Unlocking JOY: Why Shawn Achor’s Happiness Science is REVOLUTIONARY for Success

So let me ask you again. How many of you are happy right now? Okay. As you should be. Really? On a 1 low 10 high scale, what's your happiness score? 9 1/2 10. What else? 7. Who's under a 5? Anyone willing to admit it? Okay. All right. The next presentation is all about your happiness. Shawn Achor's best selling book, happiness advantage, his two hour interview with Oprah Winfrey and his TED talk with now close to 12 million views has helped make Sean sought after by the NFL, the Pentagon and the White House for his expertise on happiness. I had an opportunity. I spent a couple days with my friend Art, Arianna Huffington at her apartment in New York when she was filming her Oprah course. And Shawn Achor came on to actually do a presentation there. And I got to talk with him and his lovely wife. And the guy is awesome and I'm so happy to have him here talking about happiness. So his title, as you can imagine, is the Happiness Advantage. So please happily welcome Shawn Achor. Thank you, Brenda. Thank you.

Thank you, Joe, for having me here. I have to say that this is an absolute honor. Can you hear me in the back? I'm so thrilled to be here. This is fantastic. When I first got into doing this work, actually when I first went off to college to start collecting debts, my father was buoyed by the idea that someday I might come back and I might be a doctor or a lawyer or a banker, something he thought would make sense. And when I came home from college and told him, dad, I want to study the science of happiness, he sat me down. My father is a neuroscientist at Baylor University down in Waco, Texas. And he told me that the average scientific paper, the average scientific journal article is only read on average by 7 people total. Which is incredibly depressing for a researcher to hear because I know that that statistic also includes my mom. So I have to be honest, I could be thrilled about this research we're doing in this new field called positive psychology, where we found that we can actually raise your levels of happiness above your genetic set point. In doing so, turn on the human brain to highest possible level, raising every single business and educational outcome and many of our health outcomes, and wirelessly tipping entire cultures, entire teams, towards the idea that happiness is a choice and that happiness is possible. The only problem is you're so busy with your work, you're so busy with your families that you probably don't take time every morning to read through the top tier scientific journal articles to find out how you're supposed to be happier at work that day. So this gap starts to exist between what we've been studying and what we've been learning in this field. And what I wanted to do is to merge these two things together. I, I spent 12 years at Harvard studying positive psychology. And while I was there, I realized that a lot of this work that we were doing in the laboratory was flawed. Because if you study happiness in a laboratory where we can control all the variables, that's not how happiness works out in the real world. If you can control the variables, that looks nothing what life looks like. So in the midst, at the beginning of the economic downturn, I started to go out and share this research out with the world. In fact, my very first talk was at a very large Swiss bank. And the introduction was not nearly as kind as Joe's introduction. They said we, well, we don't have bonuses for everyone, but here's a talk on happiness from a guy from America, but you can imagine the response and with Swiss bankers. But what's amazing is as I started doing this research and we started to battle test these ideas, we realized that this research I'm about to get to share with you is so much more powerful when you cannot control all the variables. And it turns out that we had that happiness success formula backwards and we actually were able to solve two cultural myths that were holding us back within our society. But as soon as we start talking about happiness, everyone gets the wrong idea. I think I started all this work actually at the Divinity School. I fell backwards into doing this. I was studying Christian ethics at Harvard Divinity School and comparing it to Buddhist ethics, looking at how our beliefs change our actions in the world. And while I was doing this, some people in the psychology department said we can test those same ideas, but we can also at the same time quantify if somebody's becoming more compassionate or somebody's becoming happier or more optimistic. And I got hooked. But one of the things I imported from the Divinity School was the definition of happiness. From the ancient Greeks, the modern world, we'd find happiness as pleasure, which is very short lived and then it's over. Which is not worth us spending even 10 minutes talking about here today. What I want to talk about is what the ancient Greeks defined it as. They defined happiness as the joy you feel moving towards your potential. I want to stop momentarily because that definition actually changes the pursuit of happiness for the people here in this room. Joy that moves us towards our potential. Joy is something we can feel even when life is not pleasurable as you just as you were hearing earlier today, as Dave was talking about, he was talking about these ideas about how sometimes, as we're trying to reinvent our life, it can sometimes feel miserable. I don't think it necessarily has to feel miserable, but we won't feel high pleasure throughout the entire process. Joy is something you can experience even when life is not pleasurable. Even working 18 hours trying to build a business, you might not have high pleasure, but you can have high joy in the midst of it. Going on a long run for 10 miles, your legs could be burning, but you could still be feeling high joy. Same thing in the midst of childbirth. But we're terrified of happiness. This is especially among the entrepreneurial class, because we think, if I'm happy now, then I'm going to become complacent. If I'm happy now, I'm not going to push as hard. If I'm happy, I wouldn't nearly have been as successful as I am right now. That's what pleasure does. Joy does the exact opposite. Joy actually fuels us to see our potential. It makes us want to explore the world as much as possible. It makes us want to invest as deeply as possible in the people around us. So I got this call, though, from the Harvard Business Review a little over a year ago. And they said, sean, we've been following this research you've been doing that I've been working out at these companies, trying to show them how if they focus on happiness, that actually can triple their levels of profits and raise their levels of productivity and sales and all those things. They said, we're going to put it on the COVID of the magazine, which I was thrilled about, right? People work 8 to 14 hours a day. Find some way of getting them positive there. Think what will happen to our communities. But I said, let's talk about something serious here. Let's talk about something that's bending the tracks of human potential. Whatever you do on the COVID of the magazine, don't put a big yellow smiley face or something silly. And they said, sean, we're the Harvard Business Review. We would never do something like that. I got the COVID of the Harvard Business Review in January and February of last year, which many of you probably read. And I looked at it and there was a big yellow smiley face on the COVID of the magazine, of course, with dollar sign dimples. It says hbr. But I looked at the smiley face and I realized this is exactly the problem, because, look, the smiley face has no eyes. It's blind happiness. This is exactly the problem because as soon as we start talking about happiness, we think we have to be blind to the suffering we see people experiencing in this world. We have to be blind to the fact that we're caring for aging parents or for sick children. Blind to the fact that our lives might not have ended up like we expected them to. But it turns out, if you research it, ignorance leads directly away from bliss. What I want to talk about is the exact opposite. Last year I got the privilege to go out and speak to A group of CEOs of Top Software companies, all software companies that are leading this technolog, technological revolution we're living through. And afterwards, one of the CEOs of the top companies offered to drive me to the airport to talk about how we could cascade this research out throughout his entire company using these digital interventions, which I was so excited about. That's how you scale this information. So I got into this guy's really nice sports car, put on my seatbelt. He got on the other side, immediately started talking to me about how they've been growing so quickly, their stress levels have been rising. And while he was speeding towards the airport, that little bell was going off in his car, the seat belt bell. And eventually it stopped going off. It got tired, and I turned him and I said, you don't wear seat belts. He said, no, Sean, I listened to your talk. I love your research. I'm an optimist. I was like, oh, no, you're an idiot. But I'd love to work with you. Optimism. Optimism is great for a lot of things, but it doesn't stop cars from hitting us. It doesn't stop reality from impinging upon us. That's irrational optimism. If we sugarcoat the present, we make poor decisions for the future. What I want to talk about exactly exemplifies why you've come here. It's rational optimism. Rational optimism starts with realism. But you maintain the belief that your behavior matters if linked to the right people. Rational optimism starts with realism, but maintains the belief that your behavior matters if linked to the right people. The reason that's important is it allows you to see the problems you need to fix and also not sugarcoat the world. But at the same time, as you see those problems, you don't think that they're permanent and pervasive, they're fixable. When you do that, people not only start believing in your vision, they actually start believing in your leadership as well. And that's what causes these long term changes to actually happen. So that's what we've been doing in positive Psychology. What. What we've been doing is we've been studying these people called positive outliers, people that are up above the curve for some reason. Because if you think about it, we normally study the average. We find out how many pills the average person should take if they get a headache. But already you should see a problem. Regardless if you're £90 or £290, back of the bottle still says two pills. That's impossible. We metabolize in completely different ways. And if we keep studying what's average, this society, this world, will remain merely average. Instead of deleting those positive outliers, we study them. Everyone in this room is a positive outlier. That's why you're at the genius event. We would have deleted you in the past. Now we realize we have to study you because only by studying you can we find ways not how to move people up to the average, but how we can move the entire average up in our companies and our schools worldwide. The reason why this is important, this is not the message our brains normally receive on a daily basis. If you try and find out what the world looks like in reality, you turn to your smartphone to find out what's going on in the world, and your brain is immediately bombarded by negative information. Murder and corruption and diseases and natural disasters. And very quickly your brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive. We can talk about happiness for 10 minutes here today, but let's get back to reality. Reality is mostly about suffering. And if you're not feeling it now, it's coming. We know it's a skewed ratio, but that's what our brains are experiencing. The way that I met Jo was actually in the back of Arianna Huffington's apartment, where I was doing this work with her on thrive. And my wife, Michelle Gienal and I just found out that if you watch three minutes of negative news in the morning compared to three minutes of still negative events, but with solution focused news, turns out that if you watch the three minute negative news eight hours later, six to eight hours later, we ask you about your mood, you have a 27% likelihood of having a worse day than somebody who had not been exposed to that negative news. It turns out three minutes each morning, we're actually corrupting part of the way that our brains process the entirety of the rest of the day. What we've been finding is it changes us. It creates what we call the medical school syndrome, which, if you know people who have been through medical training during the first year of medical school, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that could happen to a human being, suddenly these brilliant and aspiring doctors start realizing they have all of those symptoms and diseases. They'll actually start manifesting symptoms they were studying for for an exam. If you get bored during my last two minutes of my talk, you can just go on WebMD and just read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that it becomes like a checklist, like dead hands. That's what I was feeling while he was talking. But what happens is if you do this, I have a brother in law named Bobo, which they didn't give me time here to talk about. But Bobo called me on the phone from Yale Medical School, which is our rival. And he said, sean, I have leprosy, which even at Yale is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he'd just gone over a week of menopause. What we're finding is that it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, the lens through which we view reality. Which is why when I was at Harvard, I saw something amazing. I applied to Harvard on Adair. I got in, I was in valedictorian, my public high school. I was a volunteer firefighter. When I got in, I thought everyone would be happy there. I spent, you know, when you walk in there, this is the freshman dining hall there, that's their cafeteria with vaulted wooden ceilings and Tiffany stained glass. It looks like something out of Hogwarts from the movie Harry Potter. This is Hogwarts from the movie Harry Potter and that's Harvard. And they see this and they say, why would you waste time studying happiness at Harvard? Seriously, what do they possibly have to be unhappy about? Weren't you in the slums of Venezuela, Impoverished schools in Africa and children's cancer wards in Boston? Since then we've researched in all of those places and here's what we found. We were wrong. Turns out it's not your genes and your environment that predict your levels of happiness. It turns out what predicts your long term levels of happiness are the conscious choices you make, the habits you make in your life and the mindset changes. Find ways to create some positive changes in your life. And what we found is if you pick up one of these habits, then you have three things you're grateful for each day. Doing two minutes of journaling about a positive experience. 15 minutes of fun mindful cardio activity a day. Two minutes of meditation, writing a single positive email. Turns out we can not only improve your levels of happiness above your genetic set point we can put it throughout an entire organization we can triple the productivity and triple the profit levels of that team which is what we did nationwide insurance increase the productivity levels by 31% and it turns out we can raise accuracy rates by 10% but the real thing that's amazing about this is we found that all these things if we can raise your levels of happiness it turns out extends your life more then these are equally as predictive of how long you will live as obesity high blood pressure or smoking we fight so hard against the negative in our society and forget to tell people how powerful the positive can be that's 10 minutes of happiness but what we've been finding is if you just do two minutes of these positive habits over the course of the next 21 days in a row turns out we can break your genes and your environment and allow happiness to be one of the greatest competitive advantages in the modern economy thank you so much for letting me be here.

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