how you have to pursue happiness and success with one another was. It was the Super Bowl. During the super bowl during the first quarter while my team was playing, my wife's water broke. We did not know that was what was going on at the time and it was during the Super Bowl. So she ubered to the hospital Husband of the year. I got her an Uber xl so that's fancy. She got there and they said ma' am, your water broke. You have to stay here trying to hold this baby in. And then three days later our daughter was born. We almost lost her three times in a two day period of time. We didn't even have a name for her. She kept sparking back to life. Her name is Zoe Sparks Acor. She just started kindergarten and she's just the joy of my life. I love her. But instead of going on a book tour to talk about this research, instead I as a researcher my happiness sat in an incubator in NICU being for the next 50 days being care while Zoe was being cared for by these angels who were keeping her alive when my success rate would have been zero. And what we got to do is battle test these two studies that neither of these studies are mine. These are my favorite studies right now and they've, they're at the heart of Big Potential. The first one is researchers in Virginia found if you look at a hill you need to climb in front of you, your visual Cortex will show you a picture of a hill. Now, if scientists look for a picture of that hill in your brain, we can't find it. You can go to into every single brain cell, there is no picture of a hill, but you can see one. But that picture is subjective, not objective. The reason that's important is that if you have a participant looking at that hill alone, it turns out their brain shows them a picture of a hill that looks 20 to 30% steeper than it looks standing next to a person who, who they're told is going to climb the hill with them. Another participant. So the inclusion of somebody climbing that hill with you changes the perception of that obstacle. This was one of those matrix moments for me because I thought I knew how the world works. And I was wrong because I thought if I saw a hill, that's how big it is. This is my challenge at work or at home. That's it. And turns out the geometry of the challenges in our life are in flux based upon a couple of things. Whether or not you're fatigued and chronic pain, or whether or not you think you're alone or with other people accomplishing this goal. And what we found was it wasn't just the emotion, the physical ones, it was emotional ones as well. Someone trying to care for an aging parent while doing their work, or depression or anxiety, or doing virtual work in the midst of a pandemic, we kept finding was those hills were contracting or expanding based upon whether or not that person in that moment felt radically alone or radically with other people. Which is why mentors are not only important for at risk teens, mentors are important for all of us. And it's why, you know, a lot of these, these, you know, they place our books in the self help section of like Barnes Noble. But when we think about happiness in a self help way alone, it makes those hills 20 to 30% steeper. To achieve that, what we're finding is the greatest predictor of long term levels of happiness. It's your social connection score. It's the breadth, depth, and meaning in those social relationships. It's other people. And then that led to a second study which became a metaphor for all this work, where fireflies light up individually and randomly in the dark everywhere. And when they do so, they're trying to attract a mate. And their success rate of reproduction is 3%. But on opposite sides of the globe, Southeast Indonesia and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, these two species figure out how to do it differently. And they can time their pulses to the millisecond so. So the whole community lights up and goes dark at the same time. It's beautiful, but not that smart because. Right. They're lighting up when their competition's lit up. But. And we're told we live in a survival of the fittest world. So you have to be the fastest, smartest, brightest light shining, otherwise you'll never be successful, you'll never be rich, you'll never have a great Instagram account, and then you'll never be happy. Right. And all that's false. Right. But at mit, they found that when the fireflies lit up together, their success rate went from 3%, not down, it went up to 82% per bug. It wasn't like one bug was doing really well with the new system. The whole system was doing orders of magnitude better than we thought was possible. And what we realized was we don't live in a survival of fittest world. I believe we live in a world of the survival of the best fit with the ecosystem. You find yourself, you get a brilliant child, go to the best school in the world, but if he or she doesn't find a peer set or mentor or professor they connect with, they underperform, fail or flounder. And what we kept finding was that as people were pursuing happiness, we had to find a way of enhancing the ecosystem that was that praise and recognition or connecting to it, or, you know, if they were going on walks to decrease depression, you do it with other people instead of alone. Right. All of these things had multiplicative effect when you looked at the ecosystem. And we could take the cap off of someone's happiness and success. There's a ceiling on it when it's all about you. But as soon as it became for somebody else, then suddenly there's other avenues of finding that meaning, which is exactly what I felt with social media as well.

You know, it's interesting as you talk about that, I think of my youngest son who went to a school in Santa Barbara where I live, called the Santa Barbara Middle School. It's a private school, and they start the first year students with a week long, what they call the bike trip. And my son, literally at that point when he was going into the school, he goes about the seventh or eighth grade, couldn't ride a bike. And so we had to teach him. It's just something he never wanted to do. We never thought it was a big deal. So here's my wife all of a sudden teaching him how to ride a bike, you know, and he gets it, but he's, he's awkward at it. And then they go to. They take these kids out, and for a week, they. They bike every day. They camp at night. And the last day is a hill that you look at it and you go, oh, my God, there's no way I can bike up that hill. And yet they do. And I think, again, it's the power of the group. And you look at that and there's all these people doing it with you. You're not doing it alone. You know that people have done it before. And the neat thing is, at the school, they always refer back and say, remember when you didn't think you could do that? Well, you did that, you know, and so they've got that. That mindset that goes with them, and it becomes part of their. Their. Well, their mindset, if you will. That's very, very cool stories. I love those stories. The idea of your book is that this idea of having working together, it's community, it's relationships. Delve a little deeper into that. Expand that for us.

Sure. So I think that, you know, my mom was a high school English teacher, and when I would tell her about some of these habits that we were researching, she had minimal interest, mostly because it was just her son. That's why she was interested. But what she cared about were the students. So when we worked with these teachers, what we realized was we actually had to find a way of getting them to realize that their mindset and behavioral choices were actually changing the mindset and behavioral choices of the people that they were trying to teach, that they cared about. And suddenly, when they could see that benefit, then they were more likely to do these pots of habits because the meaning was imbued from those relationships. I think most of our meaning that we derive is relationship connected. You know, I get a critique sometimes where people say, okay, well, if social connection is so important, how come a monk sitting in a cave can create great levels of enlightenment and happiness even though they're alone in isolation? Most of the people, when they ask that question, don't know any of those monks. They just assume that there is a monk that's like that. But most of those monks actually live in communities with other people that are meditating and practicing all the time. And they're actually not allowed to meditate all the time because that actually causes them to feel weird. Right. They get disconnected from other people. They actually have these periods where they allow their brain to go fallow for a little bit so that it can come back enriched as they go back into the meditation. So that's. That's why they have service and community as part of it. But when you talk to those monks, what they actually say is in those moments where they're meditating, they feel like that meditation is connecting them to the rest of the world and benefiting the rest of the world. That part of the meaning that they feel and the happiness and joy is because they feel more connected than ever to the entirety of the universe, as opposed to what we oftentimes feel surrounded by people on a subway in New York. So what we're seeing continually is the meaning is derived from other people. And then when we think about, oh, I've got to make this change, I think I hear so many people when they push back against big potential, it's usually around, well, I work alone at home. I work in a virtual environment. I'm a lone wolf sales wolf salesperson, right? Like I have my own region and I'm traveling all by myself. But you're traveling on planes with other people. You're traveling to make money for your family or you're. You connect with your friends, right? Just because you work alone during the day doesn't mean that the meaning that we feel about why we work isn't coming from other people. And what we're finding is as the world became more virtual, it wasn't as good as the in person connections. The mirror neuron responses that we were getting was lower. So we actually had to make up for it. Elsewhere there was connection meaning possible virtually, we're having it right now, but at the same time, you have to make up for it with those deeper connections with the people you do see on a daily basis. Even if it takes learning the name of the barista at the coffee shop you go to. Right. Or calling that aunt that you haven't called in a while. What we kept finding was social connection was the greatest predictor of long term levels of happiness. When we measure social connection the way that we've previously done it is the how much social connection you receive. So the way that we ask the questions in the typical metrics are when you're going through a difficult time, is there someone that you feel like you could talk to? When people are going through difficult times, when, if you are feeling lonely that there's somebody that you can turn to, do you find that you're surrounded by people in your life that are full of love for you? It's all about how you're experiencing these. We just switched around the questions and we asked, when people are going through difficult times, are you the type of Person who goes out and tries to help them. Right. If people are setting. Like, if you're feeling disconnected, work, are you the one who sets up social connections, like bringing donuts in or something like that? What we kept finding was if you flipped around from social connection receipt to social connection provision, it turns out it tripled the effectiveness of the social connection it caught. The meaning was in the provision of social connection, not just receiving it, which is exactly what my grandmother used to say. Now I think about it, she was always like, if you want friends, you have to be a friend. You want. Because I'd be like, oh, I came home from school, I didn't have any friends. She's like. She was like, want friends, you have to be a friend. And I would just sit there and wallow because I see all these popular people at school who had all these friends and girlfriends, and she was like, you know, she's got to be nice. You got to be great. You got to be a good friend to other people and they'll come around. Right. And that's exactly what we see when we see this research. So what we started looking at is how do you enhance the people around you? That's the praise and recognition or kind, random acts of kindness you do for other people. Or how do you make it so that when people are doing tasks, they're doing it with one another instead of alone? Or that if you're having to work virtually, you're going to do it. And at coffee shops, you see some of the same people on a continual basis, and those provide the meaning, even if we don't know some of their names. This connection that we feel with the world and when we feel the least happy is. I mean, if you think about prison, the worst thing you can do in prison, which is already a terrible place, is when they put them. What's called isolation? Right. What's it called when they put you in isolation? I feel like that's the wrong word for it. But they keep you away from everyone else. That's literally the worst. They keep you away from all the other prisoners. And that's the worst thing you can do to someone in prison. That's because who we are as human beings is derived from that meaning we fill with other people.

Yeah. They call it solitary confinement. What happens?

Solitary. That's it. I was like, isolation doesn't sound like it.

At West Point, when you. If you do a major infraction, they do the same thing. You're not allowed to talk to anybody. You can go to class. You. The Only time you could talk is if you ask a question or answer a question. And what happens invariably is they drop out of school. They just can't take it. It's too hard.

Yeah.

And so it's. Yeah, a good thing. And we see all these people working at home during the pandemic and all the. The suicide rates went up and the depression rates went up, and the amount of depressive drug sales went up and so forth. Very, very, very telling. You have an acronym called seeds, which is how you organize the book. Could. If I give you a clue, like I say, the first one is surround. Could you talk for a minute on each of those? And then it'll kind of take us to the end of this. So again, the first letter is S for surround.

So the first one, we were trying to get people to surround themselves with positive outliers, and that just didn't include people they were. They were physically with. It include things like their podcasts. Like, we'd hear people that are trying to be optimistic, that are listening to very cynical or negative podcasts on a continual basis. Right. Or trying to get pumped up by music talks about how terrible you are. Right. And so what happens in the midst of this? We weren't seeing the positive effect we want. So you're getting people to try and surround themselves with positive people. You try to enhance the ecosystem around you. You try to expand power out to other people. So I went through two years of depression while I was at Harvard. And while my job was to make sure that the first year students weren't going through depression. And I kept trying to be there for other people, and that's what my job was. So I put up this front that everything was going fine, that I was successful at the bottom of the depression, actually had to turn to my eight closest friends and family and tell them I was going through depression. I was like, it's genetic. My family's gone through it. There's nothing you could do. I just wanted to tell somebody. And the groundswell support was amazing. People started calling me, meeting up with me, emailing me, bringing me cupcakes, which is not why I did it. They were amazing. As soon as I did that, I had opened up to them about this hill that was in front of me. And as soon as I did that, I realized I wasn't alone climbing that hill. Now I was with other people. That hill of overcoming depression dropped by 20 to 30%. But what I really had done was I had deputized them. I expanded power out my ecosystem to deputize them to help me. Right? Because they couldn't help me if they didn't know something was wrong or if I wasn't letting them in. So suddenly it's not about depression or anxiety or a challenge. It's giving. Given a challenge, how do we make sure that we're not alone overcoming that, that we're with other people and talking about both the good and the bad as we're experiencing that. So it's expanding power out, being there for other people. I've seen that because I've joined groups before and I won't tell them about some of the bad things going on in my life. I'll just tell them about the good things and joke about things so that we can get back to them, which means I'm not giving them an entrance to actually deep social connection, which is they want to be able to feel like they can help me with it.

And we.

When you're doing it together, that's where we feel those moments of joy. The D and C was defend the system together. So that's making sure that we found that, you know, not only does this the mirror neuron response in the brain, the mirroring effects in the brain that activates when people smile. Like, if you smile at me, part of my brain lights up, shows activation, basically saying, I'm smiling as well, which I'm not in that moment, but my brain's not that smart and drops dopamine into the system and which causes me to smile as well. What we're seeing is a mirroring reaction. Same thing happens with yawns, but we found was the same thing was happening with negativity, stress, uncertainty, and anxiety. We were actually picking up on those things, like secondhand smoke. So when people hear that, that you can be a genetic optimist, but if you surround yourself with negative podcasts or people or you've got people at home, they're negative, that you pick up on negativity like secondhand smoke. They immediately think, well, then here are the people I'm cutting out of my life, not hanging out with that guy anymore, defending on Facebook. When I get home from this conference and I'm looking at this person, which is awkward because I'm married to them. Right. They're immediately thinking about eliminating social connection. If you look for flaws, we can eliminate pretty much everyone in our life. Right? But also I've been working with hospitals in the midst of the pandemic, and we find these people, these healthcare providers that learn about all these communicable diseases and then they don't avoid those people. They wash their hands religiously, they take whatever shots they need to, put on a mask if they feel like they need to. And then they help as many people that are suffering as possible. They build up a physical immune system to help those who are suffering. We have an emotional immune system that we build up by doing these positive habits. But when you do that, it buffers your brain against the negativity coming in. So we could defend the system together. So what's getting broadcast back out is the positive back into that ecosystem. So we defend the system by actually buffering our brains by building up that emotional immune system and trying to shut down some of the unnecessary negative inputs, whether that be music or podcast or, you know, angry radio or watching something on the news that's a negative take on it in each of those moments allows us to get back to loving other people faster instead of having to deal with that toxin coming in.

I think I read in your book that people who watch negative news for three minutes in the morning, it affects them for six to eight hours. For the rest of the day, they.

Have a 27% higher likelihood of reporting a negative day with a 3 minute negative exposure in the morning, which we get a lot more than three minutes. And we know this because we compared it to neutral. But what's amazing was we didn't have to stick our head in the sand. If you just had a negative story but appended a solution to it, then suddenly people's creativity and problem solving the next task improves. What happened was we kept getting problems. We hear about a bridge that collapses, but we never hear about it getting rebuilt. So our brain is just full of these broken bridges. And that's how we think about the world, which is why we keep thinking the world is getting to be a darker, more dangerous place. So the last part of Seeds was sustain. How do you actually sustain that positive change in the midst of the challenges we raised experiencing? So a lot of that is celebrating the positive. This is not for me. I'm stealing this from this guy named Greg Kaiser, who he would see lost dog posters up in like a Starbucks, right? We lost our puppy. And he said, and he said one time he walked into a Starbucks and it said puppy found. And like right next to it and a picture of the person hugging it and saying thank you to the whole community. He was like, I have seen probably 50 lost puppy signs in my life and never seen a puppy found. But everyone who came up there to put their milk into their coffee was smiling and Thinking about how puppies sometimes get found. It was such a different way of being able to look at it. It's just like John Wooden not getting thanked a lot. We just assume that the positive is occurring. But unless we're making conscious efforts to do it, it's very difficult to sustain, sustain those positive changes.

So just have a few minutes left. But I'd love to have you share your experience on the cruise ship where you were interviewing people that were working on the cruise ship and what you discovered about appreciation and people acknowledging people's successes and so forth.

So it's so interesting because if you go on a cruise ship at the. They have the place where all the passengers get to stay, which is all very nice. And then you go one floor down and then it's the bowels of the ship and they have a. Basically like a highway system right in the middle. This is super highway. And then everything connects off to the sides and along the sides of the hallway are all these posters about safety starts with you. Right? And it's all about safety, safety, safety, safety. Because they know that if they keep those messages front and center, they can decrease, they can hopefully make this a safer place because that's where most of the lawsuits come from or people get injured on their job. But the struggle to get people to stay on the ships because they're so unhappy, because oftentimes they're away from their home for six to eight months at a time in the bowels of a ship while the passengers are joining things up on top. And so what we started looking at was could we change the messaging along the system? And so one of the pictures that they had on the wall was safety starts with you and had a mirror so you could see yourself in it. So what we decided to do is we flipped around and we were, we said things like, you know, happiness or optimism starts with you and you could see yourself. And they would actually put this right before the passenger facing parts of the the ship. So right as somebody was going to go out to greet the other passengers that were there, they would actually see their face. They would see that connection. And on many of them, if you got it, to smile. When you're smiling, you see a smile which creates a mirror neuron reaction which dumps more dopamine to your system. You're like, wow, hello, someone smiling at me, it's you. But what was happening was it was actually priming them to become more positive when it got there. But the amazing thing was if you measure the safety ratings when people were Focused on the positivity and being there for other people. And they were providing praise and recognition to the passengers. The safety ratings on those ships rose dramatically versus the ones that just focused on safety. So what we kept finding is exactly what we're seeing with the happiness advantages. As the brain becomes more positive, it takes this cap of our potential where we actually think change is radically possible. So oftentimes we hope that something good is happening when we do something nice in our life, but we don't see the return on it. So we just let it go. Like, I hear so many people that are like, oh, I. I used to journal all the time. It was one of my best things I did. And I was like. And they'll say like, I did that 10 years ago. I was like, why'd you stop? It was so good, right? Because we've got these great things in our life and then we just let them go because there's not that feedback loop. So it's humbling realizing these are things people have already known for thousands of years. It's just nice when we have the. We can quantify it because it shows people how much they matter.

One of the things I love about positive psychology and research, you have all this incredible research is like, it. I read these research studies the things in your book, and I go, wow. I intuitively knew that for years. I don't know why I knew it. I just knew it. I did it, and I've got all this research to back it up. And so there are some universal truths that we can unpack, you know, And I love what you're doing. Unfortunately, we've run out of time. We're gonna have to do this again. Sometimes. I want to encourage everyone to get this book, the big. Their big potential. It's incredible. I just read this this weekend and I love everything in it and it's so, so valuable. Want to get that back up there where you are the bestseller list, even though you didn't make it that first week because your wife's water broke. But the reality is, get his books. You can go to barnes and noble.com Amazon.com and I encourage you to read them. Reinforcement of these ideas, you know, hearing them, reading about them over and over and then put them into action. You know, one of the things is awareness plus action produces results. So all of these, we call them mental hygiene, emotional hygiene, happiness hygiene, exercises, etc. So it's one thing to know about them. If you take one or two things you heard today and begin to activate them, it'll start making a difference in your life. And I love the the five or six things that you call the, you know, happiness hygiene exercises and what's your what's your website? Sean? How can Sean, how can people find you?

Just my name, Sean. Aor.com the best one, actually, I think we have two and the better one is Good Think Inc. Good thinkinc.com that's probably the better one.

Good thinking. I love it. All right, well, thank you so much. This was delightful. I look forward to sometime doing it again. And also, as I said earlier, we get some time to spend together and just, you know, hang out. That'd be fun. All right, everyone, thank you for joining us today. And make sure to tune in next time where I'll have another coach, teacher, thought leader, someone who can enhance your life. Someone who can help you be happier, healthier and also have more meaning in your life, more fulfillment, more productivity and can more happiness. All right, take care everyone. See you next time.